What Drug Dealers Taught Me About Trust With Pamela Barnum

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

What does trust look like in the criminal underworld? In this episode, John Livesay sits down with Pamela Barnum, who has been an undercover drug officer and a prosecuting attorney. She has an amazing story of how she met her husband while they were both undercovers, and we talk about what drug dealers taught her about trust. Pamela also shares strategies to improve trust and build rapport by looking at body language and other nonverbal communication techniques. Stay tuned!

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What Drug Dealers Taught Me About Trust With Pamela Barnum

Our guest is Pamela Barnum, who has been an undercover drug officer and a prosecuting attorney. She has an amazing story of how she met her husband while they were both undercovers. We talk about what drug dealers taught her about trust. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Pamela Barnum. Since 2012, she has been coaching and consulting on sales and trust building. In 2015, she began sharing her strategies to improve negotiations and increase sales through intentional communication and body language. Prior to this, Pam spent over twenty years working in the criminal justice system first as an undercover police officer in the drug enforcement section and later as a prosecuting attorney. Welcome to the show, Pam.

Thank you, John. I am honored to be here. I feel like we have so much to talk about. I want to interview you. That’s where I want to go.

That’s sweet. We had a fun pre-chat getting to know each other a little bit. Readers, you are in for a treat but before we get into all these amazing stories of what it was like to be undercover, change your identity, tell a different story to yourself, and how you keep the story straight, let’s get to your story a little bit. Did you dream of getting into this business? Did you dream of first being a lawyer? How did it all start?

I look back on that. I’m one of those people. When you looked at the fork in the road when you were younger, I would have ended up in law enforcement or having to be dealt with by law enforcement on a pretty regular basis. I had a family member who was a police officer who inspired me. We were talking about television shows and that thing earlier. I don’t know if you remember the show NYPD.

I love the music alone or that theme song.

Diane in the show played by Kim Delaney was working undercover for part of those different seasons. I remember thinking, “That’s so interesting and fascinating.” I didn’t have the desire to do that but when I was approached by the drug unit to come and work undercover, I remember thinking back to those episodes because it was happening almost at the same time. That was in the early ’90s when I was watching that show. It was in the early-mid-’90s when I started in drug enforcement. I was inspired and fascinated by that.

When you decided to become a police officer, is it like becoming a lawyer where you typically go, “I‘m going to may have this practice area as a lawyer?” My sister is a lawyer. It’s like, “You either specialize in wills or whatever.” There are so many different practice areas. It’s the same thing for the police. I‘m guessing there’s additional training to become undercover. Tell us, how did you decide that you wanted to do undercover? Secondly, I want to hear a story of one of your favorite experiences, how long it lasted, and everything.

[bctt tweet=”How you say something is just as important as what you say.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Everyone goes through the police academy. You start as a uniform officer. With the force that I was working with, you had to have at least five years of experience on the road as a uniform officer before applying to a specialized unit. However, I was recruited into drug enforcement after three years on the road. I had a real knack for finding drugs, cultivating informants, dealing with people, and all of the things that happen in drug enforcement. I was the only woman working undercover when they recruited me. There were a couple of other women in the unit. They didn’t do undercover work. They did some other things.

I moved around all the time. I was getting used here, there, and everywhere on different projects because people didn’t expect a woman to be an undercover cop. There were additional challenges that come with that because we talk about the #MeToo Movement, the glass ceiling, and all of that thing. In the criminal underworld, especially in drugs, drug dealers, and bikers, the glass ceiling is pretty much bulletproof. I spoke at a conference of undercover officers. Nothing has changed. There are so many changes as far as technology and all of this but the underlying culture remains.

I found it very interesting. I spoke with one woman who was working undercover. I felt like I was reliving my history with some of her stories and the things that happened. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I was recruited into drug enforcement. I loved it. It was interesting. There were some challenges for me because I was in graduate school at the time. I was going to graduate school part-time to get my Master’s degree. I remember going for my interview with who became my boss and then his boss that oversaw everything.

I remember them thinking that was going to be a real headache for them. I was going to graduate school. They started telling me this story about one of the other officers who had a parrot that got in the way of him doing his job. I thought, “They’re comparing graduate school and having a pet parrot.” I was fascinated by that. I got into the unit. I moved around quite a bit. I loved it. I met my husband working undercover. He wasn’t a drug dealer. I want to clarify that. He was another undercover officer.

We had to pretend to be married. We never met before they partnered us up. I was driving 5 or 6 hours from home. He was driving a few hours from where he was located. We had to meet in this town, set up an apartment, and set up this whole background story about how we were in this common-law relationship never having met. Ten months later, we end up in a real relationship and decide to get married. We call it our government-prearranged marriage.

