Today we have my friend (and source of my jiu jitsu pain), Jason Woodard. Jason is a veteran Marine Sergeant who served with the 1st Battalion 5th Marines from 1994 to 1998. He is a decorated 19-year law enforcement veteran who has served as a Field Training Officer, Firearms Instructor, Range Master, SWAT Operator, SWAT Sniper Section Leader, and Lead Defensive Tactics Instructor. The focus of Jason’s career has been as an investigator and instructor; while conducting major crimes/homicide investigations he worked multiple high profile and death penalty cases and developed a reputation for investigative tenacity and interrogative skill. Jason is also a lead instructor for the Interview & Interrogations Institute and is still an active-duty Law Enforcement Officer.
Show Notes
00:48 – Pre-Intro/Summary
1:43 – Introducing Jason Woodard and his background
4:08 – What Jason does with teaching interview interrogation
6:10 – Rapport building
11:12 – Using Jason’s techniques for coaching people
16:35 – How Jason has been helping gyms with recommendations
22:50 – Chickasaw Nation – Unconquered Life communication improvement
25:05 – Pressure tested methods
30:30 – Skill set of law enforcement officers for coaching
32:35 – Basics and foundation of building rapport
37:25 – Robb’s plan for having Jason on, and Q&A followup
40:40 – Where you can find Jason
Building Rapport – A Cheat Sheet (PDF Download)
Email: [email protected]
The Interviews and Interrogation Institute Website
Transcript:
Download a copy of this transcript here (PDF)
Paleo Solution – 418
[0:00:48]
Robb: Hey, folks, welcome back to another show. Today is quite different from what we usually talk about. A good friend of mine, Jason Woodard, he and I have been doing jiu-jitsu together for years, but he is pretty famous within the interview and interrogation scene within police and military circles. It’s an interesting story. You may not initially think that there’s a benefit to listening to this, but it didn’t take me long to connect the dots between the skill set that Jason has and potentially benefiting health coaches, allied healthcare providers, trainers.
He’s really an amazing guy, pretty cool story. He is on the advisory committee, along with myself, for the Chickasaw Nation, and we’re doing some other consulting work together. Again, I think you’ll like this. It’s definitely a diversion from the standard protein, carbs, fat, so check this out, my good friend, Jason Woodard.
Hey, folks, Robb Wolf here, welcome back to the show. If my voice sounds a little bit strained, if it sounds like I’ve got some pressure on me, it’s because my good friend, Jason Woodard, who is on the show today, mashes me anywhere from three to five times a week at Brazilian jiu-jitsu and causes a diamond to roll out of my pants’ leg after doing so. Jason, how are you doing, man?
Jason: Good morning, man, how are you?
Robb: Good, good, another day above ground, which I call a win for me. It’s a loss for Nicki because I’m probably worth more, dead than alive.
Jason: Well, I’m sure my wife would echo that sentiment about me, for sure, but that’s what happens when you marry out of your class.
Robb: That’s true, that’s true but they had slim pickings in this area. They did the best they could, but there just wasn’t a real good talent pool around here which was lucky for us.
Jason: Yeah.
Robb: Yeah. Hey, man, so, you have a really interesting background. We met doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu. You have a career in the military and then shifted into law enforcement for 22 years now, is that right?
Jason: Just coming up on 21 but, yeah.
Robb: Twenty one motoring towards 22. So, Jason and I would train multiple times a week and like I said, he would smash me. He’s a stronger, better athlete, much better looking and all the rest of that stuff, so, deadly combination for me. Every once in a while, he would say, “Hey, I won’t see you for a week. I’m going to do this gig.” Guys being guys, it was probably about a year of this happening and of course, I don’t ask what Jason is doing because men don’t do that. We don’t ask each other questions about what the rest of our life entails.
Finally, one day, for whatever reason, I said, “Hey, what is it that you’re going to do?” You said, “Interview and Interrogation class.” There was maybe another five iterations of that. Maybe about once a month you would drop out for a week to do these gigs and then finally I was like, “Hey, man, what is this Interview and Interrogation class?” Can you explain what that is that you do currently?
Jason: Yeah, sure. Well, in my 21 years in law enforcement, I spent the majority of my career in investigations. I went to some training. I got a lot of training, a lot of time spent training, and when I got into my investigative career, became a detective, I went to a training on Interview and Interrogation topic, a company called the Interviews and Interrogation Institute.
