Influencing Skills To Build Instant Rapport

By Author: Humir Madrid
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Rapport is essential in a healthy relationship with anyone. Rapport building skills are a part of influencing skills that you can use to help people to like you in order to create win-win situation and achieve your goals. Whether it is meeting potential buyers in sales, or landing an exciting contract, or even developing relationship friends and family, rapport is very essential. Without it, you will hardly achieve anything.

There are numerous ways of building rapport. Some of these techniques are derived from NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which is a growing self-help tool. Whichever method you use, realize that it may take some time and practice to get good at it. You might make mistakes at first. Accept them as part of a learning experience. You will no doubt get better after consistent practice.

Shared Commonalities

We often like people who are similar to us. We tend to feel more at ease and safe with people with whom we have shared commonalties. There’s a saying that birds of a feather flock together. The more we have something in common with another person, the more we tend to like them. This ...
... is one way to build rapport.

You need to find commonalties with another person as quickly as possible, usually within the first few minutes of meeting them. This is often done through small talk or casual conversation. Ask questions about what type of food they like to eat, what kind of music they listen to, which basketball team they like, etc. Find as many commonalties as you can within the first few minutes of conversation. Obviously, you don’t have to have a lot of things in common with them in order to gain rapport. One or two would be enough.

Pacing

This is an NLP technique in which you match and mirror another person’s physiology without making it seem obvious. The point of this technique is not to 100% mimic the other person’s posture or movements. You just have to match with their general posture and general tone of voice, etc. For example, if the person you’re talking with is leaning forward, you might want to lean forward by just a little bit as well.

Other things to mirror and match are the person’s rhythm of speech and the person’s breathing. Matching the other person’s breathing is relatively harder and requires some practice. When matching the other person’s speech, factors to consider are volume, pitch, and speed. These things don’t have to be exactly the same as the other person’s, as long as you match it a little bit. Obviously if the person is yelling, you don’t have to yell at the same time. You might want to raise your voice just a little bit.

Leading

One way to test whether you are in rapport with another person is when they are the ones who are matching and mirroring your physiology. This is called leading When you are in rapport with someone, try to lead them by changing your posture. If you are in rapport, the other person will match your new posture. This is a very fun thing to do.

Three of the ways that you can gain instant rapport are shared commonalties, pacing, and leading. If you practice these techniques, your influencing skills will benefit greatly.

For more information on improving persuasion skills or social skills in general, please visit Influencing Skills at http://influencingskills.org