Christopher Diaz Discusses Autism Awareness For The First Responder Community And How To Develop Great Negotiating Skills

It's time for Success Profiles Radio with your host, Brian K. Wright. Have you ever wondered if there's more to life than you're currently living? Then Success Profiles Radio is the program for you.

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And now, here's your host, Brian K. Wright. Hello and welcome to Success Profiles Radio. I'm your host, Brian K.

Wright, and it's an absolute pleasure to be with you here today. I'm honored that you chose to spend part of your day with me here. This is going to be a fantastic and amazing show. I will introduce my guests shortly, and I promise we're going to have a lot of fun, and it's going to be terrific.

I do want to share a minute or two to share some things I've been learning and thinking about lately and I usually do this every single week. Recently I've been thinking about why things are sometimes difficult for us in life. It seems like we're doing all the right things. It feels like we're doing everything we can to push forward.

We don't always see the progress that we want to make. So consider this. Life is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle but you don't get to see what the picture on the box looks like first. Very often we only see the pieces that are in front of it and we're trying to make sense of it and it causes confusion because we have no idea what to do with it.

Only through taking action do we begin to accumulate critical pieces that fit together somehow and when the puzzle is nearly done we begin to understand why certain pieces didn't fit together at all. Sometimes patience is necessary. Not at the expense of not taking action but just remember everything happens for a reason even if that reason isn't obvious. Keep doing what you know is right, operate in faith, and let the pieces come together at just the right time, and you will be so glad you did.

If you've not downloaded and subscribed to Success Profiles Radio on Apple Podcasts or iTunes, please do that. Leave a five-star review if you think we deserve it, and we would love to have that happen. So my very special guest this week is Christopher Diaz. Let me tell you about him.

He is a retired DEA special agent, keynote speaker, and founder of Alpha Innovative Solutions AIS. It's a training and consulting company dedicated to autism awareness for first responders, law enforcement mentorship, and professional development. He brings over 27 years of law enforcement experience, including 22 years as a DEA special agent conducting complex international undercover operations to a mission that is deeply personal to him. So we have so much to unwrap and unravel, and we only have an hour, so let's get right to it.

Here's my very special guest, Christopher Diaz. Christopher, how are you? Welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

It's an honor and a pleasure to be here. I'm doing amazing. Fantastic. So did you envision early on that you'd be where you are right now?

Absolutely not. But it's been a hell of a ride and I'll take it. A bit of a roller coaster, but it's still a hell of a ride. Absolutely.

Well, tell us a little bit about your path. How did you get here? Well, let's see. I was born in Florida.

I'm a military brat. My dad was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela.

And from there, my mother was also an officer in the Navy, moved around a little bit, ended up in Virginia, went to James Madison University, studied sociology. Ironically, was a music major in school and never would have guessed I would have picked a profession that would pay less than a musician. So I went into law enforcement and I was hired at Albemarle County Police Department of Virginia. Charlottesville area and later got picked up by DEA did about 22 years nine months and 35 seconds as an agent and punched out retired and began following my passion with autism my I'm a special needs parent my son is 14 years old now he is non-verbal and in the last five six years of my DEA career, I was fortunate enough to have a very unique niche and I operated as an international undercover as a global narcotics and organized crime enterprise boss.

And after those years, I punched every professional level and ticket that I could ever fathom. And that's what open the door for me to leave to have conversations about my law enforcement career, which allows me to walk through that door of opportunity to talk about autism. Wow. I bet undercover work was fascinating.

I mean, I watch shows like NCIS, Law & Order, all those things. Is what you see on TV the way that undercover work actually happens? that's a great question a lot of it is a lot of it definitely is not what we were able to do as a very specialized team we were able to create if you will a phantom cartel so we had all the bells and whistles the suits the the g-wagon vehicles i like to call it a poor man's carnival trick And I was the carny who got a chance to do the poor coin tricks.

But, you know, with the power of a good story, the power of presence, the power of negotiation, that allowed the perception to prevail successfully. successfully. I am the first American to do undercover in Chile, operated in undercover capacity from Kazakhstan to Portugal to Romania to Africa. So I had a very interesting niche with an unbelievable supportive team from FBI, United States Marshals, Homeland Security, HSI.