Ultimately, after a couple of years of being an investigator, I had always been a trainer, firearms trainer, training officers, those types of things; I got woven into the fabric of the company there and became an instructor for them. What we do is we teach field level, investigative level and advanced level interview and interrogation for police.
We also have some prosecutors, defense attorneys who come to our class, but primarily our focus is on the law enforcement scene and teaching law enforcement officers those skills until, obviously, most recently, some of that is branched out now, stuff that I’m doing on the side from teaching that, but that’s what we would do.
[0:05:18]
Most of our classes run about a week long. They’re 40 hours long. I think people maybe have an impression that when you go to a training like that for some law enforcement, all of your students sit and look at a PowerPoint until they die or want to curl up and die, but we have a very interactive class. We’ve got a lot of different activities that we do.
Basically we want our students who go through our training to be able to leave our training and go out and perform high-level interviews of victims and witnesses, and ultimately interrogate the suspects as soon as they leave the room. We want them to be able to do it in both an ethical and legal way because it’s no good if we’re teaching them stuff or condoning stuff that doesn’t support an ethical approach and also approach that’s going to stand up in court.
Robb: Right, right, and what was fascinating to me when we actually did start digging into what it was that you did, you mentioned almost somewhat offhandedly that a core feature of this process is rapport-building, being able to go into a room, someone you’ve never met, someone who potentially has done something that’s absolutely horrible.
You’re famous within the scene for having done some interviews with some very bad, terrible people, like in the way the rapidity of the process played out with your ability to build rapport, build trust and get a written, signed confession so that they’ve been turned into some made-for-TV movies and some things like that.
It was so interesting to me that the core feature of this thing was developing a specific step-by-step process for an individual to go in, sit down across the table from someone and build trust and rapport in a way that, to your point, you would get an ethical, legally substantiable documentation of what was going on with the person, but it was predicated on trust-building and rapport-building.
Jason: Yeah, it’s really interesting. There has been a tremendous amount of information since the war on terror kicked off that has come out with regard to interview and interrogation. It’s funny, people make jokes and repartees when they find out that I teach this on the side or I’m involved with the company, people joke about waterboarding and those types of things. That’s referred to as enhanced interrogation. Obviously in the law enforcement realm we don’t get involved in that.
Ultimately, there was a group that was basically funded by the government after people became aware of some of the enhanced interrogation techniques, and ultimately they went back and said, “Hey, we’ve got to come up with a different way of doing these high-level, high-value target interrogations.” It’s a group called the HIG.
Ultimately what they came up with, in the end, was that really by doing a rapport-based interrogation method, by developing rapport with the person that they’re trying to elicit information from, that ultimately was, one, more ethical; and, two, they alleviated all those other issues related to the enhanced interrogation techniques; and, three, they were getting just as good, if not better information.
Now when you translate that obviously into the law enforcement realm, really, if you do unethical things in the rooms, we call it, when you’re interviewing a suspect, it’s not like TV. It’s not like NYPD Blue. One, you’re going to have to answer for that in court; and, two, ultimately, you can jeopardize the direction of where the case goes.
Really at the end of the day, what it comes down to is you as the interviewer and you as the interrogator, you have a job to, one, get the information; and, two, when you walk in there, you want to make the situation ultimately unfold so it’s about the person who either was the victim or witness of the crime and the information or about the person who actually committed the crime and the information.
Really at the end of the day, what I figured out very early on in my investigative career is, hey, the more efficient I become at this, the easier it makes my job, the easier it is on the witnesses and the victims. Because a lot of times when you obtain a valid confession, the suspect say, at the end of the day, they will usually plea, and it circumvents the court process.
Now that doesn’t always happen especially in your more high-level cases but when you’re working crimes against persons, which is what I worked and I really developed a reputation for, just earning the trust and maintaining a good relationship with the victims, the families of the victims and the witnesses in the case; I found this, hey, if I can develop rapport with these people and establish some trust and relationship, it’s going to make my job much, much easier not only to get information but to keep those people on-track and, for lack of a better term, on our side until my case is adjudicated or goes to court.
[0:10:32]
The other thing is, ultimately, at the end of the day, people are people. I’ve been in the room or I’ve interrogated or questioned or whatever you want to refer to it as being, some very, very bad people, people who have murdered kids, people who have murdered elderly people, people who have committed sexual assault, sexual assault to children, those types of things. None of that stuff anybody really wants to talk about but at the end of the day, somebody has got to go in there and have those difficult conversations with people and try and get some justice going for the victims.
