Here is the full transcript of former Secret Service Special Agent Evy Poumpouras’ talk titled “How to Succeed Without Confidence, Motivation, or Healing” at TEDxAthens, Dec 3, 2024.
Listen to the audio version here:
EVY POUMPOURAS: I began my career as a former special agent with the United States Secret Service. In the U.S. Secret Service, there’s a dual mission agency. You do protection, which means you protect the president, former presidents, foreign heads of state, and you also work criminal investigations, serious crimes, across the board. And I did interviews and interrogations.
After I left the U.S. Secret Service, I had a more public persona. I wrote my book, Becoming Bulletproof, and then I began working on air. Today I work for NBC News and I cover crime and national security.
What was interesting is people began writing in to me, and they started writing in to me with questions, wanting guidance. “Evy, I want to ask my boss for a raise, but I don’t know how to do it, I’m afraid.” “Evy, I’d like to change career paths, but I don’t know how to do it, I’m afraid.” And the questions varied. They were all over the place.
And I began doing mentor sessions. I thought, you know, I really can’t answer a person’s question in a text or in a note or even in an email. So I started doing a few mentor sessions, guiding people. Then the few became a few dozen. Then the few dozen became a few hundred. And over the years, I did hundreds of mentor sessions with people.
And I found a pattern. I found a pattern that they were all at the core struggling with common issues, that there were these inhibitors, these patterns in their way of thinking and behavior that caused them to be stuck, that caused them not to know how to move forward. And I want to share these with you today.
You’re Not That Special
First inhibitor, you’re not that special. Here’s the thing. We may like to think of ourselves as special. Okay, so if I’m special, then that means you’re not special. Well, or if you’re all special, then nobody is special.
The other thing is, when you think of yourself as being special, it kind of means that you’re separate from everyone else. You are unique. You know, it’s interesting, I’m a criminal justice professor, and obviously my background is criminology. We found that people who commit crime, chronic crime, those people that commit crime over and over and over again, they think they’re special because the laws and the rules don’t apply to them. The laws and the rules are for everybody else. I’m special.
What else is really interesting is that those who think of themselves as special become extremely self-focused. I am so focused on myself and me that I make my problems special, my pain is special, and my suffering is special. Nobody knows how I feel because I am so special that I hurt so differently. And when you feel like that, there are higher rates of depression and you have higher rates of anxiety because I am so unique.
But what I found is when you think that you are that special, you feel alone in the world. You can’t get through it. Nobody understands you. You’re not that special. And do you know what that means? You’re not alone in the world.
When I was a special agent, I was exposed to the events of September 11, 2001. I worked out of the United States field office in New York City and I went to work that day at the World Trade Center. So I was there from when the first plane hit to the second to the collapse of the first tower and the second tower.
Now what was interesting, there was a moment when that was all happening, that exposure to see all those people suffer and all those people that I couldn’t help or save. And what got me through that really tragic event is I understood I wasn’t that special in my pain, that other people had been exposed to what I had been exposed to and that if they could get through it, I could get through it. I knew that I wasn’t alone in the world.
Now this is the number one thing I get asked about when people come to me, “Evy, I need confidence, I’m not confident. How do you manifest confidence?” I’m going to tell you something, confidence is overrated, overrated. Here’s the secret, you don’t need it. You don’t need it.
Think of it this way. I want to do something, typically people want confidence so that they can do something. So here’s the thing I want to do. Here is me. I want to go from here to here. Ideally, I would go this way. Here’s my achievement. Boom. I’m done.
But do you know what we do? We say, ah, wait, I need confidence to do this. So instead of going this way, I’m going to break my path and I’m going to go on this wild journey to find confidence. Where’s this confidence, confidence? I need you. Where are you? Where are you? And then once I get it, then I can come back.
You have done this, such a windy road and gone all over the place that you either forget to go back, you get distracted or you lose faith. And we never achieve what we want to achieve.
