Building & Maintaining Rapport

RAPPORT IS A POSITIVE connection between you and another person, or you and a group.

You have seen lecturers, comedians and others build rapport with an entire audience. Perhaps you have experienced a good connection with a sales person, and by relaxing into that connection, found it easier to make a buying decision. You've probably met people who had a strong, instant effect on you, either good or bad.

What is it about the politicians and actors, the sales people, and the charismatic people you meet, that give them the ability to create rapport? Is it just natural chemistry? Sometimes. But professionals such as politicians learn to build rapport.

Rapport is one of the first areas that NLP became fascinated with as it developed. The therapists that NLP studied early on had rapport building abilities, but they had very different styles, at least they had very different approaches and personalities. But, as you have learned, NLP is not content to just look at the surface. It models, it analyses, and it finds the active ingredients that make things like rapport take place.

This is what you will learn next;
the active ingredients of rapport; the ingredients used by professionals in many areas of life to sell, to lead, and even to heal others.

This Doesn't Sound Ethical. Is NLP Just Manipulation?

Although this is not a course in ethics or philosophy, we do want to share a couple ideas on this with you. NLP wants to see people develop meaningful values so that
they can lead more fulfilling and meaningful lives. This does not happen at random. Except for the hero who is surprised by the heroic act that comes out of them in a
crisis, most great people of history have done a great deal of sometimes painful soul searching. They have drawn from various sources of inspiration. They talk about the feeling of standing on the shoulders of giants, even though history regards them as giants. Except for a few with very large egos, most of the great people in history confess to feeling like anything but giants.

But the things that they are proud of, are that they aspired to higher values, and that they worked to build the skills they needed to have a meaningful impact on the world.

We see the same thing is people today; people who don't expect to be in history books, but who are fascinated by excellence; people who want to know how their role models do what they do. These people use rapport-building skills to achieve excellence in their chosen pursuits.

The first lesson in rapport, much like other NLP skills is flexibility. If you think showing interest in people helps build rapport, consider the person who is too shy to handle you showing interest.

If you think a dynamic, outgoing personality creates rapport, consider the person who would feel overwhelmed or pushed by that. If you think speaking from your heart and your vision generates rapport, consider the person to defends themselves with sarcasm and cynicism.

What NLP has discovered about rapport transcends earlier efforts to build rapport with a list of personality traits. That is not flexible; that is a cook book approach. The master chef isn't glued to a cook book.

The second lesson in rapport is conscious application. It is not simply a gift or a coincidence, it is a skill.

Since most people prefer to think that rapport is only a natural thing, they may be uncomfortable with purposely creating rapport. We say that if you care about your mission in life, and if you care about your values, then you have a responsibility to learn to build rapport.

Rapport is part of your mission. You may be surprised to find that being pretty technical about it at first is very important. It's a little like a musician who practices scales for hours on end but emerges from this and other training with a great ability to play jazz. Rapport-building is the jazz of NLP.

What Skills Should I Start With?

Start your rapport-building skills with what we call SENSORY ACUITY. You have already started building this skill. We taught you to recognize what rep system people were using by listening to their predicates and watching their eyes and body language. Those are sensory acuity skills. Everything a person does is a message to you on how to build rapport with them. All you need is to know the code and the guidelines.

Have you ever been in the same room with someone and felt uncomfortable, or known that something was wrong, but didn't know why? With sensory acuity, you can describe everything about the person that was telegraphing signals to you.

For example, changes in posture can signal tension, extra skin moisture can signal anxiety or alarm, same thing with changes in heart rate that you can see from the carotid artery in the neck.

The face creates brief flashes of facial expression that are not controlled by the conscious mind. This has been shown in research using high speed video. And those are just a few body language elements.

Consider speech. On the physical level, you can hear stress in the voice. A dry mouth is a sign of anxiety or alarm. But also consider the hidden messages in what people say.

