Throughout my career as an operative, I realized that the key to being successful is to be authentic. There is no shortcut! You need to be flesh and blood. And lately, this has been a commercial truth as well. Look at the global IKEA and their ads and product catalog. Year 2016 something happened. All the "home styling" pictures were replaced with pictures of messy kitchens, beds that were not made, etc., in order to communicate that real people actually lived in IKEA furnished homes.

The same goes for interpersonal communication. You want to interact with real people, with stains and flaws, people who are human. You want to see the person behind the mask, even more challenging today with facial masks due to the pandemic.

And actually, if people don't signal authenticity, you're unconsciously suspicious. Training surveillance teams, undercover officers, but also management, I usually fall back to these rhetorical principles of being real, the rhetorical baseline of Ethos Logos and Pathos. Use priming and prepare yourself by asking yourself, am I for real? There are five questions; five Cues you can ask yourself before entering a scene, a scenario, or a board meeting:

Who am I?

Where do I come from?

Where am I going?

Why?

What way and what's my mood?

And actually, these 5W are applicable in reversed situations as well. Training security officers and checkpoint staff, I train them in very much the same 5W for first screening of a person assessing verbal and non-verbal leakage as well as behavior.

How do you make behavior analysis of a person with criminal intentions? How does a suicide bomber, a stalker, a burglar, or hostile reconnaissance blend in? A disparity or not? You know your environment and know when it is normal activity or if it is out of the ordinary. Trust your instincts when it tells you things don't look right, and if you follow the protocol of 5W you can give a more distinct assessment on if someone is for real!!

Look at the terrorists at Brussels airport 2016, what is missing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7M3NSIfrcc

They didn't bring any carry-on luggage and did split without talking to each other.