Here is the full transcript of former U.S. Secret Service special agent and interrogator Desmond O’Neill’s interview on The Diary Of A CEO Podcast, December 1, 2025.
Ex-Secret Service interrogator Desmond O’Neill sits down with Steven Bartlett to reveal the science-backed frameworks he’s used for decades to handle the world’s toughest conversations. Drawing on 30 years in law enforcement, he explains why labeling people as “narcissists” backfires, how gaslighting really works, and the 4-step PLAN method for navigating high-stakes conflicts without losing control.
From spotting subtle signs of deception to building real trust and repairing damaged relationships, this conversation is a masterclass in communication under pressure. Ideal for anyone facing difficult partners, bosses, or friends, it gives you practical tools to keep your emotions in check and finally say what needs to be said.
What You’ll Learn From This Conversation
STEVEN BARTLETT: Desmond O’Neill, for those people that have just clicked onto this conversation, what are they going to walk away from our discussion with?
DESMOND O’NEILL: So I’ve been in law enforcement for 30 years, and I’ve served a lot of different roles in that. And above everything else, one thing that I’ve learned is when stress is high, when emotions are strong, when it matters, how do you authentically connect and communicate with somebody else?
There’s something to be said about when a conversation is easy, right? When it’s fun, when everybody wants to be there. You can focus on your handshake, you can focus on the eye contact, how great your posture is.
What about the dark conversations? What about those conversations that live in the shadows of your mind because you don’t want to face them. You don’t want to have those, right? They’re cloaked in so much emotion or so much tension that you just don’t know how to handle that.
We all have that, right?
Because it comes from, for the 30 years that I’ve been doing this, most of the people that I talk to didn’t want to talk to me. And my job was to connect with them, to find a way to get them to open up, to find a way to have some type of understanding and get the information that I needed.
So this is not about interviewing or interrogation. This is human connection. If your audience cares to understand how to have a dark conversation where you can deepen that relationship or at least come to some type of understanding, or at the very least, not walk away ruminating on everything you said, trying to figure out what went wrong, what could you have done different. If you’ve had that and you’re interested in knowing, then this is where we’re going to talk about that.
Desmond’s Unique Background in Law Enforcement
STEVEN BARTLETT: And to summarize in, I guess, 30 seconds why you’re the guy that is best placed to deliver this information. What are the reference points, the experiences, the variety of experience you’ve had that feeds into the answers and the actionable advice I’m going to give my audience?
DESMOND O’NEILL: My initial career started as a corrections officer, became a police officer, and I was a SWAT officer as well. From there I went to the federal government. So I went to the Secret Service. With the Secret Service, I also started a polygraph career. So now I have people that are giving me their deepest, darkest secrets.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And just for context, polygraphing is a lie detection test.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Polygraph is a lie detection test. So it gives you a physiological response in terms of how somebody answers a particular question.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Where else did your career take you after that point?
DESMOND O’NEILL: I went into internal affairs. And so that is now policing the people within our organization. So now I’m talking to men and women who have had some of my interrogation training. They kind of know the questioning going on, they know the interaction. They’ve done themselves interviews and interrogations.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay, so this is law enforcement officers who have committed a crime or some kind of possibly issue or been reported for something, and your job is to investigate them.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yes, but think about that for a minute. You are now talking to somebody else who, maybe a year ago you were out in the street doing work with, and now you’re asking them these questions or these for clarification on some type of allegation. You’ve got to be mindful with that. That’s a big deal.
The Evolution of Interrogation Methods
STEVEN BARTLETT: And the interview methods that were prevalent at that time, you felt were outdated.
DESMOND O’NEILL: They were. So there is in the U.S. a very historical evolution of interview and interrogation. It started in the 1900s when policing came in. In that circumstance, it was physical abuse. They called it the third degree, where you would go in and people would grind down your teeth or they would cause pain for you to talk to them.
As we’ve evolved as a society, that started to go away in lieu of psychological manipulation. So it was less about hands on and more about trying to get people to talk to you from a psychological perspective.
And right about 2014, when I went into internal affairs, I was like, Steven, I was like, there’s got to be something different. We’ve had to evolve in some way in terms of what that is. And so you have my thesis there, right?
Right about that time, I was accepted into the Naval Postgraduate School to pursue a master’s. And because I was looking for a better way to interview, one of my thesis advisors said, “Hey, have you ever heard of the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group?” Which the acronym is H.I.G. Had never heard of it.
But the H.I.G. when it was created was three prong, meaning that it had a research department, and it had a practitioner department. So the people that would do the interrogations, and then it had a trainer department.
Now the trainer department, we would do interviews, interrogations. But we also understood the science behind that. The reason that’s important is because you could be a really good practitioner and not understand why something is or isn’t working. And so being able to cross the bridge between the science and understanding that and being able to apply it in the room, that hybrid, that connection, that sweet spot, that is what I did.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you did research and you continue to do research on how to get people to give information, how to get information from people, how to get them to offer up information. Is that the crux of it?
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah.
Stop Labeling People
STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I’ve got a difficult conversation I want to have with someone, this person is antagonistic, they often gaslight me, they might be a narcissist. And I’m walking into that conversation or I’m overthinking it, I’m thinking, God, I need to have this conversation. Where’s the first place to start?
DESMOND O’NEILL: So the first place that I would start is don’t label the people how you just label them.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.
DESMOND O’NEILL: And that’s a problem. So you just labeled somebody a narcissist. Why does that matter to you?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think it allows me to blame them, I guess.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Allows you to blame. But tell me in your perspective, what’s a narcissist?
STEVEN BARTLETT: That they are low empathy, they are self-centered, they are a little bit aggressive maybe.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay, so let’s stop there. Do you think personally that there are times in your life where you lack empathy?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay, so empathy is very situationally based. So meaning that it’s also subjective. Meaning if you feel this person is not giving you certain empathy. Okay, maybe a bit self-centered, a bit aggressive.
The reason I ask you these things is because if you just blatantly label somebody as being like, “This person’s a narcissist,” you’ve just made it easy for yourself. You’ve just put blame on them and you’re not going to be able to really understand who this person is and why they are the way they are.
So the first thing that I would do is I would take away the labels as to how you define them as you’re going into that. What was the other thing you said in terms of what they were? They were narcissists. They were something else.
STEVEN BARTLETT: They gaslight.
Understanding Gaslighting
DESMOND O’NEILL: So second thing, which is interesting because we actually, within our training program, we just did a big class on gaslighting because it’s important to understand what is gaslighting and when is it not gaslighting. So for you, because you said this person gaslights you, what are they gaslighting you about?
STEVEN BARTLETT: When I bring something up, they make me feel like I’m to blame. When I bring up how I feel, maybe they make me feel like I’m to blame, like I did something wrong.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay. Does that always happen?
STEVEN BARTLETT: More often than not.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay. More often than not. So it’s something that, it sounds like that when you go in and you’re talking to this different person, whatever the circumstances is, they are trying to discredit you or make you feel like maybe you don’t know really what happened.
STEVEN BARTLETT: They’re not listening. They’re just always throwing it back on me, saying that I did something to deserve it.
DESMOND O’NEILL: And what was the third thing you said?
STEVEN BARTLETT: A little bit aggressive, antagonistic. So their emotions go up and it kind of makes me shut down.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay.
STEVEN BARTLETT: They kind of flood the zone.
The PLAN Method: Purpose
DESMOND O’NEILL: So when you need to go into a dark conversation, here are the four things that you can do to stay engaged and involved in what’s about to happen, right? And how this is going to hopefully go through. And what we say is, you need to have a plan. And there’s the acronym about that: P, L, A, N.
So the P is for purpose. And the purpose is why are you there? What’s the reason? What’s the mission? You have to understand your mission because your mission is going to drive your tactics. Your mission is going to determine if things get off track. If this person becomes aggressive, this person starts to be insulting.
If my mission at that moment is to deepen my conversation with them, deepen my relationship in some way, and this starts to get ugly in the middle, your mission should keep you on track because you can get pulled from that very quickly.