Robb: What was fascinating to me, again, there were so many layers to this stuff, and it’s funny again where you think you know someone and then as you actually start talking and hanging out and everything then you start peeling this onion. So, Jason has this whole other life going on that I wasn’t aware of, in part because I’m hypoxic frequently during his presence when we’re at jiu-jitsu.
When you explained all of the rapport-building and even some of the motivational interviewing that you guys do as part of the training, I was noodling on it and I said to you just offhandedly, “Hey, if this works in a scenario where a police officer, law enforcement personnel is able to build trust and rapport with someone who might be facing something like a life sentence or something like that or even capital punishment or something for a crime and you’re able to build rapport in such a way that it’s effective in eliciting a legitimate confession, could these techniques be helpful for trainers and health coaches and maybe even allied healthcare providers in building rapport with the folks that they’re trying to work with?”
Because at the end of the day, it’s that trust and human contact that is really the make or break element for trainers, coaches and, I would argue, the bulk of people within the medical field. I would actually, in some way, say doctors are so much less so because they’re so harried and need the gym in and out that, although I think it would be better if they could build more trust and rapport with the people. That’s more on like the physician assistants and nurses and folks like that.
I threw that out there to you, and you’re like, oh, yeah, that should be easy because at least, to some degree, in that gym or medical setting, there’s so much more of at least a potential buy-in, and maybe the person doesn’t 100% want to be be there, but they certainly want to be there more than someone who is being interviewed for a potential crime.
So, we started noodling on this, and I introduced you to the folks at Madlab Group, and you went out to Las Vegas at their yearly event. For people that aren’t familiar with Madlab, a very good friend of mine, Craig Patterson, founded the first CrossFit-affiliate gym in Canada. That gym is still running. They’re no longer a CrossFit-affiliate, but they developed a whole business system for people running that kind of CrossFit-flavored micro gym setting. It’s very good, very extensive. It’s not a one-weekend deal. You went and gave some talks for those folks, and they barely let you out of the room. It was a 30-minute talk, 15, 30 minutes?
Jason: Yeah, I think we did a round robin, and we did breakouts and people in groups. That was awesome. First of all, they’re an awesome group of people and second of all, just being able to give them a little glimpse into some of the stuff that we do and some of the things that we know work really, really well.
It was a genius on your part because the parallels are just uncanny, especially as a coach. You have somebody that approaches you and they really want to make that big change in their life and depending on the personality and a couple of other variables, they’re going to select your gym or that coach for a specific reason.
[0:15:02]
Initially, they have these goals but also, they’re going to pick somebody that they’re comfortable with or somebody that does something that they’re looking for, for them. I think what you want to be able to do as a coach, and I’m very limited in my experience, but I could tell you this from all my years of training, I think what you want to do is ultimately you want to do that, give somebody a fish, teach them to fish. You want them to develop that ability to really move the coach out of the picture to some degree and really the process becomes about them.
So, when we start talking about motivational interviewing, we start talking about building rapport, we start talking about all the things that are intrinsic to what we do and the skill set that we teach, like I said, the parallels are huge. It also makes the coach’s life much, much easier because, one, if coaches were given a little bit of information about some predictable human behavior and also if they had some training on what they’re dealing with when these people present or come and see them and potentially want to become a client, it’s going to give them a better idea of what they’re looking at and what they’re dealing with and how they’re going to be most effective in helping that person in the process or their challenge that they’re about to take up.
You and I got to work with a local gym here, and they had one of their employees who, we did some training for them, she sat back in the back of the room, took it all in and then went out and put this stuff into work. Just in a matter of a couple of months, she was absolutely crushing it as a coach. She was bringing people into the gym, and her people were really moving the needle. So it ended up being a really, really nice pairing. Yeah, there’s definitely an application for the stuff that we teach and the stuff that we do.
Robb: Yeah, and I was going to lead into that, the work that you did with the local gym here. This local gym is one of the flagships for the Madlab organization. It’s one of the best run gyms that you will ever wander into that has a little bit of that CrossFit kind of flavor to it. Their coaches are paid well. They have a super stable clientele base. They charge way more than the going rate. Yet with all the gyms around them, because they do an outstanding job and they really haven’t been affected by the commoditization of the CrossFit gym scene because they really run an astounding program.
