Chase Hughes is a behavioral analyst who trains both military operatives and civilians on how to read people and gather human intelligence. In this episode, he talks about the five factors that measure someone s authority and produce composure, a state which resides between posturing and collapse.
00:17:18.180And if you'll allow me to go back to the pendulum for just a second.
00:17:21.400And we have composure in the middle and we have collapse and posturing.
00:17:26.580Collapse and posturing on these far ends of the pendulum have a lot more in common than people think.
00:17:32.980They're both trying to get the other person to give something up, whether it's respect, admiration, love, money, whatever it is.
00:17:40.560Second, their agendas are concealed and hidden from public view.
00:17:45.360They wear this mask to kind of conceal the collapse or they want to conceal the posturing behavior.
00:17:51.000And they both cover up for feelings of a little bit of inadequacy and the feelings of always trying to be tough.
00:17:58.720And I think they're both incredibly stressful states to live in.
00:18:02.400And they're kind of rooted in insecurity.
00:18:04.780And the one big thing that they both have in common is they both believe highly in competition.
00:18:10.820And they kind of live their lives in a competitive instead of a collaborative frame of mind.
00:18:17.040And then one of the things you talk about, too, is that people with authority or people with that natural influence, they tend to understand that people, most people have that neediness and those unmet desires.
00:18:28.180And they're just kind of broken human beings.
00:18:30.020And because they understand that, that's one of the reasons why they're able to connect with them because they can give that person what they need.
00:19:06.420It's how you have got a good reputation with yourself and you're giving yourself permission to do something.
00:19:12.300And one incredible thing is that if you're displaying super confident behavior to a person that you're just meeting for the first time, they will automatically assume that you've been that way for decades.
00:19:26.080So, you're not just confident in yourself, you're carrying the permission from thousands of other people that you've interacted with.
00:19:33.960So, they're assuming that thousands of other people accepted your confident behavior.
00:19:38.840So, that's a really key point to make that even if it's a one-on-one interaction and you're behaving confidently, that person, if it's genuine, that person is assuming that it's been this way for years for you.
00:19:52.360So, how do you develop this genuine confidence?
00:19:54.260I'm sure we could dedicate a whole podcast to this.
00:19:56.000But, you know, generally, what do you tell your operatives?
00:19:58.600Like, what do they need to start doing in their personal lives to develop this natural confidence that will be displayed naturally when they interact with other people?
00:20:07.780Let me give you – let me see if I could do this like a two-minute summary.
00:20:11.060So, the first thing, I want you to start challenging yourself to be slower than anyone else in the room.
00:20:21.660So, just set a speed limit on your body.
00:20:24.780Just try it on for a few days of like, I will not move faster than if I was standing in a swimming pool.
00:20:30.900So, this starts reteaching your body to just display the signs of comfort.
00:20:37.640And second, just having the knowledge that you don't need permission to be confident is so, so critically huge.
00:20:48.020And keeping track of your own levels of confidence throughout every single day is the way to get that down into the lower parts of the brain.
00:20:55.980Because just thinking about it stays in the top of the brain.
00:20:58.880If I can get my lower brain really invested in my confidence, I don't need to – I'm not talking about setting goals or anything like that.
00:21:07.640I'm just talking about at the end of every day, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, how was my confidence today?
00:21:16.340Because it's just like when you're looking for a new car, like on the internet, you're like watching all the YouTubes and all the videos and stuff about, I'm going to get this new car.
00:21:23.960Then you buy the car and you start seeing it everywhere.
00:21:27.900Like I just got a Tesla and I'm like, wow, everybody bought Teslas at the same time as me.
00:22:31.040And just taking tiny, tiny steps out of your comfort zone when it comes to just talking to other people.
00:22:36.960And you're essentially teaching the lower part of your brain like, nope, nothing bad is going to happen.
00:22:42.320They're not going to like punch me in the face if I start acting confident.
