Evy Poumpouras

To lead is to bear the responsibility of making decisions, both easy and difficult. These decisions impact teams, organizations, and even our own personal lives. The decision-making process can leave us oscillating between pieces of information that create paralysis towards progress or left wondering whether we’ve taken the right course of action.

In this keynote and call to action for leaders, Evy Poumpouras reflects on her experiences as a Secret Service Special Agent and leader to reveal the common behaviors of elite leaders and the actions anyone can take to authentically connect with their teams, positively influence people and outcomes, and create high-achieving cultures. The tactics she shares help leaders build cognitive resilience, move on from past decisions, and operate with a solutions-oriented mindset.

The ability to get what you want in your professional and personal pursuits comes down to one thing and one thing only: your ability to communicate effectively — both with your words and your nonverbal cues. Having mastered the arts of communication and psychology and applied them as a Secret Service special agent leading mission-critical criminal investigations, interrogations, and undercover assignments, Evy Poumpouras teaches audiences top-tier techniques for enhancing their verbal and nonverbal communication skills in pursuit of their objectives. The tactics Poumpouras shares will change the game for anyone looking to apply battle-tested communication strategies used in the heat of conflict by the most elite Secret Service agents and influence any situation to achieve the desired outcome.

As someone who broke glass ceilings in a male-dominated field, former Secret Service special agent Evy Poumpouras demonstrates how anyone can move beyond self-doubt to a mindset of strength and resilience. In this talk, she shares valuable methods for harnessing solution-based thinking at work and every day and filtering out the noise to lead and problem solve effectively. Poumpouras stresses how important it is for leaders to master emotional intelligence, enhance mental fortitude, and break through diminishing thought patterns and self-doubt, while providing audience members powerful tools to add to their arsenal as they look to lead themselves and their people to conquering short- and long-term challenges.

As a former Secret Service special agent, Evy Poumpouras has successfully come out at the other end of chaos and conflict on countless occasions and draws from those experiences to provide crucial tips for navigating difficult situations and people to move from confrontation to cooperation. Poumpouras offers a step-by-step breakdown of how to deescalate, empathize, and even collaborate in challenging circumstances and takes the stigma of fear out of confrontation. She shows how anyone can protect their mindset, stand their ground, and effectively deal with whatever (or whoever) life throws their way.

Whether assessing potential clients in a business meeting or trying to understand the true motives of a relationship, reading people is the key to any successful interaction. Evy Poumpouras can attest to this. During her 12 years as a Secret Service special agent, mission success depended on her ability to analyze the signals she received from her allies and adversaries as she worked to get to the bottom of highly sensitive investigations and interrogations, and safeguard various U.S. presidents. Reflecting on those experiences, she shares everything audience members need to know about deciphering body language — movements, postures, and facial expressions — in any situation, be it in the workplace, negotiations, or elsewhere. Coming out of this talk, audience members will be able to decode verbal language to understand what people are really saying, while also sharpening their ability to spot the red flags of deceptive communication.

Poumpouras can also move the conversation from reading others to how others read you. What do people see when you enter a room? What do they hear when you speak? Often, we don’t portray to others the person we want to be. She helps people remedy this by teaching them action steps for commanding respect and authority through body language, developing verbal skills to convey ideas with conviction, and employing paralinguistics to present confidence in any situation. Poumpouras’ insights lay the foundation that empowers people to be the person they want others to see.