What was fascinating is Jason did an in-service with all their folks, and looked at their intake forms and where they had the desk in the office and the way that the person entered the room and where the coach was and all this stuff; made a bunch of really interesting recommendations. One of the recommendations was instead of having the prospective client fill out information ahead of time in almost like a medical intake fashion, Jason recommended the coach go through all of that information with the person.
What was really interesting is the reason why medical offices do that is because it’s time-efficient but it is not efficient in building a relationship. The reason why gyms do that is not so much time-efficiency, it’s because they want to have a feel like a medical office but they’re getting a feel like a medical office that’s kind of cop-blocking them in a way. That’s one feature of the medical scene that you don’t actually want. So, Jason made some recommendations around that.
The cool thing about this gym is because they’re very well-run, they have a very bullet-proof software system where they look at, okay, how many phone call, email walk-ins do we have a month, how many of those people come into the gym, who do they talk to, how many of those folks convert into paying clients, three months, six months, one year down the road, how many of those people are still here? They have great benchmarks for those.
Then when they tweak this stuff, it wasn’t a guess as to whether or not this was helpful. It was immediately, obviously helpful. It was helpful on the global level within the gym, but it was also one of their trainers who is this one gal who was kind of quiet, not super interactive at the beginning that clearly took all this stuff in, and she has lit the place on fire. She’s just crushing it, and it’s all this rapport-building, motivational interviewing. Again, this was one thousandth of a percent of what your knowledge base is.
Jason: Absolutely.
Robb: It was just a dusting of what this material was, yeah.
Jason: I think in today’s day and age, what people aren’t told or what isn’t reinforced or really brought to the surface is that, at the end of the day, we’re all animals. 55% of our communication on a daily basis is still nonverbal in nature. It still deals with our facial expressions, with our posture. It’s nonverbal.
[0:20:12]
One of the things that I particularly dislike about that medical experience, that doctor’s office kind of experience is it is very sterile. Now obviously it’s based on a model where the more volume you’re running in and out the door, you’ve got to do that in order to be profitable. But I think that the medical field, some of these offices, if they employed some of this stuff and there’s more of a personal touch or a personal feel; one, people would be more patient and I think people would probably be more loyal.
The second thing I think you would see is that they would become much more efficient because at the end of the day, the patient might not know what’s wrong with them but if you slow down and take a minute and listen to them and you know what you’re looking for and how to assess some predictable human behavior, all those different types of things, you add that bedside manner, you’re going to boil down to the issue much, much quicker. Really that’s what you saw with the gym and that’s what you see with everybody that we sit down and we explain this stuff to.
The benefit that you get secondarily is you’re really enhancing people’s ability to communicate with one another, so you take the time. Let’s say you own a business, an organization. I come in and sit down with your folks, and we just talk about some basic stuff that has to do with human communication and the whole concept or art of building rapport; your people are not only going to interact with your client base much, much better, but your people are also going to interact with one another within the organization much better too. It streamlines everything.
Robb: Keep going, keep going
Jason: Yeah, it just really streamlines everything. You and I have been involved with other projects, and that’s just me riding our coattails, but we’ve been involved in other projects. I’ll sit back and try to take it in and look and observe because that’s just what I’m used to or conditioned to do, but you can see where those gaps are in organizations, where those communication gaps are where people, they have the very best intentions.
Ultimately, everybody has a goal of making the organization successful or achieving whatever it is they set out to do and if they just had a couple of little components to enhance that communication to understand how to refine their processes when people come through the door, you can see that life would be easier for them and moving the needle would also happen much more efficiently.
Robb: Absolutely, and one of things that Jason is referring to, I was brought into the Chickasaw Nation’s Unconquered Life Advisory Board. I’m the head of the board. They brought me in about two years ago, and as I went out to meet with them and look at the project that they were putting together, which was really a lot of breadth, a lot of depth, very people-intensive both on the internal workings that the Chickasaw Nation was putting together and then also by serving the employees and the people of the Chickasaw Nation, I started looking at where I saw some need for, not technique, but skill set development.
So, I brought in Jason, I brought in Tyler and Luis from KetoGains, and we’ve had a decent amount of success out there. There’s a lot of working parts. What was interesting is initially when we went out, one of our last visits — and we did this, Jason spent a lot of time with the coaching staff, helping them on these things like motivational interviewing and rapport-building and predictable human behavior and whatnot.
