11:05 PM
Unknown
No matter what your goals happen to be, in most instances, there
are people who can help you reach them far faster than you ever could
solely on your own. People are, without question, your greatest
resource. If you look back through history you will find that people who
were able to change the world in dramatic and epidemic ways were people
who had the ability to influence, enlist the help of, mobilize and
connect with vast
numbers of people. Spiritual leaders like Jesus, Siddhartha (the Buddha) and Gandhi, inventors like Edison and Tesla, industrialists like Ford and Rockefeller, politicos like Churchill and Lincoln or maybe simply the best teacher you ever had, all had something in common... the ability to create rapport with groups of people who then tipped the scale of their cause in very impactful ways. The tool that virtually all of them used is the tool of rapport. We all have some sense of what rapport means, although it probably doesn't mean exactly the same thing to everyone. Most people tend to see it as being in sync or simply liking someone.
While both of those descriptions are partially accurate, they do not paint the full picture. When you strip away all the subjectivity involved with an effort to describe rapport, you are left with one very simple concept... the perception of sameness. In other words, people tend to have rapport with or "like" persons they believe to be like themselves. Think about it for a bit and you will begin to understand. Simply look around you at your friends, family, co-workers, etc. Who do you gravitate to? The folks you have the most in common with. Perhaps the most inaccurate axiom ever coined is opposites attract. While you can certainly find examples of it, it is by far the exception and NOT the rule. If it were the rule, the world would be an utterly different place. For example, the races would be far less segregated; nations would engage in war less, Christians would choose atheists as their friends and so on. In reality, we all know better. Why do clubs of all manners exist? Hiking clubs, motorcycle clubs, quilting clubs, the democrat and republican parties, churches, social clubs, the list is virtually endless. They all exist for one reason... to bring like-minded individuals together. People are comfortable with sameness. They are uncomfortable with differences.
Rapport or the perception of sameness occurs at two levels... conscious and unconscious. Conscious rapport is the obvious attraction you feel toward someone who you perceive to be like you... your friends for example. Unconscious rapport on the other hand happens at a much deeper level. Allow me to explain. When I am teaching live seminars I can observe people in the front row and with an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy, tell you which people know one another and which do not; even without observing them prior to the start of the seminar and even if they have not spoken to one another. Magic? No, physiology, or in other words, how they have arranged themselves physically in relation to the people adjacent to them. It is a tremendous eye opener once you know what to look for. You see, people who have rapport, and are in sync if you will, tend to adopt very similar postures. You can see this every day in the world around you if you take the time to notice and this happens almost completely out of conscious awareness. The next time you are at a social gathering, watch and see. You will quickly realize how easy it is to tell which people are in rapport and which are not. This unconscious phenomenon is called matching and mirroring. The terms were first coined by the founders of NLP, Dr.'s John Grinder and Richard Bandler. They had become aware of it while studying the therapeutic techniques of Dr. Milton Erikson, MD, widely regarded as one of the greatest psychotherapists of his time. What they began to notice was Dr. Erikson's uncanny ability to create almost instant and deep rapport with any of his patients regardless of how dissimilar they were to him in either appearance or attitude. In an effort to uncover the secret to his technique, they employed something called behavioral modeling. A tool which takes observable behaviors and chunks them down into tiny pieces so that analysis and understanding can take place and the map of the behavior can be used to transfer it to another person. What they discovered from Dr. Erikson was that he was using his body and his language to create this rapport and he was doing it consciously. Dr. Erikson understood at a fundamental level that rapport is the perception of sameness so he aligned his posture and his language to closely match or mirror that of his patient's. Their perception of this was out of their conscious awareness however the result was a profound sense of rapport with the famed therapist and rapport means trust, and trust, in a therapeutic environment, is critical to success.
In a nutshell Dr. Erikson was subtly mimicking the body posture of his patients. For example, if you are facing someone you want to create rapport with, notice how they are arranged... legs crossed, hand face down on lap, head slightly tilted to one side, arms folded, etc. Then slowly begin adjusting your posture so that it becomes a near mirror image. Do not be exaggerated or overt rather slow and subtle until you are very near the same posture. I understand that this may seem unnatural to you at first however you are doing something that already occurs naturally when people are in rapport with one another. It is for this very reason that the shifts will not be consciously perceived by the other person. They will however begin to have a sense of rapport with you. If you find yourself adjacent to someone such as on a plane, at a dinner table or in a conference, you will not mirror the person (left leg crossed for them means right leg crossed for you) but you will match them (left leg crossed for them means left leg crossed for you). When you are facing someone, mirroring creates the greatest sense of sameness. When you are adjacent, matching does the better job. All of this is much simpler in action than it may sound in verbal description. It is actually no more difficult to master that the child's game of copycat. Once you begin to sense rapport, you can test and this is the really amazing part. If you have effectively established rapport, when you shift away from the mirror or matched physiology, the pother person will begin to follow YOU. This is known as pacing and leading. You can try this in a restaurant nest time you are out having dinner. Pick someone at another table in the room who is within you peripheral vision but not directly facing you. Slowly begin to match or mirror (depending on the position in relation to you) their every move. As they take a bite of food, so do you. As they take a drink, so do you. As they lean forward, lean back, gesture, smile... so do you. After a few minutes of this, begin leading the dance. You will be astonished at what will happen. They will begin following you even though they are not consciously aware of you or seeing you other than from their periphery. This is the seemingly magical power of matching and mirroring, pacing and leading. Another great example to illustrate the impact of this is to sit with your spouse or friend, tell them what you are doing then deliberately match their posture for a minute or two, see how it feels. The one of you shift to a completely different posture, now check and see how that feels. Not nearly as comfortable I can promise you. Give it a try!
numbers of people. Spiritual leaders like Jesus, Siddhartha (the Buddha) and Gandhi, inventors like Edison and Tesla, industrialists like Ford and Rockefeller, politicos like Churchill and Lincoln or maybe simply the best teacher you ever had, all had something in common... the ability to create rapport with groups of people who then tipped the scale of their cause in very impactful ways. The tool that virtually all of them used is the tool of rapport. We all have some sense of what rapport means, although it probably doesn't mean exactly the same thing to everyone. Most people tend to see it as being in sync or simply liking someone.
