I've spent my life learning how to reach people when it matters most.

For 31 years, I served as a police officer and detective with Durham Regional Police Service. I worked homicides and major crimes. I investigated crimes against the most vulnerable. I interrogated suspects, ran polygraph examinations, and negotiated with people in crisis when the wrong word could cost a life. Somewhere in all of that, I learned the thing that has shaped everything since. You don't move people by force. You move them with dignity and respect.

That lesson followed me overseas. During the Iraq War era, I served as an international peacekeeper in Jordan, based at the Jordanian International Police Training Center. I led a team of international trainers and became an advocate and counselor to the Iraqi cadets we were there to train. I went in seeing sides. I came out seeing people. In Muwaqqar, I survived a terrorist attack, and the person who helped save my life came from the side I'd been taught to fear. That changed how I see almost everything.

I've carried these discoveries into rooms most speakers never enter. In 2005, in Paris, I talked a man off a plane after he threatened to blow it up. We never left the tarmac, and I never did learn whether he meant it or was simply out of options. It didn't matter. What mattered was reaching him.

Today I teach what those years taught me. I speak to leaders and teams about negotiation, conflict resolution, trust, and human behavior under pressure, built around my PIER Negotiation model. I wrote ‘Take Control of Your Life'- published by HarperCollins- followed by four other books, one of which is ‘The Hostage Effect,’ which looks at how people stay captive to fear, anger, and belief long after any literal hostage is freed. I closed TEDxToronto in 2015 with a talk called "Finding Humanity Amid Terrorism and Global Unrest." I've broken down real hostage negotiation on camera for Vanity Fair's True Crime series and consulted for CBC, CNN, and Global News. And I'm now turning some of the hardest chapters of my life into stories for the screen.

One idea runs through it all, from the interrogation room to the hostage call to the keynote stage. Dignity and respect can change outcomes. I've watched it happen when nothing else would.https://linktr.ee/jpaulnadeau