Their accent not only tells you where they are from, but their accent and vocabulary tell you their educational level. They drop hints on things like their feelings about personal responsibility and what kind of people they trust and don't trust.

As you connect with people during the week, pay attention to these signals, in fact, to all the different signals that people send off. A good cardiologist will tell you that when they started medical school, they only heard two things when they listened to a heart. Lub and dub. Lub dub, lub dub. But with experience, they came to hear all sorts of other things, like prolapsed valves, heart murmurs, and much more. So it is with sensory acuity. The more you pay attention, the more you will
come to see, hear and feel. When you aren't building rapport, you can use this skill at parties reading people's palms as a diversion.

How Should I Practice This?

A great way to start is with people that you already know something about.

Notice how the various signals they put out go with the things you know about them. Then think of as many people as you can who share one of those traits, and what
they had in common.

The next step is to rate in your mind the stress level of every one you see for a week.

Notice how their stress level can change up and down in an instant. Watch for paleness, facial expression changes, tension, rigid body language, slight withdrawing in apprehension, how hard they are trying to act natural, and so forth.

Here is something that will help you with this part. When people feel fear or excitement, they are activating a part of their nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system.

This does a lot of things, and you can observe many of them. Here are the most obvious ones: pupil dilation, that is, pupils getting larger; thinning of the lips, more muscle tension, paler skin, more skin moisture, more aggressive or withdrawn body language (yes, it can go either way), a tighter voice, the face stretched somewhat more, and faster foot motions, perhaps even being more on their toes. These are all the things that the body does when it thinks it may have to fight or run away. Perhaps you've heard of the fight or flight reaction. Well, this is it, this is the action of the sympathetic nervous system.

When you do rapport building, you will see a very different set of signals from people. They are similar to what you will see in practicing hypnosis.

Then How Will I Actually Create Rapport?

The key to rapport is to adopt an overall state that is similar to the other person. You start by using your sensory acuity to size up the various subconscious signals
that they are putting out, and telling you what state they are in. This is called calibration. Calibration is basically using the persons subconscious signals to know about their inner state.

Once you have done that, you can cultivate that state in yourself.

After all, people tend to like people that are similar to themselves. They can relate and they feel that they will be understood. They also feel some security because that makes you seem more predictable.

It may be a little easier, though, to simply start gently imitating certain key behaviors. This is called mirroring, or matching. This helps build your sensory acuity, because you have to pay attention to the aspect that you are imitating. It also teaches you a lot about calibration, because, as you imitate their key signals, that will tend to produce a state in you that is similar to theirs.

This is kind of subtle, but if you wanted to, you could go pretty far before anyone would think that you were imitating them. You will probably be surprised at how far
you can go.

The only reason you do not go too far is usually that you don't want to have completely different personalities and then be in the same room with two very different
people that you have done this with. You would be wondering who to act like, or maybe you'd suddenly need to leave because of a family emergency just to get out of there.

Let's go through each of the behavior- MIRRORING SKILLS that are especially powerful ways to develop rapport.

Posture

Posture is pretty easy. Without mirroring every single thing about other people's posture, practice adopting the basic stance or sitting position. Resting on the same arm (except as a mirror image, your right to their left) gives you a similar alignment. A more leaning forward, straight up, or leaning back posture match is good. This leaves out the more obvious things like crossing arms or legs. But you can try this as well, especially if it is not a person who would be looking for this kind of thing.

Movement

Movement is another. What is their general style of movement? How fast, how much gesturing, how open or closed. This sort of thing. Make your movement kind of similar to that.

Breathing

Breathing is very interesting. If you match the person's breathing, it can have a powerful effect. It's a little harder than the other things, because it is an ongoing
concern about timing, but as you get more comfortable with mirroring, start developing this match up as well. This is used in hypnosis, and affects the timing of your verbal statements, speaking during the exhale.

Source: (Page 317 of "The Big Book Of NLP")