Rapport improves our ability to relate to others quickly. It helps to create trust and understanding. Firstly, in the rapport process, you understand the other person’s point of view. You can then get them to understand your point of view. Rapport can lead to agreement but the parties may agree to hold on to their point of view. You don’t have to agree with their point of view or like it.
These techniques speed up our ability to communicate and communicate effectively. The ability to make and break rapport is an important pillar for success in NLP.
Rapport skills may be natural and hence unconscious. Extroverts may find it easier to build rapport naturally but they can still benefit from learning more about the rapport-building techniques. Introverts can always learn and derive immense benefits using rapport-building techniques.
Rapport for Better Communications
How Rapport Helps Us Succeed
Rapport helps build trust and understanding between people. With rapport skills, one can become more responsive, influence other people, and improve persuasion skills and relationships. This helps to improve communication and reduce misunderstandings between people.
Improve Responsiveness
One has to respond quickly and effectively to various situations and requests to get the ball moving toward the goalpost. Being stuck in your own half will not help score the goal. One has to keep making efforts to move forward.
Rapport techniques help a person to responsive even in situations, where they would have ordinarily felt being stuck.
Improve Persuasion
We need the ability of persuasion to change someone’s beliefs, opinions, attitudes, motivations, or behavior. More than 2000 years back Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher described ways to communicate persuasively.
- Ethos or convincing using your credibility
- Pathos or appealing to one’s feelings or passions.
- Logos or convincing using logic and reason.
- Kairos or the timing of the message
Being authentic or genuine is essential to gain credibility. Rapport-making can help tap into other persons’ feelings and logic. When the time is right, one can use the right metaphors, or anchors to influence other person’s beliefs, opinions, motivations, and attitudes ultimately influencing the desired behavior or outcome.
Metaphors are subtle and bypass the conscious resistance to change. Anchors help us establish or maintain the state in which the other person, is more likely to be more receptive to the thoughts. These NLP techniques can help us reach the right timing for inducing the desired change.
Improve Influence
In organizations with strong hierarchies, we may get things done at a transactional level because the hierarchical influence gives us some authoritative power. However, in a flatter organizational structure, we need more transformational influence.
As leaders, we need the ability to influence people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions to guide them toward a desired course of action. We need rapport to understand their feelings and beliefs which shape their attitude. We may not be able to change their attitude completely, but moving the needle in the right direction can help us meet our common objectives.
For transformational influence, we need to develop rapport with the other person to have an exchange of thoughts and ideas. Using other skills like sensory acuity, we can get into the hidden meaning of communication. Once we understand their map of the world, we can find ways to effect the needed change.
Improve Relationships
Rapport building uses body language skills, active listening, building on similarities, and understanding other person’s opinions and ideas. These skills forge a better understanding which is essential for relationship building.
Even when we make an effort to influence or persuade the other person, we do it with respect and build on the other person’s existing map of the world. This makes the person feel understood and open up a bit.
An important aspect of solid relationships is trust. Trust in turn depends on being authentic, and empathetic yet rational. Having genuine intentions for each other’s welfare helps individuals become more authentic. These skills help in being more empathetic yet rational to help each other succeed.
With rapport, everything is possible. Without it, nothing is possible.
Milton Erickson
Know Yourself
We can understand others only if we can understand ourselves. Rapport building forces to understand how the other person looks at the world or a situation. When you consciously build rapport you become aware of your own way of looking at things. You come to know of the similarities and differences. There may be opportunities to reassess and change the way you think about things, for your own betterment.
Why Rapport Building Techniques Work
You may have heard the proverb Birds of a feather flock together. The main principle on which rapport-building techniques are based is “We Like People Who Are Similar to Us”. It may be for several reasons which are ingrained into our psyche. Some of the reasons could be that we associate similarities with safety and security. It can also mean connection leading to pleasure and happiness.
People who are already in rapport have these similarities in place. To build rapport with someone, we have to build on the similarities in our interactions, to make the other person feel comfortable with us.
The Basic Structure of Rapport Building Techniques
One way of looking at Rapport is building similarities at the 3 levels of interactions Physiological, Linguistic, and Energy. We can use nonverbal communication like body language skills to build on physiological similarities. Using the right words, and tone we can build on linguistic similarities. Understanding the motivations, we can build on similarities in the energy aspect of the interactions.
Congruence at the 3 levels of interaction is important to maintain rapport. Using verbal communication consistent with non-verbal language cues that give out is important to be in Rapport. This needs one to be sincere.