There’s something called multiple goals theory, and multiple goals theory is the understanding that at any given time, we will pursue simultaneous goals. And typically those goals would be something task oriented. You want to finish a tasking, you want to get something done. There’s going to be a component of identity in there, meaning that how do I feel? What are my emotions going on during the course of this? And then there’s going to be relational. So it’s going to be my relationship with this person at the time.
Now, a lot of times, within multiple goals theory, those things can align. And I’ll give you an example. If you’re playing a sport, you’re on a team, the team goal, your goal within that team. The task is to win, to put on more points than the other person. That’s the task.
The identity aspect of that is, am I a good player? Do I want the ball? Do I get the ball? Am I contributing? Am I the superstar? Is there some type of identity in how this makes me feel about myself, being a sports star in some capacity?
And the relationship part of that is, how do my teammates feel about me?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Am I?
DESMOND O’NEILL: Am I a good teammate in terms of what that was? Those things can align. You can see when that is misaligned, when all of a sudden somebody, what they would call a ball hog, somebody takes the shot all the time and they won’t pass it around. And you’re like, “Ronaldo, what are you doing?” right?
And it’s one of these things where you are more concerned about your identity than you are about the team winning. That’s a problem. That’s when you can see there’s a misalignment of goals.
Or something that’s even more simple would be, let’s say you’re in a meeting with a boss or a colleague, and it’s a pretty important meeting. You’re trying to close a deal and your boss says something that’s wrong. Now you have to make a decision. You could either correct your boss in front of everybody, or you could preserve his or her dignity and address them at a later time.
You have to decide which one of those is most important. You have to understand your purpose of being in that meeting, because maybe I could let this go. It’s not that big of a deal, because if I correct my boss, this may affect my relationship with them at a later time. This could ruin my career in terms of being transferred or not being on a project.
So when you’re looking at goals, you have to understand what the overall objective is. It becomes, Steven, it becomes, especially in emotional conversations, it becomes really easy to get distracted, really easy.
The Power of Purpose in Difficult Conversations
STEVEN BARTLETT: So I go into that conversation with my colleague who is problematic. My goal with them, let’s say, is to get them to stop. I’m actually thinking about earlier in my career when I used to work in call centers on the phone. And there was one particular lady that sat next to me that was always a little bit rude and always put me down a little bit, patronizing.
So I, in hindsight, wish I could have taken her aside and had a conversation with her and said, “Listen, the way you’re speaking to me is very disrespectful or you’re putting me down or patronizing me. Please can you stop doing that?” My goal would have been to get her to stop it.
DESMOND O’NEILL: But the crux of that is to understand why she’s doing it, because that’s going to allow me to fix this in some way, if it’s fixable.
I’ll share this story with you. In 1991, an 11-year-old girl named Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped by a man named Philip Garrido and his wife Nancy. Philip and Nancy kept Jaycee Dugard for 18 years. He fathered two children with her, one when she was 14 and one when she was 17.
In 2009, they found her and him at Berkeley. They arrested him, arrested his wife. 2011, he was tried, convicted. Three years prior to that, there was a young girl named Michaela Garecht who had gone missing, never been found, in a county over, west of El Dorado, in a county named Alameda County. There was a lot of suspicion that Philip was the one who did this as well.
One of my colleagues was the prosecuting attorney for El Dorado County, California. His name is Vern Pierson. And Vern said, “I’d like to close this or get some type of understanding. Can you go and interview Philip?”
So I looked at all the information on Philip. He had written a manifesto in terms of how to cure pedophilia. And I went to Vern. I said, “All right, let’s go do this.” And he goes, “What do you need, like a day, couple of hours?” And I said, “I need four days.”
My goal was to do a deep dive into the things that he had done. He was a serial rapist, a serial kidnapper, and to understand his life and the timeframe by which Michaela Garecht went missing. And so this was the evolution of what I was trying to do.
So I show up, he walks in, says, “Who are you?” I said, “Well, I’m Special Agent O’Neill. I’d like to talk to you about your history. I read your manifesto and I had some questions.” And he said, “You know, when they told me I had a visitor, I wasn’t going to come in. But the angels on my shoulder tell me that this would be a good talk.” So he said, “Let’s do it.”
We talked in detail every day for probably eight to nine hours. They brought him food. And the end of each day I would say, “Philip, I will be here tomorrow. If the angels on your shoulder tell you to show up, please do. If not, then it was nice to meet you.” And every day he showed up.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did you say that?
Understanding the Subject’s Headspace
DESMOND O’NEILL: There’s a depth of understanding in terms of the headspace that he is in. And so when you can connect, like genuinely connect with that, you truly try to understand another person. And there’s power with that.
In the course of those 36 hours, multiple times, he was very aggressive, he was very condescending. He called me a liar. Things he accused me of. “I don’t believe you are who you say you are. I don’t believe you’re here for the things you’re saying you’re here for. I don’t even know if you work for the federal government.” And he’s essentially questioned my integrity.
Now, my purpose is not to make him feel that I’m smarter than him, is not to belittle or berate him or have a question of integrity. Because I could have said, “You kidnapped an 11-year-old girl and kept her captive for 18 years, fathered two children with her, the first one at the age of 14. And your question of my integrity?”
I didn’t do that because that’s not why I was there. And so despite the fact that he got upset, despite the fact that he called me and accused me of all these different things, I stayed on my purpose. I stayed on my mission.
And when we were done, when we finished, I went back to the prosecuting attorney and said, “He’s not your guy.” And he said, “Are you sure?” And I said, “I bet my career on it.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: How did you know?
Indicators of Truth
DESMOND O’NEILL: There was a lot of things in regards to when you’re looking at people from the perspective of telling the truth in terms of the way that they talk and engage with you. Our conversation on Tuesday and our conversation on Wednesday and our conversation on Thursday and our conversation on Friday all stayed very consistent.
If I’m asking him for further clarification, he’s providing further clarification. If I’m talking to him about something and there’s some type of spontaneous correction where he’s like, “Wait a minute, this happened before this,” those are indicators of truth.
And if there are things that he talked about in terms of things that are of complication, nobody’s day goes perfect. And there were many times when he was telling me about the things he had done because he was a serial rapist and a serial kidnapper, and he would drive around and pick up women hitchhiking and he would rape them and let them go.
Oftentimes we would get into the details of when those didn’t go well. And when all of a sudden the girl would fight him off and run away. And so there were all these different complications and different things that he would talk about.
STEVEN BARTLETT: He handled the complications consistently is what you’re saying.
DESMOND O’NEILL: When complications are introduced to a story, people who lie don’t do that. Truth tellers will often do that because it’s just like, “This is just what happened. These are the things that happened. This is my life.”
In terms of where things were going to go overall, in terms of how that conversation went, there are those type of indicators that just made it trend more truthful than not. There wasn’t this big gap or this big weird moment when we’re talking about Michaela Garecht, to where all of a sudden it’s like missing pieces that I have to put in.
There are no cues to deception. There are things that all of a sudden seem different and require you to do more questions, more asking. But that didn’t occur around the time that we were looking for with that.
So we finally, when we finished and then they went back and they looked at the evidence, they found a new fingerprint and were able to charge and convict the person who did that.
The reason I bring all of that up is because for the purpose aspects of what we’re talking about, not losing sight of what your mission is, being focused in terms of what that is. The power of communication and staying online as it relates to what you want to accomplish is really powerful because it keeps you on track and it keeps you engaged and reminds you of why you’re there.
Not every relationship deserves that. There’s just some relationships you’re like, “This just isn’t worth it for me.” If it matters to you, that mattered to me. It mattered to me. Not because for me, it mattered to me before that family.
And there is a difference between having a profession and being a professional. Having a profession is what you do. Being a professional is the culmination of everything that you’ve done at that moment, at that time for a specific purpose. That’s what I had to bring in with that, because that was what was at stake with us.
