Rapport is the basis and foundation for every meaningful interaction between two or more people. Rapport is about establishing an environment of trust and understanding, to respect and honor the other person's world. This allows the person the freedom to fully express their ideas and feelings and know they'll be respected and appreciated by you.
Researchers at the Boston University Medical School studied films of people having conversations. The researchers noticed that the people talking began (unconsciously) to co-ordinate their movements (including finger movements, eye blinks and head nods). As the conversations progressed, these people were getting into a deeper level rapport with each other, and didn't even have a clue to what was going on, this is because we communicate our ideas and concepts at this 93% unconscious level.
And NLP rapport skills teach us how to communicate at that unconscious level. NLP teaches how to mirror and match that 55% physiology, 38% tonality and 7% predicates or process words.
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 behaviors.
Mirroring is a method of building a strong "second position" with someone else. It is a fundamental skill for modeling another person and for developing intuitions about the person's internal experience. To get a sense of the influence and effects of mirroring, try out the following exercise. The purpose of the following exercises is to provide some experience with the basic processes and procedures of modeling:
1. Choose a partner, or person to converse with.
2. Enter into a conversation with the person, asking for his or her opinions about various subjects.
3. As you are conversing, begin to subtly mirror the other person's physiology (including voice tone and tempo).
4. When you are fully mirroring, you will be sitting in the same posture, using the same types of gestures, speaking at a similar speed and volume, and in a similar voice tone range, as the other person. Notice how it feels when you have reached this level of deep rapport.
5. One way to test your degree of rapport is by "second guessing" the other person's opinion on a couple of subjects that you have not yet discussed.
6. To get another sense of the influence mirroring and matching has on your interaction; try out abruptly mismatching the other person, in posture, gestures, voice tone and breathing. Both you and your partner should experience quite a jolt if you do this, and feel as if your quality of rapport has changed dramatically.
7. Before concluding your conversation and letting your partner in on what you were doing, make sure you have reestablished rapport by once again physically mirroring your partner.
The fact that you've read this far means that you can see the benefits of increasing your rapport skills. Reading is sadly not enough - practice is the key to building skill, so do the exercises.
Ben Tien has been writing many articles about Hypnosis how to hypnotize. Read his recently article about: How to hypnotize someone