Instead of parents setting them up, it was the government.

The government paid us to be a couple, and then there we were.

 

Talk about buying into your story. It was so believable that you began to believe it. Let me ask some questions about this. You’re a woman undercover. Isn’t there tremendous pressure to take the drugs?

It depends on how you set up your background story. There’s a lot of training. We talk about training to become an undercover officer. It’s a very intensive course that you go to for a few weeks. Most people that get into law enforcement don’t have a huge background in illicit drugs and dealing with criminals, at least hopefully if the background checks have been effective. You learn about all of that. You learn about pricing, usage, simulation techniques, and setting yourself up as a business person, not necessarily as a user. There are all sorts of things that play into making your career more effective and hopefully safer.

Your TEDx Talk is What drug dealers taught me about trust. What a great topic. Can you give us a takeaway from the TEDx Talk? What did you learn about trust? You had to build trust to get the drug dealers to even feel like they could openly talk to you. What is one of the things you did to build trust with drug dealers, which I would imagine would be some of the most skeptical people in the world?

They’re paranoid. They don’t like new people. They don’t like to do business with new people. There were all of those circumstances. This thread has carried through in all of my careers and when I talk to people about negotiation skills and sales skills. When you refuse to look at people from an us versus them mindset, when you look at people as human beings doing the best they can at the moment that they’re in, and I do maintain that a lot of the drug dealers I met were in that scenario, and when you can have empathy and confidence in what you’re doing and who you are as a person, you will effectively build, gain, and maintain trust.

The most successful undercover officers that I ever worked with and that were in my experience didn’t view themselves as different or separate from the people that they were working with. They knew what their job was. Their career was different but as human beings, they didn’t see the difference. That’s an important distinction.

Let’s double–click on each of those words. I‘ve heard before that when you show empathy for someone, they trust you because they go, “You get me. You must be stressed out. This must be hard for you to trust somebody new,” or whatever you say to build the unspoken objection. You’re voicing it with empathy but the interesting thing is I haven’t heard anybody combine it with confidence to build trust. Let’s have you explain the difference between confidence and arrogance, especially in the drug world because they look very similar. How in the world does coming across as confident help you get someone to trust you? That would be helpful in any scenario.

If you don’t feel confident and you don’t express confidence, you won’t inspire confidence in what you’re saying and what you’re doing. It won’t happen. People want to deal with people that know what they’re doing. People want to deal with people that can be effective and help them achieve whatever that goal is. There are goals for drug dealers, goals for CEOs of companies, and goals for all sorts of different professionals and tradespeople.

[bctt tweet=”How to tell if someone is anxious or deceptive.” username=”John_Livesay”]

You can express confidence primarily in your nonverbals because oftentimes, the things that we say can come across and be misinterpreted as arrogant or overly aggressive even. How we say those things and how we show up in our body language and the nonverbal way is going to impact that person and send messages to their brain because it’s what science tells us. I am not a neuroscientist by any stretch. I love to read books about neuroscience and leadership.

What they found by doing fMRI testing and looking at all sorts of different research is that people will make a decision within 50 milliseconds or less than the blink of an eye. They see someone, and their brain starts translating, fight, flight, or freeze. We like or dislike. We feel comfortable or uncomfortable with someone. We start looking for reasons to back that up.

If we can show up in our nonverbals and immediately express confidence tempered with empathy and compassion, that sends a different message than showing up uber-confident and aggressive, which in my case would not have worked. For some scenarios, perhaps that’s the way you need to be. The pounding on the chest confidence has its set of circumstances but for me and the job that I was doing, I needed to be seen as very competent because as a woman in those scenarios, that was not their initial thought. I needed to show up in a way that could help at least start a little bit differently. The things that I would do and say would back up that initial impression.

When you’re talking about nonverbal body language, there are mirror neurons where we match. If someone is smiling, we smile back. We’re matching people’s moods. If someone is cranky or angry, you don’t try to come in so happy maybe. Is that part of what it is?

Those mirror neurons are for sure happening. There’s an exercise that I did working undercover when I was a prosecuting attorney or a federal prosecutor and now as someone who does keynotes, speaks, and consults, here’s the thing that will work well in building initial rapport. You can do this virtually. It’s much easier and better in person. In-person meetings are better. When you first get to have a conversation with someone, it’s mirroring slightly and very subtly their body language.