The PLAN Method: Listen
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you have these four cards in front of you. We’ve done the P, which is staying focused on your purpose when you go into conversation to fend off the emotion which might distort you and take you off. And I’m so guilty of that. Everybody is so guilty of that, especially with conversations with my partner where there’s emotion involved in this, areas where blame might be prevalent. So the L that you have there.
DESMOND O’NEILL: So the L is, listen. This becomes the thing that people are worst at, because it’s a lot to do. Think about right now. Think about my conversation with you at this moment. I’m speaking so internally, my internal vocabulary and the conversation that I’m having in my head is running about 800 to 1,000 words a minute. I’m speaking to you in about 120 to 150 words a minute. There’s a lot that’s being edited. There’s a lot of things that I think that I’m saying or I want to say. I’m trying to engage with you.
There’s also something called theory of mind, which is me watching you and trying to understand. Is what I’m saying on point with what Stephen wants to hear or wants to hear for his audience? Do I need to change anything? Is this landing on him? And then if your nonverbals change or your verbals change, then I have to readjust. Maybe what I’m editing and my theory of mind will readjust too, because I’m like, “Oh, I just lost him here. I have to readjust.”
Simultaneously, you are listening to me, and you’re listening to the 120 to 150 words I’m giving you. But your brain can process this at 400 to 600 words per minute. So you have too much cognitive bandwidth. You have the ability to listen to me and then do multiple other things, which is oftentimes why people will drift out. Or you’ll start thinking of something else, or you’ll think of your notepad because you got it figured out.
And this is when it becomes really easy to be convinced and not curious because you’re like, “I kind of know where this is going.” And so you check out. So you actually have to do something called cognitive inhibition. You have to kind of narrow that bandwidth to stay fully engaged with me.
That’s why when you hear people say active listening, it’s hard. It’s hard to do because you have to be attentive to the other person. You have to listen, you have to look, you have to pick up their verbal and their nonverbal behavior, and then you have to do something with that.
Stephen Covey says most people don’t listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply. And if you are simply just waiting for your turn to talk, then you and I are not connected.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Controlling conversation comes from listening, not talking. So if I’m trying to get some information out of someone, I should have a bias towards just letting them speak at me.
The Power of Asking Questions
You should, you know, you hear about this, like, always let the other person talk more. That’s great. But if both people are doing that, then the conversation is not progressing. The conversation is an extension of what you and I are speaking with. And when we’ve gone from listening in terms of what that looks like, the next thing you have to do, which gets into this, is the A, which is ask, right?
So the A being this: if you are paying attention to me and you’re picking up on things that I’m saying, the changes in my body language, and there’s something you don’t understand, you need to ask. This is where you’re going to deepen the conversation. This is where you show somebody that you’re actively listening, you’re curious and you’re open, and you are trying to understand them.
Understanding Empathy Accuracy
If you look at empathy research, we typically think that we can understand our significant other or different people at a much higher level than we actually do. For a stranger, it’s called empathy accuracy. For a stranger, your ability to understand their headspace is like 20%. For a friend, somebody close to you, it’s like 30. For your significant other, it’s no higher than 40%.
Which means that despite you thinking that you know what she’s thinking, you got a 4 out of 10 chance of being right. And if that conversation gets emotional, that 40% can go down as low as 15 because you start to pull in to be like, “I’m guarding myself here. I’m guarding my ego.”
When your ego is on the line, your ears go offline because you stop hearing what she’s having to say and you start protecting yourself in terms of what you’re trying to do. Your ability to be empathetic when things are hard becomes harder. And you have to be very mindful of that.
Let’s say you come home from early morning workout and your spouse says, “Hey, Steven, how was it?” And you say, “That’s pretty tough.” There’s a lot that you can do with that. This is what she could do. She could say nothing. So now maybe you understand that maybe she doesn’t want to talk about this or she’s not interested in it. That’s one.
The second thing she could say to you would be like, “Well, sweetheart, that’s why you look the way you do.” She has now made the assumption, right, her empathy accuracy, that she knows what you meant by the word tough. And so if she says to you, “Well, that’s how you look,” and that’s not what you meant, now you feel that there’s a separation between what you’re hoping she would pick up on and what she actually said.
The third thing she could say would be like, “What do you mean by tough?” Because the ambiguity of that is the word tough. Who knows what that means? It could be a lot of different things. She’s now showing you, “I’m into you, I’m tuning in.” And the power of something like that, when you talk about deepening relationships and increasing that connection, that’s how it happens.
Reading Nonverbal Behavior
The same thing with your nonverbal behavior, right? You look at nonverbal behavior, 66% of what we give is nonverbal. And so if I, through the course of my conversation with you, if all of a sudden we’re talking and you’re…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Just like folding my arms.
DESMOND O’NEILL: So folding your arms could be a sign of just you’re folding your arms. It could be a sign of you not liking my question if you roll your eyes. So if I see that and it matters to me, then I need to say something to the effect of “it seems like” versus “I think,” because “I think” is the pronoun saying it’s about me. And it’s just like, I don’t care what you think.
“It seems like what you just did maybe was because you didn’t like what I had to say because I saw you cross your arms and roll your eyes. Do I have that right?” So now you have a choice where you can either say, “Yes, you got that right, for these reasons,” or “No, I just folded them because I was comfortable,” and, you know, whatever the case may be.
But it is a matter if I see you and it’s in harmony with the conversation that we were having that seems like it’s something that shows that it could be potentially a problem. I need to ask about it. You and I having a conversation right now, and you folding your arms isn’t going to be like a red flag that I’m like, “Oh, I just saw you folded your arms when I said that.”
But if it’s something that there’s some emotional aid around that, and it’s important, and I’m trying to express something to you when I see you roll your eyes or cross your arms. “Hey, Steven, I noticed when I brought up this thing about our family, you kind of leaned back and crossed your arms and rolled your eyes. It seems like you didn’t approve of that. Is that, do I have that right?” So now it’s on you to explain that or not.
Pattern Recognition in Body Language
STEVEN BARTLETT: On this point of body language, as someone that sits here and I guess interviews people for, like, you know, four or five hours at a time sometimes, over the last five years, I have come to learn certain body language patterns in my guests.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay.
STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the most obvious ones is when I ask the guest a question that is causing them some potential discomfort in some way. And when I say discomfort, I should probably define that as maybe it’s a difficult question for whatever reason.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Sure.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What I tend to see is I tend to see them cross their arms.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s like a really consistent pattern. It’s almost like a, it’s almost as if they’re telling me that this is a little bit difficult and it holds to be true.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Do you ask them? “I noticed when you crossed your arms, you know, when I asked you that question, is it something with this question that bothered you?” Or do you just let it go?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I let it go, but they’ve already told me. Okay. So I’ve already, I don’t need to ask them because I know. I now know that there’s something there where there’s emotion.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Sure.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s kind of the way that I see it.
DESMOND O’NEILL: It’s what it is. More than likely, it’s what it is. And I think there’s power to that because your perception, right. So you bring this back, like your pattern recognition of all the guests you’ve done and the association or the connection of that in terms of the question that you ask. And they cross their arms, like, that’s where that comes from. That’s where that, all of a sudden, that thing where you’re just like, “I feel it, but I don’t really,” it’s just like, you don’t know that to be the case because it could be a number of different things.
But because of the pattern recognition you’re seeing all the time, that gives you the chance of saying, “There’s some emotion here, so either engage it or tread lightly, depending on which way you want to go.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: Both. Yeah. And that’s what happens. So instead of saying, like, you know, “Why did you cross your arms?” I will ask them potentially how that memory makes them feel, that they feel about that. And that tends to be, it’s just, it’s so, you know, because people always talk, you know, they say, “Does body language matter? Does it count for anything? Can you interpret someone’s body language to understand if they’re telling you the truth? Is any of this stuff true in your view?”
DESMOND O’NEILL: No. You should look at body language because it is a language in terms of what somebody is showing you. You look at body language, and if you see something that is a change, just like the crossing your arms, then you need to be curious about it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s really about a change in state.
