Rapport Series: Volume 1

Previously I’ve mentioned how on a deep and primal level, we look for similarities with others when I was expounding upon my insight of that reaching so deep as to influence the modern day usage of the word ‘like’. I’ve since been contacted by parties interested in learning a bit more about rapport building strategies, and, since I’ve been busy and am suffering a profound lack of any recent earth shattering insights, I’ll indulge my nascent fans by running through a bit of an abridged crash course on general rapport techniques. They’ll come out when they’re out, for more advanced discourse on the topic there are any number of persuasion schools and programs, as well as sales training, NLP, or even ‘seduction sciences’. I encourage the interested reader to continue advancing their knowledge through whichever medium they find most compelling.

I know, gentle reader, you're thinking rapport techniques are FASCINATING, that building rapport is interesting, and you consider it useful to develop, and this means you can find yourself easily integrating the rapport techniques you’re about to learn into your behavior so that in a couple month when you look back at this day you’ll marvel at how you’ve adopted these skills so easily and quickly as your own natural skillset. (Congratulations, you’ve just been NLPed! You can try to resist absorbing what I’m about to show you deep inside your mind but you’ll find the more you read, the deeper you’ll learn and understand the techniques before you. While your conscious mind can read the words from the page, your unconscious mind finds a deeper understanding and you may notice yourself adopting these behaviors in the days and weeks ahead or notice or perhaps longer but always at a rate and speed best for you, as supplied for you by your protective unconscious mind. )

Now that your grey matter has been poked and prodded, let’s get to the good stuff.

‘You’re my kind of person.’ Briefly retreading an old path, once again, people tend to be attracted to people with similarities. No, not the JUMP YOUR BONE kind of attraction, but more like the communication between friends (although it can be used as a lead in for such, but not the scope of this post). We innately like similarity, and we learn from differences.

The overall umbrella where rapport techniques fall under is the concept of matching and mirroring. This first article will discuss how its done physically. Later ones get into tonality, representation systems, pacing and leading, and testing for rapport.

Mirroring is like becoming a mirror image of another person. Be astounded as I represent it with my incredible internet artistic abilities.

This is Kirby <(^_^)>
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Mirroring Kirbified
<(^_^)> <(^_^<) (^_^) (^_^)>

<( x )> <( x ) ( x ) ( x )>

You become like the mirror of someone else. Now don’t do this exactly with every movement that they do or it becomes painfully obvious and disconcerting (like little kids being irritating by mimicking each other). You want to give it some time (use common sense) but generally make it within 10-20 seconds or so, and slowly, unless the person your mirroring is frenetic.

Matching is along the lines of doing the same movement, or adopting the same position but instead of analogues with mirroring, if the person you’re building rapport with is moving their right hand back, you move your right hand back. Generally same rules apply and its easy enough to practice in casual interactions with your friends. Why? Because you do a lot of it already! My previous post on ‘like’ has a few common examples.

Physiological matching and mirroring includes postures, blinking, movements (gestures), breathing, and expressions. Chasing gestures while the person you’re building rapport with is speaking to you can be stupid (imagine someone speaking and waving their hands and how ridiculous it is if there you are silently following suit, common sense people). Remember, overdoing the matching/mirroring is bad. You don’t have to chase down every single motion, spasm, twitch, or what have you. Calibrate for the situation, and its easy enough to practice. Matching breathing is powerful. We do this all the time in conversations, eventually the pace of the old inhale/exhale melds together for two people in rapport. You can boost this artificially for taking stock and observing the natural rise and fall of the chest (especially enjoyable if it’s the chest of a particularly well endowed member of the fairer sex), and shift yourself into that pattern. The real key is to be attentive, which is also a skill worth developing, and the rest comes easily and naturally. Matching and Mirroring when you perform it is called pacing, and more will be gotten into that later.