And we called ourselves ad hoc either Team America or Mission Impossible primarily because everybody and every boss that we talked to, they would just stare at us and blink their eyes and just kind of say that that's never going to work and that's impossible. And so that was my personal mission to try to prove everybody wrong that we can operate at a very, very high level. What are some of the biggest sacrifices you had to make in order to make your dream come true? The primary, the biggest sacrifice was family.

To operate in that capacity, in the United States, undercover is done in a very particular way. And or just the narcotics business is done. It's very reactive. And you have to react with people who don't have a calendar nor a sense of obligation.

They have no allegiance to birthdays or anniversaries. And if they have an opportunity where they can make money, they will. Doesn't matter the commodity. Doesn't matter of the method They going to seize it And as law enforcement in the narcotics world you have to react to that and so if they working on a saturday night and you have the opportunity to intercede or have an opportunity to have a sit down with these individuals you have to react and you have to do it so the sacrifice of family for my entire career uh has always been ever present and uh and and which which was one of the driving examples of the last five years as an international undercover on a more managerial level and utilizing the concept of leverage, having the ability to be the more alpha persona in a conversation allowed me to dictate more things in the sense of the nature in the criminal world of negotiation, whether it's the locality or the pay or the manner of negotiating, it afforded me the opportunity to be the person that I didn't have to acquiesce all the time to certain positions of discussion, of principles that we were working on.

And so that allowed me to be very concise with my points of travel. So instead of getting a call at three in the morning that you have to go dig through somebody's trash, I was able to schedule a trip to Portugal, to Lisbon, and have people show up and everything be very concise and timed from dinner to a tour or just driving around or walk through a park to have a conversation. It was very, very, very concise and timed, which allowed me to live my life with my family and be my passion, obviously, as the caregiver in the family.

And also working with criminals that are international allowed me to operate in time zones. So while I'm up at 12 at night or one in the morning, looking at and taking care of my son so my wife can sleep and be charged up for the day, I was in a position because of the time zone difference to be able to make calls and take advantage of that opportunity. Yes, for sure. Here's a question I love asking people.

What is the most expensive mistake you've ever made? It can be financial. It doesn't have to be. It could be something you gave up on too soon or something you didn't start soon enough.

But what's the most expensive mistake you think you've ever made? the most expensive mistake I ever made I would say the most costly I will say okay uh uh I was in uh I was in an office overseas and I had somebody working for me and the challenge of operating internationally is very very very hard and so obviously the sacrifice of family but there was an individual that worked for me a confidential source who ended up getting picked up and he ended up dying and he was tortured to And so and that's that's a very, very hard thing to manage as to say it was a mistake.

It's just when you're dealing with people and if there's a threat upon my life and you can only do what you can do at the moment. And so I was able to the government allowed me to leave my post. but at that same time while I had left there was somebody who he chose not to leave and even though he was still corresponding and letting me know and I'm trying to get him to leave the area that he was living in he chose not to and he ended up dying it was ruled as a robbery but that's that that that's uh i guess you could say that that that adds a cost in your life in that type of career that you have to carry that sure we've got less than a minute to our break what is the highest value skill you think anyone needs to develop the ability to communicate the ability to communicate not just in english your non-verbal communication your ability to understand other people's nonverbal communication with you and also take the time if you if you speak one language to speak another language it opens the door to another world and you'll never truly get a chance to meet somebody unless you actually speak their first language perfect we will come right back after the break this is success profiles radio please stay with us don't go away we will return shortly The mission is to motivate and inspire others to discover their unique talents and follow their dreams in life.

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my very special guest this week is Christopher Diaz. And we're going to talk about autism and awareness. And we're also going to talk about the art of negotiation, two things which are very near and dear to him in his life and in his career. And if you have not subscribed to Ultimate Achievers Magazine, please do that.

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So Christopher, we talked a little bit about how you have an autistic child who's nonverbal. What has that experience taught you about yourself? It taught me that I needed more patience in my life, that in the world in my world there a saying that if you meet one child on the spectrum congratulations you still have only met one child on the spectrum and there just so many different levels of of uh functionality uh just breaking it down and so for me uh i didn't have a lot of patience and my son that's what he has taught me for example uh brushing one's teeth a child a neurotypical child could visually see someone else brush their teeth and they would be able to put two and two together, toothpaste, toothbrush, water on the head of the toothbrush and start mimicking what is being modeled to that child.

My son wasn't able to do that. It took him what's called hand over hand, where I would put my hand on the toothbrush, I would have his hand on mine, and then we would go through that process. And my wife, obviously. we would go through that process two times a day or three times a day.