DESMOND O’NEILL: It’s a change of what somebody’s doing and the timing of that. So you just said, like, when I ask something that is personal or emotional, they’ll talk about it. They’ll cross their arms. Because maybe it’s just now, like this psychological thing where “I want to guard myself a little bit, maybe I want to kind of close up a little bit,” who knows?
But if it’s something where you’re just like, “I noticed it,” and you don’t need to use it, like, you could ask them if you wanted to, but you’re just like, “Oh, they already told me, so I don’t need it.” But for anybody else, if you see that and you’re talking and somebody crosses their arms, don’t just assume that’s what it is. Because if you assume and you’re wrong, you’re going down the wrong track.
The N: Next Steps
STEVEN BARTLETT: And so throughout this framework for having hard conversations, we’ve covered the P, which is stick to purpose, the L, the list, which is listen, the A, which is to ask, ask. Is there anything else in the framework?
DESMOND O’NEILL: The N, which is the next steps. So to have a plan means to understand all of these different things and the way that you approach that. And the next steps is, how do you want to resolve this? Like, what’s the end goal with this? Is there anything that I can do that we can, you know, further our relationship where both you and I can be in alignment?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you ask them or do you propose?
DESMOND O’NEILL: I would always ask them if I’m engaged. Right. So perhaps let’s go back to the conversation that you may have with, you know, this individual. You’re just like, “This person’s a narcissist,” and so forth. If you’re engaging them and you’re the one who wants to really have this conversation, and you’re hoping that you can find some type of resolution, you have to ask if there’s resolution with that.
So something to the effect of, “Do you think that you and I can find an amicable way forward? Or when I, when you and I engage, you know, we can really enjoy each other’s time and this thing not go bad. Like, do you see that in our future at all? Yes or no.” And then it’s either yes. “Okay, what does that look like for us? Like, how do we have that? Because I’m having this conversation with you because my relationship with you matters. But there are things that happen within that are, that are frustrating and that cause me not to really want to engage. I do want to find a way to do that because that is most important to me. How best do we do that?”
There’s No Magic Bullet
There is no magic bullet by which makes everything, every conversation go perfect. There’s none. You are part of that conversation. The other person is part of the conversation. You have your perspective. They have their perspective. You have what you think is right or think is fair. Fairness is subjective because what you think is fair just means what you think is fair.
And so the hardest part is to walk away and feeling like there should have done more you can do. The power becomes knowing how to address that. And if it doesn’t go right, then you walk away and be like, “You know what? It just didn’t go right. And I’m okay with that.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: What if they start insulting you in the conversation?
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay, what’s your purpose of being in the conversation?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m trying to get them to stop being so rude to me when we’re on the same bank of telephones at the call center.
DESMOND O’NEILL: So it is a matter of if she’s being rude to you, it’s addressing that at the moment. Right. You know, “I noticed that we’re having this conversation that you’re being really aggressive, really rude, and really condescending.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you call it out.
Handling Difficult Conversations with Specificity
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah. Be very specific in terms of what it is. Like, you know, if she calls you and she uses, you know, she calls you a name or whatever the case may be, like, you know what? You’re being rude. And she’s just like, what did I do? And you’re like, you’re just being rude. That’s unhelpful.
Like, give her the context by which you feel that she’s being rude. Because maybe she does something outside of a name where you’re like, you’re being rude. And maybe to her, that’s not rudeness. Maybe it’s her directness. Right?
But if she’s like, you know what? You’re Steven, you’re just an ahole, or whatever the case may be. And I would say, hey, it seems like as of right now, like, you know, you’re very condescending. You’ve called me a name to include an ahole. Can you explain to me specifically right now why that is? And make her back it up.
Make her explain to you what it is that. Is there something about. Is there something about me you don’t like? Is it something about my work ethic that you don’t like? Or maybe the way that I’m doing this, you’ve been here longer than me, so is perhaps there’s something else that I’m doing or not doing that you think is wrong?
Because I am not understanding your anger and your venom and your need to insult me. And I would really try to understand what that is. So you’re having a very direct conversation with her, very specific to what she’s saying.
It does not mean that that’s going to fix it. She could just be an ahole. And it’s one of those things where you have to be like, I am going to address this. I’m not going to return in kind. I don’t have to turn into that person as well. I can walk away from that conversation and be like, you know what? I handled that the best I could. It doesn’t mean it’s going to fix it.
Keeping Your Emotions in Check
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there any tactics that interrogators are taught or that you teach interrogators for keeping your emotions in check? Because, you know, we go into those conversations, someone calls you an ahole, your cortisol starts spiking, you get into your amygdala, you get stressed, you get emotional, you end up calling them an ahole back. But is there. I don’t know, is there breath work? What did interrogators get taught in the heat of the moment?
DESMOND O’NEILL: At that time, you have no time to do breath work. This is real time stuff in terms of what you’re trying to do. If you go in and you understand your purpose. And again, I don’t mean to go back to the plan, but what happens is you become. You can be pulled out very quickly.
And all of a sudden, if you are trying to get information from somebody. And one of their strategies, because they maybe don’t want to give you information, one of their strategies is to insult you. And now you’re insulting them back. One, you’re not going to get anything. Two, you fell into their strategy.
So what you have to do is you have to address that I am something to the effect of. I see that when I asked you that. Or all of a sudden, like, it seems like there’s a change in our relationship to where now you’re being really aggressive. Why is that?
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re continually calling it out.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yes, because I am asking you to back up your emotions. Because if it’s BS, if you’re just doing that because you’re trying to hide the ball someplace else, I’m going to call you out on it. It’s also showing me that I am not afraid to confront this type of behavior.
And I’m seeing it and I am really trying to engage with you in a very amicable, genuine way. And if you are going to treat me a certain way, I am going to understand what that is. You’re also showing that you’re not doing it in kind.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is part of this showing that you’re strong?
Competence Over Strength
DESMOND O’NEILL: It’s less about being strong and more about being competent and confident in what you’re doing. Because if you allow in anybody, not just an interrogation room, in any conversation, if you lose your cool, you lose control. You have to be mindful of that.
I was overseeing an internal affairs interview and I was going to go in and talk to this person. At the end, I was thinking about doing a polygraph with them. But before that was going to happen, the case agent, the person who had the investigation was talking to the subject. It was a road rage incident where this agent had been accused of road rage and pulling his gun out on a civilian. So this was the conversation that they were having.
And I’m listening to this in an interview room, right? In terms of like a two way, two way mirror. And the subject is very aggressive. He’s very angry. And he’s very angry to the point of like, he’s like, I don’t know why you don’t believe me with this. I keep telling you these things and you keep asking me the same questions. I think this is a bunch of BS.
The investigator comes back and he’s just like, because I think you’re a liar and you’re not telling me the truth in terms of what it is. And you’re causing us to be in this room a lot longer. And this is a problem. So now they’re both yelling at each other, like, yelling at each other.
And it was one of these things where I’m watching this unfold. And it wasn’t the subject’s job to maintain his composure. It was the investigators. Because his goal is not to belittle this other agent. His goal was to find out did this or did this not happen? And he lost sight of that.
And he came out of the room to me, and he’s like, what do you think? And I’m like, well, I’m not going to polygraph him. I mean, this guy’s so emotional right now, like, that’s not going to happen. And he goes, you know what? This guy’s just an ahole anyway. And I’m like, I don’t think he’s the ahole in the room.
The other guy was the ahole in the room because he allowed himself to get pulled out of what he should have been doing. Because now he wanted to have the game of who’s the bigger. Who’s the bigger jerk in the room. You can do it. And again, if you want to burn that bridge, burn it. But if you want to maintain a relationship or you want to maintain your profession or you are trying to get to some resolution, you cannot lose your cool.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess that’s what it comes down to, is most of the time, we’re not clear on the goal going into the conversation. So we have nothing to be anchored to. So just. It’s getting into the washing machine.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Absolutely.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What it is, we just spin around and around and around.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Absolutely.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Walk away with a nice relationship.
DESMOND O’NEILL: And the power really comes from if this person is insulting you and they’re angry and they’re doing these things and you’re sitting there and you’re asking good questions, you’re keeping your composure. There is a lot of power with that.
