BY GRANT LANCASTER
One former Secret Service agent hopes her book will teach people about how the skills she learned while protecting U.S. presidents – reading people, adapting to new situations and influencing others – can help in everyday life.
Evy Poumpouras’ book, Becoming Bulletproof, is about more than just her 12 years in the Secret Service, it is about teaching people resiliency and how to protect themselves physically and mentally, she said. The book is less about her exploits and more about what she learned from challenging assignments.
“People want to feel confident, they want to feel strong, they want to feel resilient, and I want to give them that,” Poumpouras said.
Poumpouras hopes that the book will be a sort of tool kit for navigating work and personal interactions, challenges people are more likely to encounter than covert operations, she said.
“[it’s] your life manual to resilience, strategy and learning yourself,” Poumpouras said.
The book will teach methods to read the motivations of others, useful for any kind of relationship from work to friends to romantic partners, as well as how to adapt to challenging situations like working with someone who does not have the best intentions, Poumpouras said.
Poumpouras recommended dealing with people in the same way someone might check their email in the morning – respond to the important things quickly, manage important but unpleasant things quickly but professionally and delete the junk and spam, she said.
On top of all of these specific lessons is a general message of perseverance and work ethic, Poumpouras said. She included examples of her failures in the book to show readers that everything will not always work out as planned and they may have to change their response to new situations.
“If you’re doing something you want to do, you adapt,” Poumpouras said.
Poumpouras, a Queens native, went to Columbia University to study journalism after leaving the service, learning a new skillset that has led her to appear on TV more recently, with Poumpouras recently appearing as co-host of Bravo’s reality series Spy Games, as well as speaking on news shows such as Today Show, NBC, CNN and GMA.
Poumpouras’ book Becoming Bulletproof is scheduled to release April 21 through Atria Books.
