At the December Stories to Share event at the Jaffrey Civic Center, former FBI agent Colton Seale will present “Talking to Terrorists…and Everyone Else.” Seale will relate stories from his long career with the FBI.
The event is Friday, Dec. 5 at 5 p.m. and will be followed by a reception. Stories to Share is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To reserve a seat, go to jaffreyciviccenter.com/stories/.
“Part of the talk will be stories from my career overseas–places I went, things I saw,” Seale said. “But it is also about my later work, conducting research on interview and interrogation techniques, and coming up with a program we could replicate and teach.”
Seale spent 22 years as an FBI special agent before retiring as interrogation team leader and head of training for the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), an elite interagency interview and interrogation team at the FBI.
Seale has done extensive research into methods of getting people to share more information and “foster genuine communication.”
“The question was always, how could I get someone to talk to me more? How do we talk to people who share different viewpoints? How can you turn a confrontation into a productive conversation?” Seale said.
Seale said first step in getting people to truly communicate is to listen.
“You start with: I’m hearing what you’re saying. Can you tell me how you came to that point?” Seale said. “That changes the dynamic; otherwise, it is just people arguing their own agenda. The goal is to at least have a conversation and not argue.”
Seale said that especially as the country remains bitterly divided, he would like to share his thoughts on how people can have back-and-forth conversations instead of conflict.
“How can we pull closer together, rather than pull farther apart? I’m hoping people can take that away from this talk. True engagement is about not just what you believe, but why you believe it,” he said.
Seale and his wife moved to Peterborough from Virginia in 2018.
“We were driving around New England and kind of looking for a place to retire, and we saw an ad about Post and Beam opening, so we drove over here, and that was it,” Seale recalled. “I love breweries and we just fell in love with Peterborough.”
Seale says New Hampshire reminds him of Alaska, where he lived and worked as an FBI agent for nine years. While Seale misses both the beauty of Alaska and his hobby of running sled dogs, he says Alaska has “no end of crime.”
“A lot of people move to Alaska with really bad ideas. It’s kind if like the Wild West up there,” he said. “I could have worked 24 hours a day.”
In Alaska, Seale worked on everything from a major corruption case to fraud, kidnappings, homicide and counter-intelligence.
Unlike many people who work for intelligence services, Seale never planned to work for the FBI.
“I was working as an analyst with a consulting firm, and we had the FBI as a client, and they told me I should consider becoming an agent,” Seale said. “So I did, and it turned out to be a very good decision.”
Seale is now CEO of Pyxis Academy, which provides science-based training in communication to corporations and law enforcement.
“I spent most of 2024 in the Middle East, which was challenging,” he said. “You just have to believe you are making positive change.”
For more information about Colton Seale and Pyxis go to pyxisacademy.com/media. For information about Stories to Share, go to jaffreyciviccenter.com/stories/.