And I mean power in a way that shows, like, I’m in control of myself. I am well aware of what’s going on as this relationship and this conversation is happening. I am not going to fall into this because this matters to me. In terms of this other thing.
The Me Me Me Syndrome
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve heard you say that you think people suffer from me me, me syndrome. What does that mean?
DESMOND O’NEILL: So the me me, me syndrome is everything is about me, right? I mean, it seems obvious with that, but, like, you can even look at things from, like, a cultural perspective. You can look at, like, here, you know, in the US. In Western civilizations, like, we are primarily like a dignity culture where we are. It’s all about us, right? It’s all about that internal. That internal feeling that we have.
And so everything is predicated on our job, our success, the things that we do. The external world doesn’t really matter in terms of our success or failure. So a lot of it is what is in your headspace and how do you manage that?
Because the problem that I see and what I think comes within communication is we do a lot of self reflection. We rarely do a lot of outward reflection on the other person. Some of the best negotiators there will spend more than half of their time thinking about somebody else.
So a very personal story. When I was 21, my father passed away. And he had been battling cancer for three years. And so when he passed away, I have four siblings and my mom was there. So when he passed away, he passed away at home, and all five of us were there several years later.
I’m having this conversation on the day that my dad died. About the day that my dad died. I’m having this with my sister and my three younger brothers, and we’re talking about where we were and so forth. And my sister says, yeah, I can’t watch the Simpsons without thinking of dad.
And I said, what do you mean? She’s like, well, the TV was there and the Simpsons were on. And she’s like, I always just remember that. And I was like, there’s a TV in the room. She’s like, you don’t remember a TV being in the room? And I’m like, I have absolutely not. I have no idea that there was a TV in the room. I didn’t code it. That wasn’t the thing that was important.
Her perspective and the way that she saw that moment affected her differently than everybody else in that room. And so to go back to the me, me, me. When you fail to take in consideration that other people have other experiences based on how they pick up the world, how they do things in the world, and you think that it’s just about you. You are going to have a really hard time having a deep, honest, connective relationship with somebody.
If it’s just about you, you can do it. And a lot of people do it. You know, they’re looking for that, that way to, you know, make people drawn to them and make people connect to them, and that’s fine. But if you are trying to, I guess, Steven, if you just want to be like a genuine person and you want to have a relationship, don’t make it about you.
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Building Bridges Through Vulnerability
STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking this earlier. I was thinking one of the things in the po. This podcast that I’ve learned is if I want to increase the probability that someone opens up and tells me something, one of the things I do is I share myself.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So, you know, I might be asking someone about their childhood, and it’s quite clear to me now that one of the ways, especially if they end up crossing their arms and get uncomfortable.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is just to pause for a second and share my own childhood.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I’ve identified that one of your values is, I don’t know, you want to be a good family man, might you mention that you’re a family man yourself as a way to build the bridge.
Leadership Under Pressure
DESMOND O’NEILL: So if it’s honest. So that’s a great question. But this becomes a thing where you have to look at things. If you were trying to influence or manipulate somebody, if it’s honest and it fits within that conversation at that moment, because this is what I, based on our conversation, I think this person needs to hear, then sure. If it’s real, if it’s not, if I’m lying to him, because I’m trying to say, well, I’m a family man, you’re a family man, like, we’re good now you’re manipulating the person, and that’s a whole different conversation.
So to go back to what you said, if I understand this guy’s values, and I understand that there is a sense of, let’s say, a sense of honesty. Maybe there’s a part of this person that’s also honest or there’s also a sense of he wants to be. I don’t know, he wants his kids to see him as a man of integrity. Right. Let’s just say that.
So maybe that starts to become a conversation that we have as it relates to, you know, I can only imagine the difficulty that this has with you. As you’ve told me, you’re a family man. I’m not going to say you’re a family man. I’m going to say, as you told me, you’re a family man. And one of the things that you said about being a family man was how important is your kids to kind of like, lead by your model, like your role model aspects of that, by honesty and openness and those type of things.
So do you hear where I’m going? So I’m trending in the direction by which that I am trying to bring online. Still his father, but a different value under what it means to be a father, because I don’t want to talk about being present, because that’s probably going to go away. But if he is trying to teach his kids to own your mistakes, then maybe that’s the direction I go. But how am I going to get that? I’m going to get that because I’m going to start off my conversation with him in a very honest, genuine way that I’m going to try to understand who is this person across from me?
The Difference Between Manipulation and Influence
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s the difference between manipulation and influence?
DESMOND O’NEILL: Influence is about nudging a person in a certain direction at a certain time. That’s beneficial for both you and them. That’s influence. Got it. Manipulation is you nudging a person in a specific direction because it’s good for you, it’s not good for them. And so you’ll lie, you’ll do whatever you need to do to close a deal to get them to do something, to get them to give you something. That’s manipulation. Because it’s often one of those things that it has negative consequences to it in terms of the person who did it. You know, maybe they never know, but you manipulated them, which is interrogations.
STEVEN BARTLETT: No, because this guy’s going to go, he’s going to get life in jail if he admits that he killed this child. So I’m, that’s not in his interests, but it’s in mine. So I’m going to manipulate him to give me the secrets.
DESMOND O’NEILL: If that’s what you want to do and that’s the direction you think you need to do, then by all means you can do it. And here in the US it is legal that you can lie to subjects. But…
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re saying lying is the moment where it overcomes manipulation.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yes. That becomes the shortcut, and that becomes a way not just within the interrogation room. Like, I think what becomes important, and I’ve seen this come up a lot, people are all about, like, influence. Like, you hear that come up quite a bit. If you want to influence somebody, this is how you do it. You’re honest with them, you’re clear, and you’re transparent.
Because influence is about how do I feel about you, not about all the things that you’re doing in that moment. Because if trust isn’t even on the table, if I don’t trust you to begin with, or I think that to go back to what you had said, there’s this pattern of recognition where I’m like, I just think there’s something wrong with this. You’re not going to be able to influence me if I am honest with you in everything that I do, because that’s how I carry myself.
Not only does it lower your cognitive load because you’re not lying to somebody else, but it underscores who you stand for and who you are as a person. And with that, people are going to see that and say, you know what? Steven’s very transparent. He said this was a good deal. And I believe that for these reasons, it’s a matter of you being honest with that.
I always question now because I see it a lot, and it came up in the questions that I was talking to your team about. It’s like, why does everybody want to influence somebody? Like, why? Why do they? What is that? Do you know? Like, why does it come up all the time? Because what are people trying to accomplish?
STEVEN BARTLETT: They want to accomplish something. They have a goal for who? For themselves.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Right. So is that influence?
STEVEN BARTLETT: But it gets the job done for some.
DESMOND O’NEILL: For some people, sure it does.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m thinking about that. Is it Carnegie? What’s that book, but it’s probably behind me somewhere, called Influence, and it talks about the five pillars of influence, things like scarcity.
The Power of Honesty Over Influence
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah. So it’s Robert Cialdini. We teach that. Right. It’s one of those where you can understand why influence works. The different strategies of influence, like, what they all stand for and when they fit within the conversation, you can do it. I do it. But I can tell you, Steven, being a communication specialist, I don’t spend my day walking around trying to influence people.
I will be honest with people. I will be transparent. I will answer their questions with the best information that I have. And if people are inspired by that and that causes somebody to be influenced by the things that I said, that’s what I want. Right?
And I brought this up earlier, but the training academy that I instruct with, it is all about openness. It’s all about honesty. It’s all about trying to help people based on why they’ve come to us. And it’s not about manipulating people to come in and be a member. It’s about why are you here and how can we help you. And this is the best way we can do that. And that influences people, and that inspires people to listen to what you have to say.
Why is your podcast this successful? The first time you and I met, you said something that I disagreed with, and it was, you were talking about Flight Story, and you’re talking about the different things you, you know with Flight Story and the success of the podcast. And you said, it’s not because I’m a good interviewer. It’s because they’re really good at marketing.
