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Welcome to Module 2.1 Return to Dashboard
Module 2.2
Module 2.3
In terms of cooperative relationships, one of the most well known corporate examples is Semco, a large Brazilian based company that makes things like industrial size air conditioners, pumps, and dishwashers. In the early 1980s its Manager Ricardo Semler fired his 15 top executives, and set in place a new kind of company. He created an environment where workers collectively decide everything from where factories get built to who their coordinator is, at regular factory committee meetings. Shopfloor workers set their own productivity targets and schedules, and so on. Rules about what clothes workers wear and what union they join were abolished, and in their place came agreements requiring that no-one talks in a way that shows disrespect or is designed to instill fear in others.
When he began, Semler knew he had to find a rather unique person to be “Human Resources Director” for the new company. He interviewed a man named Clovis Bojikian, who had previously been director of teacher training at the University of Sao Paulo. Bojikian was a trainer of teachers, and a promoter of alternative schooling models where the students and teachers met together to run their school.
In his book Maverick, Semler describes his first meeting with Bojikian. He says that almost from the start they were “completing each others sentences”. In short, they spent three hours talking like old friends. Bojikian was hired on the spot, and it was about a week before they realised that neither of them had discussed his salary. But the two men had created the most important of all communication successes; they had rapport.
Rapport is that good feeling you get with friends, colleagues or family that you know really well. The sense that you and they are almost sharing one mind…
A year after that meeting, the changes at Semco were in full swing, and the financial success of the new model company was already apparent. And at that point, Clovis Bojikian was made an offer by a large Brazilian finance company – a job with three times his current salary. Semler didn’t offer Bojikian more money. He agreed that the finance company’s offer was tempting, and left Bojikian to decide.
Every relationship faces challenges. The question is, how to create a sense of rapport that withstands those challenges. Could Semler’s friendship really be worth more than tripling his salary? You can imagine how curious Semler was about that. No-one can give you communication skills that guarantee success every time. All we can do is show you how to maximise the trust, respect, and cooperation of those you live and work with. And the place to start doing that is with Rapport.
When it comes down to it, rapport is so simple it can be summed up in a single sentence:
to create rapport with someone, pace or mirror enough of their behaviours so they get the sense you understand them, elegantly enough so it doesn’t distract them. The only complexity is knowing what to mirror or pace.
The answers lie in:
- postures and gestures
- breathing
- skin changes (a little hard at first)
- eye movements
- voice
Observe two people who are getting on well with each other, and the chances are they’ll be talking at a similar speed, at a similar volume, and in a similar tone. To do that, they probably breathe at a similar rate. Their posture and gestures will tend to be a mirror image of each other (when one waves to the side with their right hand, you’ll see the other’s left hand flick across a little), even to the extent that as one looks down, the other will gaze that way too. They will also be likely to use similar language, and restate each other’s main points before adding their own.
If you’re involved in any kind of group, watch people over the next sessions and notice who is in rapport with who. This isn’t mimicking (which usually means exaggerating someone’s body language to make a joke of it). It’s something more subtle. If you are just learning to use rapport, you’ll be safer to copy one or two things at a time, and to understate your own version slightly (so as to be sure not to overdo it). You’ll know it has worked because, when you gently change your behaviour, the person you began to mirror will change with you.
For example, parents often have excellent rapport with their young children. And when the parents are getting ready to go out – therefore, their pulse starts to speed up, they breathe faster, and so on – their child starts to speed up too (and is thus difficult to put to sleep). Mothers of young children often discover that the easiest way to get a child to sleep is to physically lie down beside them and to go to sleep too (once you realise how it works, you can choose just to gradually slow down your breathing to a sleeping rate, thus saving on wasted time).
In his book Unlimited Power, NLP Trainer Anthony Robbins gives several examples of his use of rapport. In one situation, he went to New York’s Central Park to relax. Noticing a man sitting across from him, he began (without giving it much thought) to sit the way this man was, breathe the way he was, sway his head a little as he did, and so on. As the other man fed the birds breadcrumbs, so did Robbins. Soon the man came over to sit beside him. Robbins continued to mirror his voice tone and phraseology. Within a few minutes the man expressed a belief that Robbins was ‘a very intelligent man’ and that he felt he knew Robbins better than people he’d known for 25 years. Soon after this, he offered him a job!
