Joe Navarro - Be Exceptional

In loving memory of my father, Albert

Mind your thoughtsfor thoughts become words.

Mind your wordsfor words become actions.

Mind your actionsfor actions become habits.

Mind your habitsfor habits become character.

Mind your characterfor character shapes destiny.

Adapted from Lao Tzu

Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; and if it is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach.

Marcus Aurelius

What makes people exceptional? For a long time, I pondered that question, and perhaps you have also. Over the course of more than forty years studying human behaviorincluding twenty-five years of service in the FBI, as a founding member of the FBIs elite National Security Behavioral Analysis Program, conducting more than ten thousand interviews in the field, and years of consulting with multilevel organizations worldwide, as well as researching and writing more than a dozen books on behavior and performancenothing has captivated me more than those individuals who display exceptional characteristics. These people make you feel special. They draw you in instantly with their kindness and caring. They energize with their wisdom and empathy. They leave you feeling better than when you arrived. You want them to be your friend, neighbor, workmate, or coach. You certainly would want them to be your teacher, manager, community leader, or candidate for office.

What is it that makes them who they areso influential, effective, worthy to model, and worthy to lead? The qualities that make them stand out arent related to their level of education, income, or talentssay, in athletics or art or even business. No, these individuals excel in the ways that really matter: they seem to know what to say and what to do to earn trust, command respect, and positively influence and inspire even the most jaded among us.

My research for this book began more than a decade ago, quite unintentionally, when I was working on Dangerous Personalities. In that book, I explored the characteristics of those who let themselves and others down because of their abhorrent behavior, the decisions they made, the priorities they neglected, lack of emotional control, or because of their lack of caring or conscientiousness.

It was serendipitous that in researching these flawed individuals, their polar oppositesthose individuals who have such remarkable positive traits that they make life better for everyone around themeffervesced in front of me with such clarity. It was that transparency, coupled with the thousands of observations that I had made in the FBI and in my international consulting work, that crystallized into this book.

What makes people exceptional? As it turns out, there are just five traits that set exceptional individuals apart from everyone else. Just five, but they are such powerful traits. I call them the Five Domains of the Exceptional.

By crafting our own apprenticeships, understanding ourselves through honest reflection, and cultivating key habits that lead to personal achievement, we lay the foundation for an exceptional life.

By increasing our ability to observe the needs, preferences, intentions, and desires of others, as well as their fears and concerns, we are better prepared to be able to decode people and situations with speed and accuracy, gaining the clarity to do what is best, what is right, and what is effective.

By embracing both verbal and nonverbal skills, we can express ideas more efficiently and intentionally, appealing to the heart and mind and establishing bonds that build trust, loyalty, and social harmony.

By knowing and applying the ethical and social framework for appropriate action, we can learn, as exceptional people do, to do the right thing at the right time.

By grasping the foundational truth that what humans ultimately seek is psychological comfort, we can discover what exceptional people know: that whoever provides psychological comfort through caring wins.

In the chapters that follow, I will combine field-tested insights, examples, and anecdotes from my decades of experience in behavioral analysis and business consulting with examples from history, current events, and everyday life to explore these Five Domains and explain how you can use them to improve and enhance your life, differentiate yourself, and most of all to positively influence others in your pursuit of a more empathetic, ethical lifethe kind of life the truly exceptional live every day.

One cannot help but learn from and be influenced by studying exceptional individuals who daily demonstrate that to be exceptional, one must do exceptional things. These five life-changing traits are all that is needed to set you apart. They will immediately reward you the moment you begin to incorporate them into your daily routine. They will increase your capacity to positively influence others and no doubt will make you a better person. They will also make you a better leadernot just ready to lead when or if the opportunity arises, but worthy to lead.

So join me on this journey of discovery of who we are and who we can be. Lets explore that special realm shared by those few we call honorable, trustworthy, purposeful, and stalwart, but above all: exceptional.

By crafting our own apprenticeships, understanding ourselves through honest reflection, and cultivating key habits that lead to personal achievement, we lay the foundation for an exceptional life.

Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks about changing himself.

Leo Tolstoy

One of the toughest decisions I ever had to make as a SWAT team commander took place before the operation even began.

As a team commander, youre responsible for the operational plan and the skilled and safe execution of that plan. Once you receive the green light for the operation to begin and are fully geared up, weapons locked and loaded, and you say over the headset, I have control, I have control, I have control, many people are counting on you to have your head in the game. The public expects it. So do your superiors. And your fellow SWAT team members need you to have laserlike clarity of thought, as their safety and the success of the operation depend on it.

Events were unfolding fast in this particular operationan armed fugitive holding his girlfriend hostage in a run-down motel outside Haines City, Florida, vowing never to be taken alive. Normally the hostage negotiators can deal with events like this, but this hostage was in need of medicine and her life was in peril. With little time to lose, the heat of the day making tempers even more testy, and the suspect unwilling to cooperate in any way, the last thing I needed was to have one of our FBI SWAT operators not up to the task. This particular operator wasnt as quick with his questions, nor was he finessing the final plans as swiftly as he usually would. Issues that he would normally raisesuch as building construction (to determine how far a stray bullet might penetrate); whether the hinges on the door faced out or in (to help us determine how to open the door and what kind of breaching tools we might need); how close we could place an ambulance without it being seen; the location of the nearest hospital with a Level I Trauma Center, and so onwerent coming up. His head, I could tell, wasnt in the game. Finally, I told myself: