How to build excellent rapport:
by Terry Elston
A fantastic place to start on building a good relationship quickly is to attain good rapport with the other person. Basic NLP training provides a toolbox of techniques, which offers ways of doing this effortlessly and unconsciously.
Imagine being able to understand unconscious communication, and how to communicate with the unconscious by using language patterns that make your powers of persuasion hard to resist. Listening to the language people use gives you clues as to how your clients are processing language. If you can mirror their style more accurately, you can enhance your communication with them. You can harmonise with them and draw out the learning more effectively.
The Myth of Matching and Mirroring
What most NLP practitioners have been trained in, is something called matching and mirroring. I am going to show you how this works in the next few paragraphs. Before that though, I am going to denominalise it and throw out the myth that it is normally associated with it.
What actually happens is that two or more people share energy fields. You can feel if someone else is ‘with’ you or not ‘with’ you in energy. You get good ‘vibes’ (energy vibrations, of course), or not!
That’s how you can easily turn your back on someone and still stay very connected (and they will still feel the connection). So the next pieces on matching and mirroring are a little redundant, unless you don’t know how to connect with people energetically.
That’s not to say that matching and mirroring doesn’t work, far from it: In the process of matching and mirroring, at the very least you have to be on the outside, observing them. Then you can’t be completely in your own head, without any frame of reference to their body language and state!
So what I am saying is that the natural process of rapport comes from an inner hunger and thirst to really connect.
What is really happening is you are connecting with people energetically. When you recognise that it’s the energy that’s connecting, you won’t have to use your body movements so much to make this happen. The process involved requires intention on your part. To develop energy connections involves wanting to and then making it happen.
I rarely have to ‘turn on’ my physical rapport techniques because there are normally so many naturally occurring good feelings present in any situation to begin with.
This is one of a series of articles about the real understanding of NLP Training
