Rapport is an essential part of all forms of communication. In hypnosis, we always rely on establishing rapport with anyone we intend to hypnotise. Whether we intend to hypnotise a person voluntarily or involuntarily, rapport must first be established before a person's subconscious is ready to embrace any suggestions that we give them. Without rapport, a person will not feel comfortable with any of our suggestions, and their subconscious will reject them.
We only establish rapport naturally with approximately 25% of people we speak to. We're able to establish this natural form of rapport because we have some deep form of connection with these 25% of people. This deep form of connection can result from having something in common, behaving in similar ways, or having similar body language.
In NLP, there are a number of techniques that are used to establish rapport with the other 75% of people that we meet, people that are not like us, people that we don't have much in common with , people with completely different personalities.
The first thing to understand is that rapport is established from a subconscious level. When we speak to someone we either get natural feelings of warmth, familiarity and a sense of having a lot in common, or we get feelings of difference, negativity or just generally not having much in common.
The thing that determines whether or not someone will view us as either being warm, friendly and familiar, or as being different, negative and uninteresting, is how much their subconscious believes we have something in common with them.
So how do we manipulate a person's subconscious into thinking that we have something in common? It's through a technique known as Matching and Mirroring. With Matching and Mirroring, we are replicating everything about a person's communicational behaviour, both verbal and non-verbal, in a manner that isn't obvious.
When people speak, they display body language subconsciously. Their hands may move, their eyes may change their focus, their head may sway in different directions, even their general posture may change. All these behaviours stem from the subconscious.
If we replicate a person's body language, their subconscious will think that we have a lot in common with them. The moment however that the person becomes consciously aware that we're replicating their body language, they may begin to think that we're mocking them, or that we're copying them because we're incapable of creating our own body language, and any established rapport will usually be broken.
We therefore have to be careful not to make the process too obvious. We do this through two techniques - delay and mirroring. With delay, we don't immediately copy a person's body language. We copy their body language with a slight delay, normally of about 3 seconds. If the person looks at a certain object, we don't look at the object at the same time in perfect synchronisation, we wait 3 seconds, then look at the object, then return our focus to where the person is looking. Likewise, if the person is speaking, moving their hands in a certain manner, we don't replicate their hand movements immediately. We wait a few seconds, and replicate the hand movements when appropriate, as if agreeing with what the person is saying.
For example -
If a person makes a circular motion with one of their hands, saying "and I really think that he shouldn't have done that, it just wasn't nice".
We would wait for 3 seconds, then make the same circular motion with our hand, and nod our head slightly as if agreeing with the person. This establishes rapport with the person as they subconsciously think that you can understand and agree with what they're saying.
To further make the process less obvious, we use the technique of mirroring. Mirroring is doing the opposite to what the person is doing, in terms of their body language. If the person makes an exaggerated motion with their right hand, then you do the same but with your left hand. If the person looks down to their right for a brief moment whilst thinking, you look down to your left.
Keep in mind that you must also delay your mirroring. Wait for 3 seconds, then mirror the person's behaviour.
When studying NLP, one is taught how to pick up on the many different signs of body language and how to replicate them. Hand movement is just one basic form of body language, there are other, more crucial forms of body language that can be mirrored such as eye movement, breathing rate, mouth movement, facial expressions etc.
Of equal importance to body language is verbal tone of voice and speed of speaking. An NLP practitioner is able to determine how fast or slow a person speaks, what their tonality is, and is able to replicate that when they speak.
All of these techniques go together in order to establish rapport with a person that you don't necessarily have much in common with.
|