We may have a need to influence other person’s opinions, which may require us to build on similarities in a certain aspect. Once we have noticed a dissimilar pattern when in rapport, we might want to gradually lead the person in the right direction for mutual benefit. This gradual movement is called pacing and since we create a directional shift it is called leading.
From this perspective we can say we mirror and match the external cues, then the internal followed by pacing and leading.
Matching and Mirroring Techniques
Mirroring and matching is a technique that involves matching the other person’s body language, tone of voice, and use of similar words. These techniques create a sense of familiarity and trust between the two parties. You may like to watch a video on how mirroring helps in building rapport.
Mirroring the other person’s external cues, help us to get into the other person’s frame of mind. As we begin to match the external cues, we remain with their train of thought. This effort helps us to understand their point of view clearly.
Blatant Mirroring can make other a person uncomfortable. Hence one has to be somewhat subtle.
Observing and Matching the External Cues
Physiology Matching involves building on physical similarities such
- Body Language Matching (legs, head, hands, arms, torso)
- Posture Matching (upright, slumped, etc)
- Gestures (head tilts, hands, and feet)
- Breathing rate ( shallow breathing, deep breathing)
- Voice (tone, pitch, volume, speed)
Language Matching: Language matching involves using sensory language to match the other person’s preferred style.
- Visual Language, for example, Looks Nice
- Auditory Language, for example, Sounds Great
- Auditory Digital Language, for example, Clicks with Me
- Kinesthetic Language, for example, Feels Good
- Olfactory/Gustatory, for example, “Smells Weird”
Eye Accessing Cues: The way we move our eyeballs gives the other person an idea about our internal representation system. Whether the person is using memory or constructing a narrative using our imagination can help us understand the person better.
Matching the Internal Map of the World
When we have meaningful conversations, we tap into the other person’s world of values, beliefs, attitudes towards things, and thinking patterns or habits.
We can always build on shared values, beliefs, and similar habits or interests like interest in sports, movies, or food.
Pacing and Leading
When we match the other person, the other person feels understood. This may not happen immediately. When we continue to match the other person’s external cues and internal cues, we make progress. We may mirror and match body language which may be easy to begin with.
Pacing is mirroring the voice, tonality, tempo, and volume of the speech preferred by the other person. This adds to the feeling of affinity with the other person.
When we feel that rapport is built, if we were to make changes to our external cues and if the other person matches us unconsciously then we have built rapport. We may then lead using our thoughts and the other person is likely to be more receptive.
Some of the mirroring and matching techniques used in NLP are tabulated herein:
| Whole body matching | Adjust your body to approximate the other person’s postural shifts |
| Body part matching | Pacing any consistent or stylistic use of body movements, e.g. the pace of eye blinking |
| Half-body matching | Match the upper or lower portion of the person’s body |
| Head/shoulder angle patterns | Match characteristic poses that the other person shows with their head or shoulders |
| Vocal (analogue) qualities | Hear and use the sensory system predicates and match and pace the system of representational systems (like visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) that the other uses |
| Verbal | See the way the other person uses their face to express themselves |
| Facial expressions | Use one aspect of your behavior to match a different aspect of the other person’s behavior, e.g. adjust the pace of your voice to match their breathing pattern, or pacing the other’s eye blinks with your head nods |
| Gestures | There may be specific things the person does to express themselves with gestures. Make sure any matches are done elegantly and respectfully. Don’t copy, as this will be mimicking |
| Repetitive phrasing | Hear and utilize the repeated phrases of the other person |
| Breathing | Adjust your breathing pattern to match the other person’s |
| Indirect matching (Cross-Over Mirroring) | Use one aspect of your behavior to match a different aspect of the other person’s behaviour, e.g. adjust the pace of your voice to match their breathing pattern, or pacing the other’s eye blinks with your head nods |
Conclusion
Rapport skills are like art that leads to better communication. We have some building blocks to get started, but it needs experimentation and practice to develop like any other skill. These skills are useful to build relationships, sales, leadership, coaching, mentoring, therapy, and practicing NLP.
Body Language Mirroring and matching skills can help us develop rapport with the other person’s unconscious mind, opening the doors to their conscious mind. When in a conversation, talking about something that is important to the other person helps improve the rapport. Good rapport building requires matching external cues, matching the other person’s internal map of the world, along with pacing and leading.