00:22:45.520There's not going to be like a tiger that jumps out from a closet if I start behaving confidently.
00:22:50.260You're just slowly, gradually introducing your brain to a little bit more stressful or slightly stressful situations.
00:22:58.300And over time, and I'm talking like just over like maybe 15 days, the confidence starts building itself and you get more and more permission.
00:23:06.640And you'll notice like as a person becomes more and more confident, you can see that they're just giving themselves more permission.
00:23:13.220Yeah, so it's the ability, sort of that long term, long lasting confidence is the ability to handle uncertainty no matter what's thrown at you.
00:23:21.700And I think that's why you can tell some people like that guy's streetwise.
00:23:24.880And it's probably because they grew up in the school of hard knocks and they've had to deal with uncertainty over and over and over again.
00:23:31.620And because of that, they have the confidence like in any situation like, well, I handled this when I was a kid and I was, you know, I was out in war and I handled that all right.
00:23:41.880And so it just carries over to everything they do.
00:23:44.020So it's so true, but that can lead people to thinking like, oh, I need to go through this big rite of passage, which isn't necessarily true.
00:23:53.340There's, there's all kinds of people who are super confident who have not been through anything like that.
00:23:59.000We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:24:07.640I mean, you define confidence as the ability to take action without reservation.
00:24:12.320And I really like that, that definition because anybody, they can build up their confidence by taking part in little deprivations in their life, taking on challenges and then following through on those challenges.
00:24:24.060And by doing that, you're going to build up that, you know, that good reputation with yourself, right?
00:24:29.720It's like a, it's a self, a sense of self-trust.
00:24:32.400And this really takes us to our next element of authority, which is discipline.
00:24:37.820So why is discipline important in developing authority and how do we develop it?
00:24:42.640So Brett, if you and I were sitting in ATL, like the Atlanta airport, waiting on a flight or something, I could ask you with no, like, you're not some behavior profile or anything, but I could say, Brett, spot someone across that's just standing over there, you know, across the gate from Mars who is disciplined.
00:25:07.020And I think that discipline has an unusual way, and I'm the number one body language expert in the world somehow, and I still can't explain this articulately.
00:25:18.860But discipline has a way of coming up in our nonverbal communication that sends these little gut feelings to other people, like that person is a disciplined person.
00:25:29.380And it makes us, when we see a disciplined person, obviously it's a little bit inspiring, but it makes us a little bit more likely to follow that person, who they are.
00:26:55.880Your past tense self did all of that for you because they put your concerns ahead of their own.
00:27:01.380And then, like, I continue to do this, and I'll be in the kitchen with my wife, Michelle, and I'll be sticking – it's nighttime, right?
00:27:10.720I'm about to go to bed, and I'll be sticking one of those little Keurig coffee cup pods into the coffee maker and sticking a coffee mug there ready for the next morning.
00:27:20.700And I will out loud, I'll say, man, Chase is going to love this.
00:27:24.960So I will continuously speak about my future self in a way that I am prioritizing his needs, and I will talk about him in the future.
00:27:33.020And just getting a relationship to where you're looking forward in time with concern and getting to the point where you're looking backward in time at your past tense self with gratitude.
00:27:44.820All right, so developing discipline that's going to make you naturally appear more competent and composed to other people.
00:27:52.200And I think also what it'll do, too, as you do these things of, you know, being your own butler, working out, sticking to a schedule, managing your finances, that's also going to give you confidence, which is going to just supercharge that factor as well.
00:28:04.360That is, yeah, yeah, absolutely, so true.
00:28:07.500And I think all these things do feed into each other.
00:28:14.360My definition when I do trainings on leadership is that leadership is having possession of innate, like, non-acting behaviors.
00:28:26.540Your normal behavior produces following behavior in other people on its own.
00:28:31.360So what this means is if I'm in another culture where I don't speak the language, they would still follow some of my behaviors.