You’re a good interviewer because of the vulnerabilities that you do. Every time I’ve been surprised on how vulnerable and open you are in terms of sharing with yourself. Like, there’s that story arc in terms of how that connection is. Because of that, you influence me. Not because you were trying to, not because your team reached out, but because of the way you carried yourself in your podcast and the questions that you ask and the vulnerability that you’re showing. There is a level of trust that comes with that.
And so you in, you weren’t trying to influence. You were being you. And there’s a part of your self congruence, who you are, your ideal self, which is just like, this is just what I do, and my life’s not perfect and I’ll share the parts that are messy. And I’m trying to use this as a platform to help millions of people. That’s a big deal.
Building Trust Through Vulnerability
STEVEN BARTLETT: And is this how you build trust with people? Or is trust a different or adjacent point?
DESMOND O’NEILL: So trust is about being vulnerable. Trust is about being open and sharing a little bit about yourself. So truly, Steven, the question becomes, is what I’ve shared with you in good hands? Because if it’s not, that’s a problem. Right? Let me ask you a question. Do you have a secret that maybe you’ve never told anybody or you’ve told just one or two people?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
DESMOND O’NEILL: You do. You got one of mine?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
DESMOND O’NEILL: What is it?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I can’t. There’s millions of people listening.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay, but if these millions of people weren’t watching, would you tell me?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay, so the reason that you’re not telling me or in front of these millions of people is why. Why are you not, why are you not telling us your secret?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because of consequence.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Someone’s going to clip it. Someone’s going to put it on the Internet. Someone took me out.
DESMOND O’NEILL: There’s a reason for it, right? There’s a reason that you’re not trusting in terms of what it was. Maybe you trust me just because of the relationship that we built at this point, but there’s probably other things that you wouldn’t trust me with. When you talk about trust, if you look at concentric rings, you know, in terms of the trust around you, the center ring should be self trust. It should be you. You should be able to trust yourself more than you trust anybody else. If you don’t, you probably need to do a little bit of work, right?
STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean in reality of me trusting myself?
The Concentric Rings of Trust
DESMOND O’NEILL: Do you trust that you will do the things that you want to do or you ought to do? Do you keep yourself in that direction? Do you keep yourself accountable? Right? That becomes this thing. Where can you make decisions? Are you a person? Like, I don’t make any decisions. I let somebody else make decisions, or I run everything by everybody else because I don’t trust myself to make the right decision. Then you have to work on your decision making because you have to find a way to build your trust up outside of that initial ring.
It should be a ring of a handful of people that have unconditional trust, right? And these are the people that, no matter what, like, you’ve given them that trust, you believe in them, and it should be a small circle. And this is where I think people go wrong. They’re like, ah, you know, I share everything with people. Then they, then they’re crushed when one of those people that they’ve given unconditional trust with break it. That’s a problem.
I have probably, you know, my siblings are all really close to me, so I have them. There’s four of them. Outside of that, I have my, you know, I have my wife and a select few friends, you know, that I know that if I call, they’re like, we’re good. Outside of that, you should, everybody else should be conditional trust. People should earn your trust, right? They should be honored to have it. Like, don’t give it away for free. And if you have somebody’s trust, you should respect that if they’ve given that to you.
But I think, and I’ve seen it, people give away trust way too much because the person will be amazing in this one spot and all of a sudden they get the halo effect and they’re like, well, they’re great here. They must be great here. It’s this arc of they’re awesome everywhere. And so I’m going to trust them with these other things. Then when again they break it, they violate it. The way you feel is just this violation of, you know, somebody took what you gave them and just destroyed it. It’s hard to come back from that. It’s hard to, once you re, once you lose trust, like, if you lose somebody’s trust, it’s really, really hard to get back.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything you can do to get back?
DESMOND O’NEILL: Do you think what I know that you can do and doesn’t always work. You have to be accountable for why you lost it. Whatever that is. Very specific. It’s going to take time and a lot of consistency to, consistency, meaning that you show them consistently time and time again that you are a person that can be trusted.
Leadership Principles: Calm Under Chaos
STEVEN BARTLETT: On leadership principles, something I’ve heard you talk about as well, what do you think of the most important principles as it relates to leadership? Because we’ve talked about trust there and other things around communication and all these things. Is there anything we haven’t covered as it relates to being a great leader in your perspective?
DESMOND O’NEILL: Somebody who’s calm under chaos. That would be my definition of a leader, however, and I say that because leadership is a feeling. Steven, how do you make these people feel? As it relates to my qualities as a leader, do I do the things that register with you as leadership? Because I can tell you, when I was on a SWAT team, which is the special weapons and tactics, this is where I learned the true essence of leadership. Because I had some amazing commanders and team leaders on that team were under high stress. Under a stress like that, if you have people around you that are keeping their composure, that’s leadership.
STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the elements there, I guess, when you’re in the SWAT as well, is dealing with huge amounts of uncertainty. When pressure’s on.
The Power of Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
DESMOND O’NEILL: Sure.
STEVEN BARTLETT: When your life’s at risk. I was reading about a study which I think you mentioned some time ago, where they look at three groups of people doing the same exam, and we’re sort of trying to ascertain how people make decisions with different degrees of certainty and information.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah. What the study showed was there were a group of students that were taking a test in college, and they were told that they had either passed or failed or they had no idea whether they passed or failed. But prior to that, they were asked if they would take a vacation.
And the people who passed and the people who failed, there was a higher percentage of them who chose to take a vacation after getting news that they had either passed college or failed college. The group that didn’t know, there was a third group that was just like, “I’m unsure,” weren’t able to really make a decision. And so what the…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Just to be clear, then on that third group, they didn’t have their exam results back, so they didn’t take the action to book the case.
DESMOND O’NEILL: They were told that there was some malfunction, inability to score their test, and they would get their results at a later time. And so then they were asked if they would also buy a vacation.
And a far fewer percentage, I don’t remember what it was, but a much less percentage of them would take it than the people who both passed, because I think there was like half the people who passed or were told they passed took the, bought the vacation package. It was like a vacation trip to Hawaii.
Around the same percentage, I believe, who failed the examination bought the vacation trip. But the people who couldn’t decide, they didn’t have the cognitive bandwidth to really make a decision. So the ambiguity of not knowing really lessens our cognitive ability to go in a certain direction. And so when we don’t know where to go, we often don’t go anywhere.
Leadership in Times of Uncertainty
STEVEN BARTLETT: That is a hallmark of great leaders, that they’re able to decide even when there’s very low certainty.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Sure. I would think that would come with… I think if you’re only a leader when it’s calm, then you’re not really a leader. You’re somebody with a higher salary and a title. Leadership really shows up in those type of circumstances when things are uncertain.
And so having the ability to manage things when not all the information is there and doing the best you can with it because, oftentimes the best decision to make is the right one, and the worst one is to not make a decision at all. And so if you have those type of leaders who just can’t think through that problem, then that’s not a leader.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I remember when I spoke in Sao Paulo many years ago, Barack Obama was on stage and he said that as president, like when he went and got bin Laden in that compound in Pakistan, that they didn’t know if Bin Laden was there, they’d never visually properly ID’d him.
So he had to make that decision to risk American lives with, as he said, 51% certainty or very low certainty. And he says that’s the thing about being the President of the United States. You make huge calls with very little certainty.
And I’ve always thought about that in terms of my day to day life. And it all has made me conclude that the most successful people that I’ve met do have that ability to be low certainty and make big calls with the peace of mind that they’ve made that call with the best available information.
And then the sort of inverse of that is some people listening right now with even small decisions are trying to get to 100% certainty, when obviously 100% certainty only exists in hindsight.
DESMOND O’NEILL: And that’s a really good point. I think that’s… a lot of people struggle with that when it comes to just to own your decision, own it. Like whatever you choose to do, if you make it not under high emotion and you do the best you can with the information that you have at that time, make a decision.
As they say, if you make the wrong decision, then it’s experience. If you make the right decision, then it’s confirmation.