Ironically, Jason called an audible and we ended up doing a little bit of in-service within the Chickasaw leadership to help with some of the rapport-building and communication because it’s a rather large organization and folks have a tendency to get siloed and the communication can be slower, nonexistent in some case. What was interesting is at a moment’s notice, Jason called an audible and said, “Hey, we need to get these people together, and we’re going to sit down and have a little bit of an in-service.”
It was pretty remarkable. The effect it had on some of the mid to higher level leadership in the streamline of the communication was really impressive, and the coaches have reported just huge benefits, very similar to what we’ve seen within the gyms, both locally and within the Madlab network that Jason has worked with. I will pat myself on the back a little bit with this stuff because there is a decent amount of motivational interviewing material available and rapport-building, but everything that I’ve looked at, it tends to come out of a university —
[0:25:21]
Jason: Yes, academic.
Robb: — like sports — academic scene, sports psychology, maybe a little bit of business stuff and whatnot. That’s all good, but I’ve always been a fan of things that have been really pressure-tested, so, boxing, Thai boxing, wrestling, jiu-jitsu. There are some things that because of their very nature, there’s a pressure testing that’s applied to them that just shaves off all the bullshit.
It’s not to say that all the interests are there, that it doesn’t continue to evolve but when you compare these things, almost like a computer operating system, when I’ve looked at what has come out of the motivational interviewing and the rapport-building material, it’s more of an academic bend or sports psychology bend, it’s okay, but it never really grabbed me by the short hair. It seemed very airy fairy, not really super concrete.
Then when I looked at what you were doing and I just thought about the pressure cooker of law enforcement work and what would be necessary to make it work in that scenario, I’m like, oh, this stuff has been pressure-tested in a way that sports psychology is never going to be pressure-tested by — the demands of sport and trying to develop an Olympic athlete and all that type of stuff, that’s all very high-level and demanding, but it is nothing like someone who has murdered someone, and they’re trying to avoid incarceration.
You, as a law enforcement officer, have to develop a technique set to be able to sit down and actually trust and understand that person sitting across from you in a way that works. So it struck me, yeah, yeah.
Jason: No, I mean, it was genius for you to see it. I think what you recognized very early was — I mean, you’re absolutely right, especially you’re talking about a homicide case, you’re only really going to get one shot at that particular interview or interrogation. We can see with cases like the OJ Simpson case with the murder of his ex-wife, you can see basically, for lack of a better term, I’m stealing a word from you, but a what a shit show everything turns into when that doesn’t go right. Obviously there are a lot of other dynamics going on or involved in that case, but because we only get one shot really, there has to be a way in order for us to be systematic about it.
That’s where the challenges come from, when you see that there’s a lot of good information that comes from academia, from sports psychology, from these folks that are over-interviewing suspects in the war on terror, I think there’s a tremendous amount of really good information and studies and science that comes out of that. We absolutely, the company I work for, we integrate that and try and stay fresh with what we teach and stay on top of that.
We also — we’re where the rubber meets the road, so we immediately are implementing those things and seeing the feedback from it. When you’re in investigations, you’re doing this stuff over and over and over and over, so you’re getting to see what works and what doesn’t work. You can’t argue with the results because at the end of the day, the results are a closed case and everything matches up. Everything is done legally and ethically, and at the end of the day you’re clearing your case.
I give you props. You absolutely saw that and recognized that. I think that that’s probably, for our profession, for the law enforcement profession, I think that there’s a lot of people, professionals in the law enforcement profession who leave that job with a tremendous amount of skills that people don’t snap up or exploit because at the end of the day, we’re dealing with people. We’re doing it on a high-frequency basis, and we’re typically dealing with people at some point in time in their life where things are critical or they’re traumatic and so you’ve got to be efficient.
We definitely pressure-test all of the stuff that we do, and I had a blast working with the Chickasaw Nation, the stuff that we’ve done working with the gym. It’s a different angle for me to work, and it’s a different group of people getting to work with. At the end of the day you’re really just moving the needle on a positive direction, so it’s a ton of fun.
[0:30:00]
It’s fun to go out there and teach cops and teach law enforcement, and I want them to be able to be more successful than I ever was but at the same time, taking some of the stuff and sharing it with these businesses especially when you start talking about the health and fitness model. The goal is to make people better and make people happier and so if there’s anything that we can share from what we do, ultimately that’s a win at the end of the day.