You don’t want to come across like Simon Says, that game when you were kids, because that’s going to look weird. You want to do subtle nuances. They have crossed their leg. Maybe 15 to 20 seconds later, you’re going to do the same, or you move your coffee cup or your beer on the bar or wherever you happen to be. You’re going to use some of their languages. Let’s use an example. If they refer to someone as a vendor, and you usually call them a seller, then you’re going to take their language as a vendor and use similar terminology. You’re going to pay attention to that and repeat it back.

Subtlety is the key. Within 3 to 5 minutes of doing that, you should be feeling a shift hopefully. When we start building rapport, we get that feeling when we’re with someone that things seem to be going well. What I encourage people to do at that point is to then subtly change their positioning, a gesture, or a word. If you see the other person mimic and mirror that, then you’re in sync. If you’re in a negotiation, it’s a good time to bring up pricing, dates, timelines, or something that could be a little bit more controversial. That helps you solidify, first of all, building that rapport because people like people who are like them. They feel that they know them and that they can trust them. That’s what we’re working toward.

 

One of the most common things that people always need help negotiating is price no matter what you’re selling, whether you’re selling a home, a car, a product, or a speaker fee. Is there anything that you can share with us about pricing and negotiating pricing?

At Northwestern University, there’s the Kellogg School of Trust. They have amazing research. That’s something interesting. I would go there because I follow them quite a bit. They did a study on what they call the virtual handshake. This can happen in person, over the phone, or online. If you have small talk about the weather, your kids playing a certain sport, a holiday place, or anything that has nothing to do with the negotiation and you do that for at least five minutes, and so often we get caught up not wanting to do small talk, and we want to get right into it or we only talk about that issue, what they found is that people were negotiating higher fees and closing better deals. That was one portion of it.

Another thing that was found, which was very interesting to me, is a nonverbal technique. It’s clothing. I’m never going to give fashion advice to anybody. That’s for sure. They did negotiation exercises. It was only men that were in these studies. I’m not sure why that was but they took men because women have some different parameters around that. The men were dressed more formally with more tailored suits and darker colors. The other negotiating study was with people in a more casual type of clothing. The more formally dressed negotiated deals in the $2.1 million profit range. The people who were in the more casual clothing were around $650,000 to $680,000 or somewhere in that range.

The only difference was the clothing. They’re thinking, “Is it the impression that the other person has of you? What is it?” They took a deeper dive. What they found was that when we’re dressed more formally, we have more expansive thinking. There’s some confidence around that but also, our abstract thoughts are quicker and easier to recall. We have this confidence in us when we are engaging in negotiations. We’re sending messages when someone sees us but it’s how our brain is interpreting that and what we’re able to accomplish. Those are simple things that don’t require a whole history lesson or study.

That’s so interesting that it’s not just people reacting to us dressed more formally but how it impacts us. We’re different people dressed up versus not. Hence the need to not wear sweatpants. If you’re going to go to your corporate work from home, maybe you should dress up a little at home to get your brain to think differently, “I‘m at work now.”

They did a study about people begging for money. There was a guy dressed casually and then a guy dressed in a suit with no tie. The guy with the suit and the tie was going, “I lost my wallet. Will you loan me $5?“ People were much more willing to believe the more well–dressed person needed the money than somebody who looked like they needed it. They didn’t believe they were telling the truth.

I had to do that on the undercover course. That was one of the things. We go out without giving too much information about what that looks like. You are dropped off in a major city with no ID and no money. There’s nothing except yourself. They try to put you in places that would make you very uncomfortable. The whole goal of that is to be able to get enough money to get back because you have a two-hour bus ride, hitchhike, or whatever you have to do to get back to where the course is happening.

[bctt tweet=”People like people like them. They feel that they know them and that they can trust them.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I’m only a study of one. I was in a group. There were 30 of us. It wasn’t a real comprehensive study by any stretch but that was true. You had the opportunity to dress in whatever way you wanted. They didn’t control that but they searched you for ID and money so you couldn’t have anything of value on you but you could dress the way you wanted. People feel more comfortable and relaxed in that scenario.

Back to your story of being undercover with your now–husband and he was undercover, a lot of people might be curious as I am. Who fell in love with whom first? How did you know it was real and not the undercover part of you being in the story so much?

I would recommend this to anyone who’s looking to have a long-term relationship, not necessarily working undercover. Kevin and I are placed in this location. We have this very stressful job to do. We have all these different things happening. We had no interest in each other. I was not attracted to him remotely. He was not attracted to me remotely. You’re living with someone. You come out of the shower. Your hair is not done. You’re using the bathroom and leaving dishes in the kitchen.

You’re not trying to impress him.