00:28:39.960I would still be effective to some degree as a leader because of how I behave and how I act.
00:28:46.720And I think if your behavior is producing what I call followership on its own, this means that you most likely have off-camera leadership.
00:28:56.320Like, you're not one person at work who's all organized and everything, and you go back to your house, and you're like, your bathroom counter is just covered in crap.
00:29:05.560You know, like, you've got piles of laundry and dishes and stuff like that.
00:29:09.080But then when you go to work, everyone thinks that you're really well put together.
00:29:12.940That would more likely be the person in charge and not the leader because those are two very, very different things.
00:29:18.800Okay, so the way you develop leadership is you work on that discipline, work on that confidence.
00:29:26.280Why does gratitude contribute to our perception of authority?
00:29:30.160So if you look at the people that we naturally follow, that people talk about a lot, and the people that, like, one of the people that, if I'm giving training on leadership, 100% chance there's going to be a video of Andy Griffith on the screen.
00:29:45.820I believe that, and this came to me from one of my commanders on deployment.
00:29:51.420If you screwed up on this deployment in the Middle East, he had every box set of the Andy Griffith show of every episode.
00:30:00.100And you had to pick a random season and a random episode and watch that episode and write a paper on how you learned a lesson to fix how you screwed up as a leader from that one episode.
00:30:12.120And the insane thing was, in every episode, there was something that applied to a leadership mistake, a leadership lesson.
00:30:20.820And one of those people, like, if you look at the people like Andy Griffith or Bill Clinton or the people that we just naturally gravitate towards as mentors, as leaders, they all have a look of gratitude on their face.
00:30:34.260You can see that while you're communicating with these people, and I think gratitude has a very distinct way of showing itself in human behavior and on our face that other people don't consciously perceive.
00:30:46.920They're not saying, oh, that's a very grateful person.
00:30:48.820They just unconsciously perceive that level of gratitude, and it helps us to be more likely to follow a person's behavior.
00:30:56.880And I always teach that there's the two types of gratitude if you just practice this regularly.
00:31:02.260And you don't have to, like, go to Michael's and build a crafty little gratitude journal or anything like that, but just low-level and then high-level gratitude.
00:31:11.680So, like, if you're eating a taco at Taco Bell, you're grateful for the employees that put it all together for you, but you're also grateful for the farmer who's supporting his family somewhere in the world who grew the lettuce that's in your taco.
00:31:24.340So, it's like you're zooming in on gratitude and then zoom all the way out, like, on Google Earth, you know, to where you could see the entire picture.
00:31:31.880No, I think we've all encountered leaders who have that, who display gratitude to you.
00:31:36.980Like, you'll go to the ends of the earth for that person.
00:31:39.340Sometimes there's leaders who will, they'll bark at you and just, you know, get results.
00:31:43.320And in the short term, that might work, but they're not going to have that long-lasting influence because they didn't cultivate that gratitude.
00:32:42.080If you have, there's this barbershop I went to, they actually set up an old black and white TV and they somehow fixed it.
00:32:49.100So, where they put in a fire, Amazon fire stick, and they'd stream Andy Griffith shows.
00:32:55.200And so, you're just sitting there getting your hair cut in an old-time barbershop watching Andy Griffith and just remember laughing out loud at Barney and his shenanigans.
00:33:01.480If I'm ever out in your town, I want to go there.
00:33:12.880It's just a person's level of in-the-moment enjoyment.
00:33:16.320If you look at people that we nationally, culturally view as the natural leaders of the world, and then just imagine one of them taking their garbage out.
00:33:29.460Or imagine one of them mowing their yard.
00:33:32.140Or imagine one of them just doing a mundane task.
00:33:36.560You'd still imagine them with a tiny, tiny smile on their face, even if it's faint.
00:33:41.340And we all have this ability to detect another person's level of enjoyment.
00:33:46.600And I think it's the most magnetic human trait that draws people in.