Robb: Absolutely, and just to reiterate, possibly even beat that into the ground, if you are a health coach, a trainer, strength and conditioning coach, allied healthcare provider, you’re in a scenario where it’s critical that you are able to build rapport, build trust with folks because when people trust you and you have some empathy and some understanding on the other side, the better you are doing at that, the more effective you’re going to be within your work.
It may come as a little bit of a surprise that there may be a very deep talent pool to be drawn from law enforcement because in our hyper-politicized, polarized world, people have all kinds of opinions about law enforcement and military and all that stuff, and I’ve been around these scenes for a long time and done a lot of consulting work within these circles and so I have my own set of opinions.
I’ll just throw this out there. People are a little bit incredulous about this but, again, what the law enforcement officer’s job is, again and again and again, is coming up on strangers in a completely random scenario, oftentimes not knowing if the intent of the person that you’re walking up on or driving up on is to kill you on site and still be able to build some rapport so that whatever the process is that’s underway can be facilitated.
I would throw out there the potential for people to move it along, that there may be a skill set here that has been developed in a really remarkable way and in a way that can’t be replicated in Corporate America or university sports psychology circles, that there’s something that’s really unique here. That’s, in part, why Jason and I have linked wagons on a number of projects and have some other things motoring forward.
Jason, you have, in addition to your work within police and military, you have spun off some of this curriculum because some of this curriculum is off limits. It’s never going to be seen by the civilian population because it’s critical to the inner workings of law enforcement, but there’s a huge chunk of material that is available for folks to use in rapport-building, motivational interviewing. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jason: Yeah, for sure. When you and I got involved in some of the first projects that we were working on, I sat down and I wrote just a quick little article of, to share with some folks. I’m happy — I’ll ping that back to you if you want to share it with anybody who is interested. First of all, there are just some very simple concepts and principles to building rapport and establishing rapport.
Just if people understood those concepts of basically, hey, if I can go and make good eye-to-eye contact, shake hands with somebody and I can sit down and listen to them and let them talk about themselves just a little bit, I’m going to learn a tremendous amount of stuff about that person. I’m not learning that stuff about that person for the purposes of manipulation, I’m learning those stuff about those people or this person I talked to, for the purposes of assessing and determining what is going to be the best way that I can communicate my message.
Because what gets missed is when we start talking about communication, I can’t just send the message. I want some instantaneous feedback or some relatively rapid feedback that not only have I communicated the message in the manner and intent which I had hope to do so, but also that you receive that message and you’ve got to give me some feedback that you received that message and I transferred it in the correct way.
So, when we start talking about sitting down and sharing this stuff with people outside of the law enforcement realm, yeah, there is stuff that’s off limits. It’s just off limits because there’s really no need or application for that stuff in the markets that we work in but really what we’re doing is we’re showing people — we’re, first of all, getting people to take a step back and let’s take a look from 30,000 feet, and let’s look at things that are common amongst human beings, that are universal amongst human beings. It doesn’t matter if you’re the person being interviewed or you’re the interviewer.
[0:35:02]
Once we get that, we show people that basic understanding of what we call predictable human behavior and how human beings work and interact. Then we start talking about the things that truly lay out the foundations of building rapport. It doesn’t matter if it’s a car salesman, if it’s a hair stylist at the salon, a guy or gal that comes up and repairs your house; everybody has a guy or a gal that is their go-to person for that specific need.
I’ll bet you that when you boil it all down to why you continue to be a repeat customer to that particular individual, a lot of it has to do with just, one, how much you trust them and, two, the personal relationship you have with them. So what you see a lot of times is if people don’t want to say the word sales, but there is a level of sales psychology that’s involved in all this.
Now, I think people associate sales with Larry the Lot Lizard used car salesman. That’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re just talking about salesmen, people who are good salesmen. They’re very good at communicating, and they’re very good at understanding their customer. That’s ultimately what makes them successful.
Well, if you are very good at communicating, you’re also very good at understanding the person you’re communicating with; it really just makes your life that much easier. So we teach people, one, this is what a predictable human behavior is all about. Then we teach people, two, rather than being so focused on just getting your message out, saying what you have to say; let’s take a step back and first look at the type of person that we’re communicating with and let’s make a determination as to how communicating with them or how we’re going to be most effective communicating with them and then let’s also look at how we can analyze the feedback that they’re giving us.