Motivation Equals Mediocrity
And with that, one other thing you don’t need is motivation. Motivation equals mediocrity. Often people think, I need to be motivated to do something. I need motivation to go work out. I need motivation to study so I can go to school. I need motivation to do these things.
I will tell you something. If you wait to be motivated in life to do something, you will do the bare minimum.
When I went through U.S. Secret Service Training Academy, we would wake up at 3 a.m.
We would go out on these runs for miles and miles. And you know what they did to really mess with us? They wouldn’t even tell us how long we would be running for. So we could psychologically mess with our heads. You would go on these painful runs, your legs burning, your lungs on fire. You would do it anyway.
I had zero motivation to wake up every morning, to go to training, to get bruised up, to get beat up, to be threatened every day that I would fail and get kicked out. No motivation. I did it anyway.
Do you want to know something else? That when you do things, that’s when confidence and motivation come in. But if you set yourself up to seek these things, to seek motivation, and let me ask you a question. Every time you look for motivation, where is it? Motivation? Where are you? Once it comes, then I can do this.
And how often does it come? Sometimes it doesn’t come at all. But if you’re lucky to get it, what does it do? Hang out maybe a couple hours, a couple of days, a couple of weeks? Then what do you do? You never finish what you start, because you need motivation.
The Victim Mindset
Another common inhibitor and a trait that I would see in people is the mindset of me being a victim or me feeling like prey. When we think of ourselves as being attacked, as being victimized by others, and I’m not saying that those things don’t happen, but when we develop that mindset, we become that.
There was a study done in New York City. What they did is they put up some cameras in New York, and they started videotaping New Yorkers walking, just walking down the street. So they took this footage, then they gave it to people in prison, to convicted felons. And they said to them, “I want you to tell me who you would pick for your prey. Who amongst these people would you target?”
Would you know that they all picked the same people? They all picked the same people to prey upon. Basically, they looked at the way they walked. Who did they pick? Well, the first group they picked were people that walked very timidly. They walked, and they kind of had small steps, and they made themselves small, and maybe a little bit kind of to themselves. They put off this vibe, I’m very timid, I’m not sure of myself, boom, easy prey.
Then they picked people who had really long strides, kind of sloppy walks, walking, I’m not really aware of my body, I’m doing whatever I want with it. They targeted those people because they had this lack of awareness.
Do you know who they did not pick? They didn’t pick people who walked deliberately, with conviction. Their steps weren’t small, their steps weren’t big. But they exuded this energy out to the world, I am not your prey.
We become what we think of ourselves, and it manifests through our mind, into our body, and that’s what we show.
Fear is a good thing, it can help you. It’s what helps you pay attention to cross the street, it’s what keeps you aware, it’s what tells you that you need to watch out for a person. Fear is an emotion, so like any emotion, fear is something that comes and goes. Like anger—you’re angry, and then it passes. Sadness—I’m sad, and then it passes. Happiness—all emotions pass, but what we have done is we have taken the notion of fear and made it our identity.
One of the things I would hear from my mentees: “I’m afraid, I’m just a very fearful person, I’m not a person who’s brave, or I’m not that person who can go out and do things.” And what they did, unintentionally, is they labeled themselves as being fearful. Labels are for clothing, they are not for people. Don’t label yourself. When you feel fear, it’s supposed to come, pass through you, and be released. Fear is not your identity. Don’t let it make a home in your head.
Resilience vs. Healing
Finally, you don’t need to heal to be resilient. When you tie in fear, often, people wonder, “Well, I’ve been through something really hard, how do I become resilient? I have to heal, and then once I heal, I make the pain go away, I make whatever I’ve been through go away, I can move forward, I’ll be all right, I’ll be resilient.”