00:33:52.940And if we are able to stay in some kind of what I call calm enjoyment in my training, it's just I have the ability to just calmly enjoy these mundane tasks.
00:34:05.600That, I think, is the cornerstone of getting started as a leader.
00:34:11.340It's being able to live in this calm enjoyment.
00:34:49.600And I think some of those we'll do deliberately, right?
00:34:52.720But over time, if we're practicing measuring ourselves every day on confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, enjoyment, and then finally, composure.
00:35:02.520Over time, all those cool behaviors that you read about in articles and stuff like that, those become a byproduct of your new psychology, your new mindset of having authority in your life.
00:35:15.440And then you're not faking it because we're all manufacturing gut feelings in people every single conversation that we have.
00:35:24.260And if I want to manufacture good gut feelings in other people, then that stuff needs to be real.
00:35:29.920So, I'm always asking the question, what can I do to make this a byproduct of everything?
00:35:37.520Like, if I want authority, how do I make authority a byproduct?
00:35:40.740And that's by just monitoring that stuff every day.
00:35:43.540You don't have to be judgmental of yourself, but just getting your lower brain aware of this stuff to begin with and dragging that stuff out into the light because most people don't really want to think about it.
00:35:54.340We're dragging it into the light and getting the brain super aware of it, and it speeds up that development so fast.
00:36:01.960And then if you want to start implementing consciously some of these body language or social skills you read about, as you do the inner work, the stuff you start actually consciously doing will actually have more effect, likely.
00:36:15.900So, like, as an example, a client of mine had trouble with posture.
00:36:21.220And, you know, when people have anxiety, we want to – our bellies are really soft, right?
00:36:25.540So, when we talk about body language, somebody gets fearful.
00:36:29.020One of the things that happens with the body is the rib cage comes downward to protect all these soft organs that are in our belly, which makes our posture bad.
00:36:37.500So, one client of mine had this issue, and I put this kind of a kinesiology tape that, like, a physical therapist would use this stuff called KT tape.
00:36:48.840And it's just kind of like a two-foot strip of, like, I would say, like, mesh kind of tape made for the body.
00:36:55.700And I would stick it on his back in an X pattern in a way that if he started slouching, it would stretch the skin.
00:37:02.360It would – it's not painful or uncomfortable, but it instantly brings awareness to the fact that he's slouching.
00:37:09.520How can I remind myself regularly to be in composure and to be confident?
00:37:15.960And just as a quick tip, like, how can I do this even in the car when nobody's looking?
00:37:21.300Adjust your rearview mirror in your car for next time you drive to where you have to sit up really straight to see out of your back window.
00:37:29.260So, just angle it up just a little bit to remind you every time you look in that rearview mirror to sit up straight.
00:37:34.820Just small little things on a daily basis like that to start correcting those nonverbal behaviors does go a long way for sure.
00:37:42.840The reason why we're doing all this stuff, developing our authority, it just makes being influential, it makes the social component of our lives just – it'll get you 90% there, right?
00:37:52.480Whether you're interacting with women or making a sales pitch or your leadership position at work, just developing that inner authority will get you 90% of your influence.
00:38:07.320Just being able to just relax because a lot of people are living off camera differently than they are on camera.
00:38:14.140And the moment that those two things start blending together and you're like, you can walk into work and know that the person I am here at work when I'm in charge of these employees or whatever is the same person I am at home, everything changes.
00:38:26.660In the books and in some of your interviews that I listen to preparing for our conversation, you talk about some authority killers.
00:38:34.840Like what are the most common ones you see in the people you work with?
00:38:38.300I will give you – I'll give you a few here.
00:38:40.620I think number one is rapid body movement.
00:38:45.960And as a body language expert, there's one thing that fear makes our bodies do is protecting arteries, but it makes our bodies speed up.
00:38:54.440Our head movement, our speech, our gestures, all of that speeds up, which is why I think that slowing down our bodies is one of the fastest ways to retrain the body to be more in composure.