Subconsciously they’re going to give us some feedback and tell us whether or not they received the message and what they interpreted as our message was accurate. I think that that stuff, that the people we have worked with, once you pull that curtain back and say, “Hey, this is what we’re talking about,” and they see the value in it; it explodes, it takes off and that animal feeds itself.
Robb: Absolutely, and it brings a grin to my face that one of my best friends, a guy who just got his brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a person who can choke you out ten ways from Sunday is so damn good at building rapport and trust. It’s a juxtaposition of positive and negative space.
Jason, I really appreciate you coming on the show. What I wanted to do with this is kind of a first sample for folks to get a flavor of what you have going on. Before we wrap up, we’ll let folks know where they can track you down on the Interwebs. I do know that you have a written PDF item that you’ve put together in the past, and we can get that. I’ll bury it in the show notes so that people can check it out.
What I’d like folks to do is to check out what you have and then we can get you back on the show later and get some Q&A going on, get some folks to ask some questions and then we can address those questions directly so that this stuff isn’t so theoretical, like it was a big picture theoretical thing but then we can give some folks some concrete information based off the questions that they generate.
Jason: Yeah, anytime you can interrogate the interrogator, I think that that’s an awesome idea and so I welcome it. No, that will be great. I’m sure it’s a little bit of a leap initially for your audience to say, “Hey, what the heck is this guy doing on here?”
First of all, as you hear all the time, Robb, you saved my life when we became friends. My health was definitely not where it needed to be and that was a result of the job. I work in shift work doing the things that we do, high stress level, those types of things. You saved my life in more ways than one.
I’d be happy to come on and help anybody out and obviously do anything I can to share what I’ve learned to help people in your audience move the needle. I think you’re telling the story a little skewed. I’ve never had a shortlist of selfie online, but I don’t think people are buying that I’m smashing you and choking you as frequently as you’re telling.
Robb: You don’t have any photo online. You’re like the shadow or something. It’s like Predator. When the invisibility thing pops up, you come, you just disappear into the background.
[0:40:07]
Jason: Well, maybe as I transition out of law enforcement that might change.
Robb: That might change just a little bit.
Jason: Yeah. The people that know me are the ones that need to know me, so it’s probably a good way to go.
Robb: Right.
Jason: Yes, yes, I agree.
Robb: What was that saying, Martin Blank in Grosse Pointe Blank when he’s justifying being a hit man, he’s like, “If I show up at your door, it’s because you’ve done something bad, and you deserve it.” That’s a topic for a different day but, Jason, let folks know where they can track you down on the Interwebs, contact email and then also any social media or website contact.
Jason: Oh, yeah, absolutely, so my email is [email protected]. I’m working on a website. All the human caliber stuff is basically the stuff that people in the civilian realm and market have asked for and so that’s me doing that on my own to put that all together. For law enforcement training, like I said I work for a company called the Interviews and Interrogation Institute. You just type that in on Google, you’ll go right to our website. Either of those two ways is easy to get a hold of me. Like I said I have a website coming but it’s just slow putting that together. If you’ve got questions, I’ll do my very best to answer them or point you in the right direction, but shoot me an email. Or like Robb said, if there’s more stuff that folks want to hear about then I’m happy to do this just as long as you and I can get in the gym and roll afterwards. That’s all that really matters.
Robb: Well, we’re an hour and 30 minutes away from it right now and my bowels already want to void themselves because I know what an ass shellacking I am in for. Well, awesome, man, love you, you were one of my best friends I’ve ever had, super stoked to crack you out onto the rest of the world. I’ve been really good at predicting some trends and seeing utility in some stuff from one area that people usually don’t recognize as being valuable in another area. I have no doubt that the rapport-building and trust-building that you’ve built in this pressure cooker environment is going to be a game-changer for people whose sole passion in their lives is to help people. So, I’m really excited for more people to learn about what you have to offer.
Jason: Well, I’m just honored to be on the podcast with you and thanks for spending your time with me and, yeah, we’ll see where it goes. As long as we need to hang out, I’m good with it, so thank you for all you’ve done for me, Robb.
Robb: All right, man. We’ll get all that info in the show notes and we’ll talk to you in about an hour and 20 minutes.
Jason: Sounds awesome, brother, thanks.
Robb: Okay, take care.
Jason: Bye.
Robb: Bye-bye.
[0:43:00] End of Audio
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Absolutely brilliant podcast. 20+ years in clinic practice…number 1 objective–establish rapport!!! I cannot help a patient unless I first establish rapport. Great job Ron and Jason!!!