It took us 12 years for him to eventually understand and work through the process of grabbing the toothbrush, putting the toothpaste on it and going through it. It's called shaping. And so to do that every single day takes it for every facet of your life. It's a lot of patience.

And especially when you hear all your friends and coworkers talking about what their kids are doing or how they're developing, you know, that takes some patience, too, to know that your your life journey is completely different from theirs in the present. And it's also completely different as you had imagined it to be when you were going through the, you know, as every parent does, oh, we're going to have a, in my case, it was a baby boy. You know, you, your vision of what your life is going to be like changes on a dime.

Yeah. My younger sister is special needs. It's not autism, but I would imagine, I mean, I just can't, I guess I can't really imagine what my parents were thinking and feeling. I mean, just because I grew up in the household, I mean, they had to give her special attention because she just had more needs.

And sometimes in my youth, I misinterpreted that difference in attention as a difference in love. And that's not the case at all. Right, right. I can only imagine what it would be like to be a sibling.

My wife had cancer around the time my son was born. And she wasn't diagnosed until eight months later after he was born. He was still an infant. And so the treatment for cancer, she had triple negative invasive ductal carcinoma, which is the breast cancer that's non-hormonal and who knows why you have it and the therapy for that at the time she's going on 13 years without cancer and the therapy at the time was chemotherapy and if you have chemotherapy the doctrine was you cannot try to have a baby for at least five years Like the soonest you could even attempt is five years after the last treatment.

And so that put us in the world of 42, 43 years old. And we just decided, you know what, we have enough on our plate and and we're going to just we're just going to go onward with our son and have our family and have our new life. Yeah, exactly. But I will say that not having a sibling there adds to, as a parent, well, what's going to happen to my son when I pass away?

I don't have family nearby and no sibling to lean on or to manage a trust. I have to rely upon my brother and who's older than me, right? So yeah, there are a lot of challenges with that. And my heart goes out to you and your situation.

Well, thank you. So you have used this as a reason to create alpha innovative solutions. And because of your career, you've decided to make this as a way to help first responders and law enforcement recognize and deal with people they may run into who are autistic. I think that's a beautiful mission.

I've not heard of this before. Well, thank you very much. And not just autism. It's people who have intellectual challenges.

Sure. The prison system has people who have intellectual challenges. You have people who are homeless who have intellectual challenges. But I look at it from the perspective of this is for my son.

My son's nonverbal. Now, nonverbal can mean many things. but from you know it could be from no speech at all to making grunts and groans and noises to being able to communicate but just communicate your wants and needs so my son didn't speak a word for many many years and then eventually he started able to speak but he still is in the non-verbal category so it's like if you can imagine uh there was a comedian who had a great joke about not not making light of it but it's my experience is like i'm imagine yourself being Mick Jagger's personal assistant.

And imagine how Mick Jagger would be when he wants something. He'd walk up to you and he'd probably shout at you, water, ice. And so that's my son. My son, if he wants McDonald's and nuggets, he doesn't walk up and say, hey, dad, I like McDonald's and nuggets for lunch.

My son would be down the hall and he'd shout, McDonald's, nuggets. And so now I know I'd have to go get up and start our day and move forward. And so from that perspective, I was thinking, well, it's cute when he's nine and he's 12. What's it going to be like when he's 28 or 30?

He doesn't understand social cues. He doesn't understand social distancing. He doesn't understand that you can't just walk up to a police officer and grab that beautiful yellow taser on his belt because you like the color yellow. Right.

So like there are things that I thought I said, you know, I think I'd be able to build a bridge and build a bridge to communicate because I know the training that police officers from uniform all the way to federal agents, the training that's given. And in the world of intellectual disability, it's not much. Right. And so I figured I could bridge the gap.

I can talk to them, not just from, I'm talking from a perspective of more intellectually disabled than somebody who may be considered socially awkward. That makes sense. And I want to do that, not just for police, but for fire and rescue and any other public servants out there. Yeah.

So here a question because I do not have a personal experience with autism in anybody in my life Let just say that you a first responder whether it fire whether it police They're used to dealing with people who are on drugs or who are high, and that's who they probably think they're dealing with first. How far down the list is it for them to realize, oh, this person's autistic, they're not any of these other things? And how do you tell? I think it goes back to your training.