00:39:07.360And complaining, I think, is one of the big ones.
00:39:11.820When we hear somebody complaining, we subconsciously make an agreement that they're probably not a leader.
00:39:18.400And I will not claim to have any neuroscience to back this up, but think about the last time you heard somebody complaining.
00:39:26.920There's something that goes on in the subconscious that says, wait, why was I paying attention to this person?
00:39:32.720It automatically usurps some of the authority.
00:39:38.800But I would say, overall, the biggest mistake that most people make is allowing the outside environment to determine who they are as a person and how they identify themselves.
00:39:51.720So starting to just internalize their own feelings and not determine who they are based on how people react.
00:39:59.500So, like, I need X, Y, and Z to feel good about myself.
00:41:02.220So, we've been talking about how we can develop our own charisma authority so that we can be more influential with others.
00:41:08.080What can we do to avoid being lulled into the charisma authority of potential bad actors, right?
00:41:15.720Like, someone trying to recruit us to a cult or MLM or, you know, manipulative boss.
00:41:21.120Like, what can we do to be on the lookout for that so we know we're like, we got to be careful with this person?
00:41:26.640I will tell you, like, I publish books on, like, hardcore interrogation tactics and stuff like that.
00:41:36.180And I'm a body language expert, behavior expert.
00:41:40.640That still does not give me, like, a vaccine against being immune to that stuff.
00:41:47.160And when it comes to the charisma and authority, you're not going to really vaccinate yourself against it.
00:41:56.080But I would say the more that you learn about how the brain works and how it reacts to authority and just learn a little bit about the psychological aspect of it, like the bystander effect and the Milgram experiment.
00:42:09.180And there's another experiment called the smoke-filled room where just a person sits because other people do in a room that's filling up with smoke and the smoke alarms are going off.
00:42:20.080They'll just sit there because other people are sitting there, which are paid actors, right, for the experiment.
00:42:26.360But in the last experiment they did, the percentage of people that stayed in the room long enough to die was 100%.
00:42:38.040Just because 11 people stayed in the room and they didn't leave, they didn't care about the smoke, so that person stayed because the other people did.
00:42:46.560So, just understanding those little psychological principles can help you break away because it's in your conscious awareness and now it's not unconscious.
00:42:55.820You're taking what the unconscious responses and making them very conscious.
00:43:00.600And the final thing I would say is pay very close attention to how you feel in that person's absence.
00:43:08.120So, if you're around somebody and you're like, wow, this is an incredible leader or we've got an incredible connection and I can't believe how awesome this person makes me feel, if the positive feelings go away when you're away from that person, something is off.
00:43:24.720You should still feel good about that interaction.
00:43:27.060It shouldn't be like you need that drug again because that person was probably using manipulative tactics on you.
00:43:32.880So, they pumped you up with a lot of neurotransmitters and you go away and those chemicals wear off because it wasn't emotional, it was chemical.
00:43:41.740They gave you a chemical high instead of this emotional feeling of actually feeling good.
00:43:54.320And if it's not good, that might be a red flag.
00:43:58.360Well, Chase, this has been a great conversation.
00:43:59.780We've literally scratched the surface of your work.
00:44:01.640Where can people go to learn more about what you do?
00:44:04.200You can just type Chase Hughes into the App Store or you can check us out on YouTube.
00:44:09.700I've got a pretty growing YouTube channel and we've got another channel with a few other guys that we profile human behavior called the Behavior Panel.
00:44:17.300And it's the most fun time of my week for sure.
00:44:30.240Also, check out his website at chasehughes.com where you can find more information about his work, including his course on authority.
00:44:36.360Also, check out our show notes at awem.is slash authority where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic, including links to Chase's authority self-assessment matrix and his 34 behaviors that will kill your authority.
00:44:47.880Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:44:58.000Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you'd think of.
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