We became great friends. We would tell each other about the personal aspects of our lives when we weren’t working and shared past relationship failures, successes, and all of the different things that you talk about with the buddy that you work with. There was no pressure to develop this relationship. I tell a much more romantic version of it. Kevin will say something like, “Undercover went under the covers,” or this whole little motion thing. We look back on those times and our true personalities. You know what it’s like if you go on a first date or somebody sets you up. People meet online.

We’ve got masks on.

You’re trying to put your best foot forward. That makes sense. It’s like an interview. I didn’t care what he thought. He’s got to pretend to be married to me or in love with me. I don’t have to have to do anything to impress this guy. He felt the same. When you are your authentic self, and I believe that to be true in negotiations, building trust, and all of the different parts of our life and have that authenticity with ease, you will shine and attract the right people at the right time.

 

That’s so beautiful. My last question for you is this. You’re such an expert in helping people tell the difference between anxiety and deception. Is there one tidbit you can share with us about how we know if someone is full-out deceiving us or they’re nervous or anxious?

It’s the same whether it’s someone you know well or someone you’ve met. That comes down to having a baseline. If you’ve talked to people who do polygraphs for a living or are in the behavioral sciences, and I have several friends who still do that for a living, they talk a lot about the baseline. The research backs that up if we can see someone in their natural way even when it’s stressful. When people are coming in to be interviewed by the police, they’re very stressed, whether they have done something wrong or not. If you get pulled over, you’re super stressed out even if you’ve done nothing. It’s nature.

You go in to get a physical. They’re taking your blood pressure. You’re like, “Why is it so high?” You’re more scared than you thought, “I‘m in a hospital.” It’s that setting alone.

It’s having that baseline. You will observe someone in their baseline. If you want to get to the bottom of something and find out if there has been some deception, my recommendation is this. There is no such thing as a human lie detector. Anyone who says they are is lying or delusional in some way. There are science-backed things that they have found that can tell but you have to be experienced and intuitive to find those things.

I’m going to give you an overarching example. When you have that baseline, you see someone stressed or not stressed. You start asking some questions again that have nothing to do with what you’re talking about, see how they react, and then present the stimulus. That is what you want to know about. It could be a piece of evidence, a text message you found on somebody’s phone, or whatever it is. You present the stimulus and then watch what they do. If within five seconds they do one of the verbal or nonverbal triggers, and I’ll share a couple of those with you if we have a moment, then that should be a red flag. You’re looking for two or more reactions to happen. It can’t just be one.

For example, let’s say you and I are having a chat. I suspect you of maybe not giving me all of the information or deceiving me in some way. I have this suspicion. I might ask you directly or show you something that will trigger a reaction. Let’s say for example that you have a verbal-nonverbal disconnect. You’re telling me something is true but you’re shaking your head even subtly, or you tell me something and preface it with, “I swear to God. Allah is my witness. On a stack of Bible.” You use religion in some way.

“To be honest with you.”

[bctt tweet=”Most people don’t want to lie and when they lie, it triggers something.” username=”John_Livesay”]

There are long pauses. You will have noticed that in your previous conversation where you’re getting the baseline, some people take a long time to think about things before they say something. You need to know. Is that different now that you’ve presented the stimulus? We are not going to have a polygraph attached to someone to look at their blood pressure and whether or not their body temperature has gone up. Are they touching their face a lot? We have this fight, flight, or freeze mechanism.

Most people don’t want to lie. When they lie, it triggers something. They want to get away or fight. Their blood will go to their limbs, fingers, and feet. It will drain from their face. It may cause a little bit of an itch and sweat. We’re going to see people touching their faces a little bit more often. Maybe they hadn’t touched it at all, and now all of a sudden, they’re touching their face.

It’s almost like self-soothing a little bit.

Another thing is grooming, picking lint off, and stroking. You see people stroking their legs. We’re looking for those pacifying types of motions as well. They have to be different enough that you would notice, and two or more. The first one has to happen within the first five seconds of the stimulus being presented.

Isn’t that crazy that we can do all that quickly, and it’s all subconscious? What a fascinating conversation this has been with Pam Barnum, the Trust Agent. If people want to find out more about you and hire you as a speaker, where should they go?

They can go to PamelaBarnum.com or TheTrustAgent.com. It all ends up in the same place. I’m more active on LinkedIn and Instagram. It’s my name on both.

Thank you so much for sharing your incredible training, wisdom, and personal story of you and Kevin. I thought that was the highlight of the whole episode for me. Thanks again, Pamela.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Pamela Barnum
• What drug dealers taught me about trust – TEDx Talk
• LinkedIn – Pamela Barnum
• Instagram – Pamela Barnum
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: building rapport, drug dealers, law enforcement, nonverbal techniques, prosecuting attorney, undercover drug officer