Confronting Your Relationship with Uncertainty
STEVEN BARTLETT: I think about this a lot. I think about how maybe everyone listening could have a conversation with themselves about their own relationship with uncertainty.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Like how good are you dealing with situations where you don’t have much information? Are you the type of person that’s able to make a decision and not sit in paralysis?
And many people that come up to me in the street and say they want a new life or a new this or a new that are choosing like the certain misery of their current life versus the uncertainty they see as they look out into the void of like quitting the job and going and playing violin in Peru or something.
A Police Officer’s Dilemma: Owning Your Decisions
DESMOND O’NEILL: And you know, you bring up something that… so in one of our recent classes that we taught this month, we talked about owning decisions, right. And I shared the story with the community and it had a pretty profound effect.
And so I was as a police officer, I was on patrol. It was late at night. I’m driving down just this two lane road kind of in the middle of nowhere and I pull over to the side and I’m just kind of watching from an angle, just people driving up and down this road.
This car flies by, goes through a stop sign, doesn’t stop. It’s a very nice luxury sedan. So I turn on my lights, pull him over, and I said, “How you doing?” And he’s like, “I’m all right.” I could tell this guy’s just like, he’s flat drunk.
And I shine my light into his passenger and he’s just like, he’s passed out. Like he has, he’s not even coherent that I’m probably standing there. So I get his driver’s license and I’m like, “Look, man, you’re pretty bad off.” And he’s like, “Are you going to call my dad?”
And I said, “Why would I do that?” He goes, “Man,” he goes, “This is his car. He’s like, he’s going to be upset.” I said, “All right.”
So I go back to my patrol car and I look at this kid in terms of he’s had no priors, he’s 16, he has no prior driving record. So I’m making… so what’s my decision now? I can call for a DWI unit to come and give this guy a field sobriety test and he’s going to fail just because I could tell how drunk he was or I could call his dad.
Now I have to make a decision because I have that type of discretion. So I have to think, do I take this kid, do I have this kid go to jail and tow his dad’s car, or do I call his dad and hope that’s the right decision because his dad will find a way to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
So I had our dispatch give me his phone, his parents’ phone number. And I called his dad. It’s 11 o’clock at night. And his mom answers. And I’m like, “Mrs. Smith, this is Deputy O’Neill. I’m out here with your son Jacob.” “Oh my God. How is he?” I’m like, “He’s fine.”
And I’m like, “I think he’s been drinking too much and I want to know if you want to come get him.” She’s like, “Can you talk to my husband?” I said, “Sure.” He gets on the phone, same thing. And he’s like, “Thank you. I will make sure this doesn’t happen again. I will be there in five minutes.”
I have no idea what happens at the end of this, but I made that decision at that time. The reason I’m sharing this is because when I told that story in our community, I asked everybody on the platform because it’s very engaging. And I said, and Evie asked this question actually, and she said, “How many of you would do the same thing Desmond did?”
STEVEN BARTLETT: Probably should give context there, that Evie is your wife.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Evie’s my wife.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Evie Pompous, Yes.
DESMOND O’NEILL: A lot of people put in the comments like, “I would do the same thing. Good for him. The kids shouldn’t go to jail.” And Evie was just like, “I would do the exact opposite thing. I would have taken him to jail. I would have towed the car because I don’t know if the consequences of what his dad would do is going to outweigh the fact that he’s going to go to jail.”
And she’s like, “What if I let him go and he does the same thing next week? Because he’s not, he doesn’t care what his father thinks.” And she’s like, “That to me was a decision that I would have made.”
So I bring that up for this purpose. We both made a completely different decision. I made it for the reasons I did, she made it for the reasons that she did. Metaphorically, mine was true. This is just what she said she would have done. The point was, is that we both owned it.
And a lot of times I think what happens going back to what you just said is people are so afraid to make a decision for a number of different reasons, and so they just choose not to. Now, again, people could look at this, your audience could look at this and be like, “He should have taken him to jail.” I understand all of that. I had the discretion and that’s the decision I made. And I would make that decision every time.
But it’s less about that story and more about when you decide on something with the information you have at the moment, do you own it or do you, as you said, do you look back later and have hindsight bias and be like, “Oh, I should have known.” You can’t do that. So many people try to live their life in reverse like that. And looking back, it’s impossible. It’s impossible to know.
So I do think and kind of to expand on what you said, I do think when it talks about owning your decisions and being thoughtful as it relates to why you’re doing or what you’re doing and taking command of yourself and being a self leader, decisions is making, that is what it is. To go back to the uncertainty aspects.
Surprising Research on Communication
STEVEN BARTLETT: Of that research you’ve done on communication, is there anything we haven’t talked about today that really surprised you in the research? That really caused a paradigm shift in what you thought communication was and now what you think it is.
Building Rapport Through Understanding
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah. The research showed that your ability to build rapport with a person is what gives you the most power in terms of that connection and different people. You know, how do you build rapport?
Most people think that this is one of those things where you’re just overly kind, you’re very complimentary. You’re talking about the weather. Now we’ve built rapport, and then we’re good. It’s not how you build rapport.
We build rapport by understanding values in terms of a person. Rapport is understanding, you know, a person’s presence and what they’re needing from you. If I’m paying attention to you and I’m engaged with you and I’m making you feel seen and heard and understood, and by proxy, by the reciprocity of doing that, you do the same thing for me. That’s rapport.
When it comes into building rapport with somebody, read the room. If I came in and I have a list of questions and I see you, that there’s some emotional state that you’re showing. If I want to connect with you, I ask about that. I need to put my stuff aside before I can have the conversation I want to have. I probably have to have the conversation you want to have.
And at that moment, it may be understanding what is going on in your headspace. I can say, “Hey, Steven, you know, I’m Desmond O’Neill. You know, I know you were brought in this morning for these reasons. It’s obvious to me right now that you seem really upset. Can you tell me what’s going on right now?”
And you could say, “You know, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m super scared. I’ve never been in jail before. My mom’s sick at home. I don’t know if there’s anybody to take it to her now.”
How much information now do I have, by the way, that I can connect with you? Because if you tell me, “I am freaked out. I don’t know what’s going on,” what do I now do? Do I go back to be like, “Well, that sucks,” and go back to my list of questions, or do I say, “How best can I help you with that?”
STEVEN BARTLETT: And this builds rapport?
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yes, because what I’m doing is I’m showing empathy. I’m listening to you. I’m giving you what you want. I’m lessening your ambiguity. I’m orienting you in terms of the direction that you’re asking me to take you. You’re asking me for clarity in terms of what’s going to happen. I’m going to answer that.
I’m showing them that I am paying attention to them. I’m being authentic. I’m going to follow up with the things that I do because I’m going to come back later and be like, “Hey, we checked on your mom, she was good. We pulled your aunt in. Your aunt came and took care of her. If anything else comes up, let me know. I do have some questions that I need to get to. This is an important part of the investigation but I can only imagine that there’s a lot on your mind and if things come up through our conversation, please, please ask me.” And that’s rapport in those situations.
The Power of Reciprocity
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m hearing many of the things that I read in that book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini. I’m hearing reciprocity. You’ve done them a favor. So now they’re more likely to answer your questions.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Reciprocity is giving somebody something with the expectation that somewhere in the future they will give you something else. It’s not a transactional thing. It’s not like the only reason I’m doing this is because I want something from you in exchange. That’s transaction.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So when you checked on that person’s mum, that was reciprocity.
DESMOND O’NEILL: That was me following up with the commitment of saying that this is what I’m going to do for you. You can do with it what you want.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But you know that doing that is going to increase the probability that they answer your questions.
DESMOND O’NEILL: No, I do that regardless. He could have said, “You know what, I appreciate you, thank you for checking on my mom. I want a lawyer. I don’t want to talk to you.” You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to check on his mom. You know why? Because that’s what I said I was going to do. You know why? Because that’s my self congruence, that’s what I do as a person when I give somebody my word, I’m going to follow up with it.
So in a situation like that I will do those things because that’s what he’s, that’s what I’ve told him I’m going to do.