You can heal from whatever you’ve been through, but healing is one thing, and being resilient is something else. Being resilient means I go through something traumatic, hard, tragic, whatever that is, but then I am able to recover from it. And when I say recover, I mean I go back to who I was pre-stressor. I go back to: can I function day-to-day as I used to function before? It is not “I’m going to make it go away,” it is not “I’m going to forget about it,” it is also not “I want to be the old Evy, the old person, the person who I was before I went through this.” That’s not resilience.
And you really want to master resilience? The more difficult things you get to do in life, the more resilient you become, because now you measure your bounce back rate. I went through something hard, I recovered. Now when I go through something hard again, I recover again, and then again, and do you know what happens? You get faster, and faster, and faster. That is resilience. How quickly I can recover, and you know what? I can move on and live.
Facing Death
When I put these inhibitors together, I also organically realized that these were things that I became aware of throughout my life. So they’re not exclusive to just my mentees, they’re really tied in. And when I think of inhibitors, these are things that keep us from moving forward, from achieving our goals.
As a special agent in U.S. Secret Service, that job definitely was a life or death job every day. You didn’t know whether or not you would come home. But there were two key moments in my life where I really thought I was going to die.
The first time I thought I was going to die was on 9/11, and my specific moment was when Tower 1 was collapsing, the first tower. I happened to be in an area where we were trying to triage and help wounded people, putting them in paramedics. We didn’t know if the tower was going to come down. But I remember in that moment, as I started to hear it, I found shelter. I was outside, so shelter was pretty much a corner on the sidewalk. I made myself small, and my hope was whatever falls might miss me.
As the tower started to collapse around me, I had a moment, and I was like, “Wow, I’m going to die.” And I was actually sure. I thought, “I’m really going to die.” And I had this thought and this sadness, and I thought to myself, “There’s so much I didn’t do. There’s so many things I didn’t do. I didn’t live.” And I prayed in that moment. I said, “If I make it through this, I’m going to live my life, so that way the next time death comes for me, I’m going to be okay to go.” And so I did live, and then after that, I made sure to live.
Fast forward about 20 years later, I had another near-death experience, but the second one happened when I had my daughter. I was giving birth to my daughter, and when I had her, I lost a lot of blood. The doctors were trying to help me at that point. When I started losing a lot of blood, my lungs began to fill with a lot of water, and because of that, I couldn’t breathe. I was having a hard time breathing.
I remember even my husband, I could hear him in my ear, because he was in the room. He’s like, “Breathe, breathe, fix your breathing, breathe.” And I remember thinking, what does he mean breathe? I am breathing. I started losing oxygen in my body, so they were worried about the oxygenation in my brain, and then my kidneys began to shut down. It felt like it was my house, all the lights were on in my house, and it felt like somebody was going through the house, and just going room to room, and turning off every switch.
And I thought to myself, “I think I’m dying.” But in that moment, I remembered the first time, and I thought, “Ah, this time, I’m okay to go. I have done everything I wanted to do, and if I didn’t get to do it, I know I tried. I didn’t let these inhibitors keep me from living my life. I’m okay to go.” And I really was.
Living Without Regrets
We have to really think about how we live, because I can tell you, when it is your time to go, you’re not going to think about your cars, you’re not going to think about your money, you’re not going to think about your jobs, you’re going to think, did I live? Am I okay to go? And you want to make sure that you understand that you are not that special, and because of that, you’re not alone in the world. There are people there to help you, to help you get through the hard times. You are not suffering alone.
And with that, you will remember that you don’t need confidence to do anything. Confidence and motivation, they will rob you of your success. They will rob you of time, because you will chase these elusive things that, quite frankly, you don’t need. I had no confidence in anything I did. I did it anyway.
And you are nobody’s prey. Think about how you show up in the world, how you walk into a room, how you speak to people, how you present yourself, what message are you sending to the world?
And even though you are afraid and that you will fear from time to time, you will have that. It is not who you are. And that with all these hardships, you will build your resilience and you will be able to withstand more and more and more, so that when your time comes, you will look back and say, “I’m okay to go, because I lived.”