You know, there's a saying, you don't rise to the occasion. you always fall back on your training. Right. And high stress situations, those high stress situations strip away any type of imagination that you think that you're going to be able to create in the moment.

You will go back to what you've done and you've trained and you've trained in high stress situations. If you have never been exposed to autism, if you've never been exposed to someone who may be intellectually disabled, but can function and drive a car in society. Yeah. Right.

You're you're only going to fall back to the interactions that you've had that you've trained. So if you've only trained for people who have consumed drugs or you've only trained that when somebody is flapping their hands, that that person is going to hurt you, then you're falling back on that training and you're going to defend yourself when in reality, you may see somebody if you had the training and you had new understood cues and understood that some people because an autistic child turns into an autistic adult it just doesn't go away it changes but it doesn't go away and so the ability to open your mind and take an extra second to breathe and be able to have the open mind that it doesn't always fall into the pattern defense.

And then as you approach the scene, you do what's called a scene assessment. When you start evaluating what's going on in front of you, you have the opportunity to start picking up on things. It's a 21-year-old young man wearing a Star Wars, carrying a plushy doll and shaking his hand. That would be my son.

Yeah. So those are some things to think about and that you're able to work through. And there are things that police, fire and rescue can do to deescalate a scenario before it even starts. Yeah.

So, yeah. For sure. So walk us through an example of the kind of scenario that someone might encounter out in the field if they realize, okay, I've got an autistic subject in front of me. What kind of scenario, what kind of deescalation, what happens?

Okay. Okay, so let's say this is something that's very common in all fields of public service. You would have, and it just doesn't have to be public service. This is for anybody who's in a position of power and control.

It could be a restaurant manager. It could be a flight attendant on an airplane. There are people who are in positions that can make a difference. So focusing on, let's say it's a missing child.

So a missing child leaves their home at night. It's called eloping. It's where they, someone who really should be in the care of somebody else and they just end up walking out of the house. having the ability hopefully you have communication by a caregiver maybe it's a caregiver a mom a dad an auntie or an uncle that can relay that the child has autism autism spectrum disorder or asd hopefully if the parent doesn't do that because in times of stress you fall back on what you know and there's a lot of emotion involved so the police have the ability to ask questions for example does the child have any sensory issues sensory issues as in sound or lights or they they they don't like strangers they like to hide because they they fear cars driving fast.

So as a police officer, you could, if you find out that the child has an avoidance to sound, or they like to cover their ears, maybe, just maybe, if there's three policemen together, maybe they don't all have to have the radios turned up to level 10 on the volume. Radios are hard, as police officers, are hard to hear when you're outside and you're not in an enclosed environment. But maybe if you don't, maybe one person can have the radio on and they can step away if you encounter the child.

And then that would alleviate some of the noise. Maybe you don't need to twerk your sirens when you approach the child to get the child's attention. That could scare the child and that child could either run off, could run into oncoming traffic, or could cause some fear or could cause a child to have what's called a meltdown or if you would imagine like a tantrum uh if you would envision that uh lights maybe you don't have to have your beautiful lights on yeah the lights are very bright they can have sensitive vision also those lights are designed to not to be in a rhythmic pattern to be supposed to break the attention of the driver who's in front of you if you're going to pull them over.

Yeah. And having the ability to do that, it's going to be a little chaotic where raises the attention. Well, for a child who's on the spectrum, and most people who are on the spectrum are parent pattern oriented, that could be bothersome. And it could cause some sensory issues with that as well.

Some children don't like to be touched. So if you walk up to that child and you go and grab them, that that may causes it some children want and are sensory seeking and they want to be touched and they want the hug so if you have a 12 year old who happens to be five foot nine yeah carrying his plushy doll or maybe not maybe he's just out in his pajamas barefoot yeah walk up to you and try to give you a hug and you're not familiar with that you you may it may it may not be a good scenario if that makes any sense.

So part of the parents have to do it. And then part of police have to have the training to be able to be open for it. And I could go on and on of different scenarios. Absolutely.

We will come right back after the break. This is Success Profiles Radio. We're talking with Christopher Diaz. He has had decades of experience in law enforcement.

And of course, you know, raising autistic child means that you have an awareness of things that most of us don't. And And so we're tapping into some of that today. And I'm so happy and grateful that we have a chance to talk about autism awareness on the show because I don't think we've covered this topic before. So I'm grateful that we're having this conversation.

We will return after the break. This is Success Profiles Radio. We will be right back. Please don't go away.