What would Robbins have done if the man told him to stop copying? This is something that often worries people learning pacing and mirroring skills (these words are used interchangeably to mean copying the other person’s behaviour). My guess is that he would simply have apologised. He might have explained that he was trying to more fully understand the other person. Certainly, as he apologised, he would have continued to pace the man’s use of sensory representational systems (talking about seeing, hearing, or feeling depending on which the other person used), just as he would have continued to use English, not German. Everyone expects to be mirrored to some extent; the only question is how much.
Once you have mirrored someone to the extent that rapport is established, then the two of you are connected almost like two magnets. When one moves, the other will tend to move. This fact can be used to assist someone to change. For example, if I’m talking with someone who is depressed, I begin talking at their rate, sitting in a similar (slumped) position to them, and so on. Then, once I’ve acknowledged their depression verbally and non-verbally (so rapport is established), I very gently begin to adjust my own voice, position and breathing back to my normal level. They will tend to follow. In NLP, this process is called Pacing and Leading. If the other person doesn’t follow my “lead”, I simply return to “pacing” (mirroring) them some more. There’s no such thing as a person who’s resistant to change. In every situation where someone else doesn’t change in the way they’ve chosen, more pacing is the solution to get them on board with the leading you are doing.
In 1995 a remarkable area of neurons was discovered by researchers working at the University of Palma in Italy. The cells, now called “mirror neurons”, are found in the brains of monkeys and apes as well as humans. In humans they form part of the specific area called Broca’s area, which is also involved in the creation of speech. When we see another person gesture or make a facial expression, when we hear them speak, the mirror neurons cause us to respond by copying. This enables us to get an internal experience of what it is like for the other person – an important skill for human society, and the source of the English saying “Monkey see, monkey do.”
Mirror neurons are the basis for rapport, and show us that rapport is “hard-wired” into our brains.
Of course, this raises an ethical issue. A salesperson can pace and lead someone to buy something they don’t actually need. The person would buy it “…because the salesperson was so nice and I just wanted to cooperate”. That’s not a result of NLP though. Using pacing and leading in this way is something successful salespeople have always used. But unless it’s used to help someone make decisions which suit their own goals, the technique can backfire. The person who bought five vacuum cleaners last week will feel angry this week. This so-called “buyers remorse” is not good for sales. The only sure way to use pacing and leading is to use it to help people reach goals which they’ve chosen themselves.
In rapport, the technical skill of mirroring blossoms into a feeling of having entered the other person’s inner world, of being tuned into their wavelength, of seeing life as it appears in their maps.This feeling, often called empathy, is an essential ingredient in all successful communication, but especially in helping.
Hundreds of research studies, over the last fifty years, consistently show that empathy is the key emotional quality required to help another person. Carl Rogers, who developed the reflective listening skill we’ll learn later in the course, states “Empathy is clearly related to positive outcome. From schizophrenic patients in psychiatric hospitals to pupils in ordinary classrooms, from clients of a counselling centre to teachers in training, from neurotics in Germany to neurotics in the United States, the evidence is the same.”
Empathy needs to be distinguished from sympathy. In empathy, it is as if you can experience the feelings of another, feeling these with them. In sympathy, one feels one’s own feelings for another. Sympathy means feeling sorry for another, for example, and often has a sense of looking down at the person. Empathy comes with a sense of equality, of sharing this moment. The feeling of empathy is an important clue that you have mastered the skill of mirroring.
How well do you think you’ll be able to use this skill? Let me remind you. To be reading this page to yourself, you had to learn to talk English. This is a process so complex that we can’t yet teach a computer to do it fully. And how did you learn to talk? By reading a book about it? By analysing the muscles of the mouth and throat? Not likely. You learned by mirroring other human beings, subtly, expertly, and consistently.
You have always had the skills to create rapport. Now you can find new ways to use these skills to build the kind of relationships you want, and to create, for those you live and work with, the sense of being fully understood and valued that they need.
Does this sound useful?…