We’ve been talking a lot this month about our chatter: what we do (and don’t) say, and a little about how we might get to a better version of ourselves through speaking our truths. Knowing what we want and where we want to end up is such an exciting thing, and it seems that it’s often enhanced when we have someone to travel along with.

Which brings us to one of our fave topics: rapport. 

Rapport is defined as “a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other’s feelings or ideas and communicate well.” 

It’s the understanding and the well that is important here. 

In NLP, rapport is defined as: “building trust through finding similarities at a conscious and unconscious level.” Now wouldn’t that be a useful little thing to know…

We don’t have to agree to understand each other. Nor do we need (or perhaps even want) to have the same ‘model of the world’ as our friends and family, but we do want to be able to join their model, either briefly or for a longer stay, in order to communicate well. We chat a lot in here about the people you surround yourself with, and how you often desire to be truly seen and heard by your herd. You want them to feel what you feel. 

The key to this is rapport. In fact, when you are in rapport with people, you can get away with the most fabulous and outrageous statements and things. Miraculously, truth and trust don’t end up as roadkill. 

So what is this magical rapport? How do we get “in it” and how can we use it for the greater good? If you look up ‘rapport’ you’ll find a lot of stuff about content rapport. How if you copy someone’s body language and use the same words, you will get in rapport with them and you can then easily sell them on any idea you have. Not quite, and yet that is a part of rapport. The juicy bit of rapport though is process rapport. Which is where match the intensity of someone else’s state and join their model of the world, so we show them that we know where they are coming from. 

Sam uses a fantastic example of a flight of stairs (we will elaborate on this in the podcast this week), but the gist is: when someone is sitting on the bottom of the stairs, in some kind of perturbed state, it’s not always useful to just stand at the top and yell at them to come on up and check out the view. However, if we are able to skilfully get in rapport with them, and join their model of the world, then we can pace where they are at, and then lead them to a new way of seeing and being. It could be one step at a time, or in leaps and bounds, depending on how well we stay in rapport. 

Learning how to get in rapport with others will lead to a richness in connection, as well as an ability to lead us to much greater heights. Happily, rapport is something that we can learn. 

This week, we want you to have a look at your ability to get in rapport with the people around you. Are you able to easily ‘read’ your people, and understand where they are coming from, or do you find that you sometimes miss the mark? 

Do you ‘match’ people before you attempt to lead them to a new place, or do you prefer to just try and jolly (or bully) them along? 

Most of us will have done all of these, and more, so this week, let’s notice so we can become more effective chatterboxes.