Time for fan mail Friday. We're going to answer some of your questions and drop some knowledge and feedback to help you kick the weekend off right.

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All right, let's cut to it.

Dwayne writes, Hey, Jordan, I'm an intelligence agent for a country that you've heard of.

Anyway, my job is to elicit information from people without letting them know much or anything about me.

I'm very good at my job, but outside of work, I'm terrible at making friends and keeping relationships. Can you help?

Awesome. Yeah. Dwayne wrote a really good question with a little bit of context that some of which needed to be edited and redacted, if you will, for the show here because I have heard of that country and I have many other people.

So the reason that you're having trouble, Dwayne is in that many intelligence agents have trouble because we get tons of email about this people right.

They call, they even come to boot camp and they have a very similar issue. You would tell you intel folks and without giving away your trade craft, which I accidentally got you to give away some of when helping you with this problem.

The reason is because when you're talking with people and you are agenda is to get as much out of them as you can and never give up anything about yourself, you're doing a couple of things.

One, you're communicating with an agenda, which isn't really authentic communication. So that doesn't do a very good job generating authentic and trustworthy relationships and connections because people do feel that even if it's subconscious.

And the other reason it doesn't work in your personal life is because you lack vulnerability by definition, not letting people know anything about you creates a buffer zone for your own personal safety at work, but to your detriment in your personal life, because you're not opening up about yourself, you're not letting other people connect with you.

So you might get a lot of information from people, they might even like you a lot in the beginning, but they don't create lasting friendships or connections and they don't have a real relationship with you of any kind other than there's that nice guy that's that I chat with sometimes even if you deal with this person regularly.

And so this skill set that you have works really well for people that are guarded or maybe unguarded, but should be, but it doesn't work very well in your personal life. So you're going to have to do a really big shift and practice vulnerability and practice opening up and being comfortable sharing a lot about yourself without worrying about getting information or anything from anybody else that you're talking to.

So you've got two totally different skill sets here that actually compete with each other, even though they seem similar. So even though this is kind of a niche problem, because it only affects intelligent covert intelligence operatives generally.

The answer to the problem is the same thing that I would give somebody who's maybe a software engineer that doesn't open up very easily or an emotionally stunted guy of which there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

It's all about practicing that vulnerability opening up and leading the way with vulnerability. In other words, by talking about things that are personal to you and taking conversations in that direction, you'll find honestly that your job gets easier when you do this, even if you have to maybe edit the details of what you're being vulnerable about.

So I hope that helps. I know it will because we get a lot of intel guys in here, a lot of operators in here at the out of charm and this is a very common problem.

Neil writes, good evening, Jordan. I appreciate you handing out your email so listeners can connect with you. I hope this email does reach you because I would love to hear this become a topic on the art of charm.

I would love to hear the opinion of everyone about personal identity. In my case, I've worked long and hard since high school graduation to become a better son and more successful person.

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