Three Things to Stop Doing in Communication
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything else on the point of having difficult conversations that we haven’t covered in your mind? Because I know there’s loads of people that want to get better at having those tricky conversations. And also just dealing with a theme we see a lot is like, people very keen to deal with difficult people. Is there anything there that we haven’t touched on? We’ve got the PLAN framework, but just want to check there’s nothing we’ve missed.
DESMOND O’NEILL: No, I just think it was the PLAN framework. And it’s not about making things complicated. It’s actually about, you know, there’s things that you should take out. You know, when it comes to communication, as opposed to always adding things in, you know, it really becomes like extinction before acquisition.
So I can tell you, when it comes to better communication, there are three things that you should stop doing right now. One of them is to stop trying to be right. One of them is to stop telling people you understand. And the third one is stop giving people your unsolicited opinion.
Now to break those down, stop trying to be right. We talked about that one a little bit.
The second one is stop telling people you understand. This is what I mean by that. You can understand. You can understand a person’s words. You will never understand their headspace in terms of the specificity of that. And so what you will see is if you’re sharing a story, like if you shared a personal story with me, let’s say your father had passed away. And I’m like, “You know what, Steven? I completely understand. My dad passed away too, when I was young. So now we’re connected.”
I have just taken away a moment for you because I made it about me, because I thought that I understood something that you had experienced. In fact, your experience of a death or your experience of your father at the moment is going to be completely different than mine. But for me to tell you that I understand is short sighted.
STEVEN BARTLETT: My girlfriend tells me sometimes that she wants me to say that I understand. And I think what she’s saying is that maybe she wants to feel understood. And so she might be explaining how she feels. And then if I said, you know, “I do understand,” but do you? Sometimes I get to the point where I do understand what she’s saying.
DESMOND O’NEILL: You understand what she’s saying, but do you understand how she truly feels?
STEVEN BARTLETT: No.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Okay, but that becomes…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I don’t feel that you don’t feel it, but she just wants me to acknowledge it.
DESMOND O’NEILL: She wants you to acknowledge it. So the difference is in terms of it was being genuine, where you’re like, “Look, I really understand how you feel.” You probably don’t.
STEVEN BARTLETT: How do I make her feel understood in that regard? Then without telling her I understand.
DESMOND O’NEILL: To feel understood is to listen to her, to be like, “Look, you know, sounds tough, sounds, you know, like, this is something really on your mind.” And it kind of goes into our other thing where, like, stop giving people your opinion.
You know, if she’s expressing things to you and she’s sharing how she wants to feel, she’s probably not looking for you to tell her what to do unless she’s asked you for that. The first thing that we always do, and it happens all the time, is like, “Let me tell you what I think.” Try to fix it without having all of the emotions and the complexities of why it’s not being done.
And so to go back to with your girlfriend, it really is just a matter of trying to understand, seeing where she’s going with it, asking her, you know, if there are ways that, you know, we can work to make it better or help you with this. But if Steven, if she’s just like, “I want you to understand,” I would just tell her, “I understand.” Just because that’s what she’s looking for. You’re not going to have it in there.
But if you generally went to somebody and you’re like, “Oh, I understand,” that’s what I’m asking you not to do. That’s what you shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t generally think that you truly understand another person, because then you’re convinced that you know and you’re no longer curious in terms of how they actually feel.
Sitting in the Mud With People
STEVEN BARTLETT: And on that last point about giving the opinion, a lot of time people, you know, when they’re sharing something, they just want you to create the space. Simon Sinek said to me, he goes, “Most of the time, people just want you to sit in the mud with them.” And, like, I naturally show up with, like, my toolbox to try and fix the situation. But a lot of the time, especially with my girlfriend, maybe she just wants me to listen.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Most people do, right? It becomes like this identity headspace where people just are looking for the sounding board for you, for your girlfriend. Like, you’re the guy, you’re the person. And that’s what she comes to you for. That’s your job in a lot of ways. And I don’t mean that in a negative thing, but it’s just one of those things where if that’s what she needs from you, then that’s what you give her.
And a lot of people just want as Simon Sinek said, where you said it, like, just sit in the mud with them, and that’s what they’ll ask you. If she turns to you and say, “Stephen, what would you do here?” Then she’s asking you. But if not, then don’t give it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Something I need to work on.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Yeah, we all do.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Because you, I don’t know, something about maybe the male brain, but it’s probably not just men.
Beyond Bulletproof Training Community
DESMOND O’NEILL: Can I talk real quick just about our training community before we go? Is that okay with you?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Because it is one of those where, like, now what I spend all my time with is I’m an instructor for Beyond Bulletproof, which is a training platform that Abby and I host. And it really comes down to three prongs of how do people, helping people think, helping people act, and helping people leave with purpose.
And I know we talked about those things, but the reason I bring that up is because there are so many people, Steven, that just as you had talked about, they’re looking for some help. They’re looking for some clarity. They’re looking for somebody to influence them in some way because they don’t have good emotional regulation, and they’re trying to get better in their relationships. We’ve been fortunate to have that. And that’s kind of where, you know, I don’t do a lot of social media. You know, I don’t do a lot of other things because I spend my time here.
The Closing Question
STEVEN BARTLETT: As you know, we have a closing tradition on the podcast, but the last guest leaves a question for the next. And the question that’s been left for you is, what decision do you most regret? And would things have turned out better if you had made it differently? That’s a spicy one.
DESMOND O’NEILL: So I, as much as this wants to be a spicy one, I can categorically tell you that there’s not a decision that I’ve made that I wish I would have made different. And I say that because it kind of goes back to I own my decisions in terms of the things that I have done, even when the story that I shared about when I was a police officer with the kid who was drinking, like, I own those decisions.
And in truth, like, all of those decisions have manifested itself for me to sit down here with you today and have this conversation. And so I can’t tell you that there’s something that I look back that I regret, because I think that there’s things we learn from. But I think, for the most part, I don’t use hindsight bias. I don’t look back to say I wish there was something else. I use those things to grow and to learn and be better. And had I made a different decision, maybe you and I wouldn’t be sitting here. So none.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But you still, I mean, if someone asked me that, I’d have loads of answers.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Like what?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Just like the ways that I handled situations in my life as an employer, you know, I shouldn’t have said that, shouldn’t have done that. I don’t want my girlfriend said that, you know, I should have just listened and I wish I had because I think our relationship would be better or, you know, some grudge I held or whatever. You know, like the messiness of being a but emotional human.
Reflecting on Regrets and Growth
DESMOND O’NEILL: So let me ask this and I think, you know, I do question at times that type of “I wish” and “I regret.” I think that also changes who you are as a person. If you’re like, “I would have gone back and done…” We can all do that in some, and I don’t mean that’s petty, but in all some petty way.
When I was writing my thesis, I would always come to my thesis advisor and she’d be like, “Nope, this isn’t good, this isn’t good, this isn’t good.” And so when I was done, there was like, I had like 30… She’s like, “Just put this in the parking lot. Like, maybe we’ll look at this, maybe we won’t.”
So when I was done with my thesis, I had 30 pages that were in the parking lot and I went to her and I feel like this is a lot of mistakes. And she goes, “You had to have this to have this.”
And so when I hear that, when it’s just like, “Oh, I wish I would have done these things different,” you would be a different person. Right. It’s all those perspectives, it’s all those little things that you code and become a different person. You would be a different person if you had done those things differently. I’m not saying better or worse, but I’m saying I don’t think that’s a reason to look back and regret things.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I probably would still have those mistakes in my future if I hadn’t made them in the past as well. So maybe the very fact that I can identify them means that my self-awareness grew based on them. I’m never going to treat someone like that again or I’m never going to say that thing again because I learned the lesson. So I’m a better person today because of that.
Yeah, Desmond, thank you.
DESMOND O’NEILL: Thank you.
Closing Remarks
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much for doing what you do. And this is, you said this is your first podcast, which is exciting.
DESMOND O’NEILL: It’s my first podcast.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much. Thank you.
If there’s anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we’re living in today. And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards. Because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again. We feel deeply connected to each other.
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