Rapport and Body Language

This is by far the most important skill you will learn. It builds understanding, trust and respect between 2 people or a group of people. Rapport creates the space for the person to feel listened to, and heard. It does not mean that they have to agree with what the other person says or does. Each person appreciates the other’s viewpoint and respects their model of the world.

When you are in rapport with another person, you have the opportunity to enter their world and see things from their perspective, feel the way they do, get a better understanding of where they are coming from; and as a result, enhance the whole relationship.

The key to establishing rapport is an ability to enter another person’s world by assuming a similar state of mind. The first thing to do is to become more like the other person by matching and mirroring the person’s behaviours, body language, voice, words etc. Matching and mirroring is a powerful way of getting an appreciation of how the other person is seeing/experiencing the world.

Matching and mirroring are used interchangeably by some NLP practitioners. Mirroring is as if you were looking into a mirror. To mirror a person who has raised his right hand, you would raise your left hand (i.e. mirror image). To match this same person, you would raise your right-hand (doing exactly the same as the other person). However you do not match and mirror as soon as the other person makes a gesture, the trick here is to be subtle and wait for  short time before you match or mirror.

When matching, you should first focus on body language, then voice and finally the person’s words. Why? Mehrabian and Ferris discovered that 55 percent of the impact of a presentation is determined by your body language, 38 percent by your voice and only 7 percent by the content or words that you use.

Body language includes body posture, facial expressions, hand gestures, breathing and eye contact. As a beginner, start by matching one specific behavior and once you are comfortable doing that, then match another and so on.

For voice, you can match tonality, speed, volume, rhythm and clarity of speech. All of us can vary various aspects of our voice and we have a range in which we feel comfortable. If someone speaks very fast, much faster than you do and at a rate at which you would not feel comfortable; match this person by speaking faster, while staying within a range that is comfortable for you.

For words, match predicates. If your partner is using mainly visual words, (see, look, view) you should also use mainly visual words and similarly for auditory, (hear, listen, sounds) kinesthetic (feel, touch grasp) and auditory digital words (sense, think, learn). You should also use the same words as the other person. That is why it is so important to listen, especially to your customers, by listening to what they say, you should be able to understand
your customers model of the world giving you a distinct advantage.