While both of those descriptions are partially accurate, they do not paint the full picture. When you strip away all the subjectivity involved with an effort to describe rapport, you are left with one very simple concept... the perception of sameness. In other words, people tend to have rapport with or "like" persons they believe to be like themselves. Think about it for a bit and you will begin to understand. Simply look around you at your friends, family, co-workers, etc. Who do you gravitate to? The folks you have the most in common with. Perhaps the most inaccurate axiom ever coined is opposites attract. While you can certainly find examples of it, it is by far the exception and NOT the rule. If it were the rule, the world would be an utterly different place. For example, the races would be far less segregated; nations would engage in war less, Christians would choose atheists as their friends and so on. In reality, we all know better. Why do clubs of all manners exist? Hiking clubs, motorcycle clubs, quilting clubs, the democrat and republican parties, churches, social clubs, the list is virtually endless. They all exist for one reason... to bring like-minded individuals together. People are comfortable with sameness. They are uncomfortable with differences.
Rapport or the perception of sameness occurs at two levels... conscious and unconscious. Conscious rapport is the obvious attraction you feel toward someone who you perceive to be like you... your friends for example. Unconscious rapport on the other hand happens at a much deeper level. Allow me to explain. When I am teaching live seminars I can observe people in the front row and with an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy, tell you which people know one another and which do not; even without observing them prior to the start of the seminar and even if they have not spoken to one another. Magic? No, physiology, or in other words, how they have arranged themselves physically in relation to the people adjacent to them. It is a tremendous eye opener once you know what to look for. You see, people who have rapport, and are in sync if you will, tend to adopt very similar postures. You can see this every day in the world around you if you take the time to notice and this happens almost completely out of conscious awareness. The next time you are at a social gathering, watch and see. You will quickly realize how easy it is to tell which people are in rapport and which are not. This unconscious phenomenon is called matching and mirroring. The terms were first coined by the founders of NLP, Dr.'s John Grinder and Richard Bandler. They had become aware of it while studying the therapeutic techniques of Dr. Milton Erikson, MD, widely regarded as one of the greatest psychotherapists of his time. What they began to notice was Dr. Erikson's uncanny ability to create almost instant and deep rapport with any of his patients regardless of how dissimilar they were to him in either appearance or attitude. In an effort to uncover the secret to his technique, they employed something called behavioral modeling. A tool which takes observable behaviors and chunks them down into tiny pieces so that analysis and understanding can take place and the map of the behavior can be used to transfer it to another person. What they discovered from Dr. Erikson was that he was using his body and his language to create this rapport and he was doing it consciously. Dr. Erikson understood at a fundamental level that rapport is the perception of sameness so he aligned his posture and his language to closely match or mirror that of his patient's. Their perception of this was out of their conscious awareness however the result was a profound sense of rapport with the famed therapist and rapport means trust, and trust, in a therapeutic environment, is critical to success.
In a nutshell Dr. Erikson was subtly mimicking the body posture of his patients. For example, if you are facing someone you want to create rapport with, notice how they are arranged... legs crossed, hand face down on lap, head slightly tilted to one side, arms folded, etc. Then slowly begin adjusting your posture so that it becomes a near mirror image. Do not be exaggerated or overt rather slow and subtle until you are very near the same posture. I understand that this may seem unnatural to you at first however you are doing something that already occurs naturally when people are in rapport with one another. It is for this very reason that the shifts will not be consciously perceived by the other person. They will however begin to have a sense of rapport with you. If you find yourself adjacent to someone such as on a plane, at a dinner table or in a conference, you will not mirror the person (left leg crossed for them means right leg crossed for you) but you will match them (left leg crossed for them means left leg crossed for you). When you are facing someone, mirroring creates the greatest sense of sameness. When you are adjacent, matching does the better job. All of this is much simpler in action than it may sound in verbal description. It is actually no more difficult to master that the child's game of copycat. Once you begin to sense rapport, you can test and this is the really amazing part. If you have effectively established rapport, when you shift away from the mirror or matched physiology, the pother person will begin to follow YOU. This is known as pacing and leading. You can try this in a restaurant nest time you are out having dinner. Pick someone at another table in the room who is within you peripheral vision but not directly facing you. Slowly begin to match or mirror (depending on the position in relation to you) their every move. As they take a bite of food, so do you. As they take a drink, so do you. As they lean forward, lean back, gesture, smile... so do you. After a few minutes of this, begin leading the dance. You will be astonished at what will happen. They will begin following you even though they are not consciously aware of you or seeing you other than from their periphery. This is the seemingly magical power of matching and mirroring, pacing and leading. Another great example to illustrate the impact of this is to sit with your spouse or friend, tell them what you are doing then deliberately match their posture for a minute or two, see how it feels. The one of you shift to a completely different posture, now check and see how that feels. Not nearly as comfortable I can promise you. Give it a try!
Edward Dunn is an NLP Master Practitioner, author and teacher.
He writes at http://SpiritualJourneyGuide.com
He writes at http://SpiritualJourneyGuide.com
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Edward_G._Dunn
Posted in: How to Create Virtually Instant Rapport Using NLP
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