Day 3: Managing Rapport

Why is it that very small children seem able to get their point across and you probably feel that there are many times a day when people just don't get simple communication. In day three of the NLP Practitioner certification at NLP Canada Training, we tackle the problem of how do you manage rapport? How do you make the most out of your opportunities to connect with other people? Why does it matter? Well, as human beings, we have evolved to learn from one another so that one person's experience can benefit lots of people. We've evolved for it, but it doesn't make it easy for an idea to jump from one person's head into another person's and still take on the same meaning, the same connotations, the same implications. Many times a day you connect with people and those connections change what you think and they change what you feel and they change what they think and what they feel.

And the trick is not to make a connection that has impact but to make a connection that has a reliable, predictable and favorable impact. So we start not with content, not with information, not even with language, but with who is showing up to connect. The person you are operationally, functionally in a moment is the person you are in that moment. And that includes your physical state, your emotional state, your mental state. When you go into an interaction with somebody else, you need two things to be happening at the same time. One is you need to form an intention to get something out of that interaction. That might be a little information, it might be some relationship building, or it might be to get somebody else to actually do something.

So you need a clear intention because if you don't have it there's so many variables the chances of getting what you want or of liking what you get are much slimmer. But at the same time, that other person has intentions. And the only way either of you is going to get what you want is if you also are prepared to relax and connect to match and mirror to allow some alignment of your states to occur so that you have the best chance of understanding another. So the day starts with a calibration game. A time when you knew what you wanted, a time when you wanted to connect. And by bringing both of those states into the room at the beginning of the day, we remind you that both of these states are fundamental to our ability to build the connections that get things done.

Then we're going to do an exercise that reminds us why it's worth it. Because so often it seems like I'll just do it myself is a better answer. It seems like people so complicated. It's so hard.

But we also learn so much from other people. And a lot of what we learn is non-verbal. It happens at the level of observation and pickup which makes things available in our brain for us to use later. And the most important things we learn from each other are not so much pieces of information which we can also learn now in other ways but they are states of being. How do you keep your cool? When? How do you make a connection?

When? [clears throat] How do you know what you're thinking? When? We look at other people as models. And if they can do the thing we want to do, we pay attention because our brains know if they can do it, there's a good chance we can learn to do it. In Dock of the Bay, we ask people to imagine stepping into the shoes of three different people who might have some ability, some state, some strength that would be useful to them. And as they step into these shoes, we say, "See what you see, hear what you hear, and feel what you feel." as that person's perceptions and experiences move in you and through you and become part of you.

Now obviously this is not some magic trick where you are temporarily inhabited by another person. This is a way of waking your brain up and saying, "Please access everything you've noticed about this other person. Put it to work in me. Now make the arrangements so that I hold myself a little differently. I breathe a little differently. I notice different things. And let me then notice what changes in me when I am in connection with this other person in this particular state that I have called up.

And by doing that we discover of course that the things we identify in other people become available in us. That we have a multitude of possibilities in every moment. And that the value in paying attention to other people is that it makes their states of mind and body available to us when we need them. When we come back after the first break, we're going to practice actually connecting this two-way interaction with other people. And the way that we often [snorts] practice all of the complicated aspects of communication at once is we tell stories. The stories we start with on this day are stories of actual physical scars and how you got them. And we use scar stories because they are a very natural way to evoke matching behaviors that you don't have to think about matching or mirroring because as you are drawn into this story that is a story of healing.

That's how you got a scar. Something bad happened and then it healed. But it's a story. It's got a little bit of drama to it and it's got a lot of commonality to it because we all have scars.

And so those stories as people tell them gets everybody listening to automatically do the matching of physical behaviors that they can observe of getting in sync as they move through the drama of the story. And we use those stories not so much for the content although the content is important because it is a pattern of harm and then healing but of showing how naturally and how energetically we can pay attention when information is offered in a form that is easy for us to relate to make images of in our minds and bodies so that we feel that we are experiencing it with the speaker. And we use all of that technique that we practice unconsciously as well as consciously for matching and mirroring when we move to the next layer which is adding language and understanding each other and we play two different games. One is called what I think you said and that is pretty straightforward listening game except that we add the NLP piece that as you listen to somebody and repeat back play back what you think they said you're also playing back the state in which they said it and you're becoming aware that using your body in this way allows you both to be clearer about what you're hearing and to remember it better because you're encoding it not just in language centers in your brain but using your whole body to encode it.

So as you play what I think you said you're testing your ability to actively listen to feedback but also importantly in NLP to pick up the state in which somebody is speaking. The second exercise is much harder. It's called what I think you heard. This is that impossibly complicated activity that we do every day without thinking about it and often without getting it right. We need to tell somebody something and track what's getting through to the other side. What are they hearing? What are they understanding?

How do they feel about what we are saying? It's impossibly complicated because your mind can really only do one thing at a time. And when your mind is working out what to say and what to say next, it doesn't have a lot of bandwidth for going to the other side of the conversation and noticing all the clues about what is getting through, what is being heard, what is making a difference to the other person. This kind of paradox is central to our practice of communication in NLP. It starts with the recognition there is a paradox. It is not easy to know what is going on in somebody else's mind. And it's harder to know what is going on in somebody else if you also have to be keeping up your end of the conversation.

Practicing it, slowing it down, getting feedback from the other person, yes to this, no to that, sort of to this other thing helps you first of all start to refine your attention. So you pay attention differently so you pick up more good information. But it also makes you aware that your your presuppositions, your sense of what is going on in a conversation needs to be verified. It's not really about being a mind readader. It is about noticing what you think and then checking it out by asking. And this is by far the best way to have a conversation where you improve the odds that what you think you're saying is what the other person thinks you're saying. And then we take a break.

And when we come back we say two people are never just talking in the ether. We are talking somewhere and we need to do two things with our framing and our circumstance to understand our rapport with other people. The first is to make sure our language includes them. Obviously this means using words they understand. Less obviously, it means using words that suggest. Not only do we have our own point of view, theories, and feelings about things, but we want to make room for their point of view and their theories and their feelings about things. And we do this using the Ericksonian language that is inclusive.

It's a little more vague. It is the language of wondering or modifying. It's the language we hate when politicians use it because we say, "Oh, they're not saying anything." But it's the language that invites each person to bring their own experience and awareness to the party. So if I say, "Imagine a time you made a hard decision. I wonder if you noticed it in your body. It might be that you noticed tension as you were making that hard decision. And some people notice that tension near their head or their face, but other people might notice tension in their core.

Now, you'll notice I'm giving you a broad outline of experience, but you're probably starting to go into that state of making a hard decision and finding for you that general information, that general language is hitting very specifically because you have a very specific memory that is being twigged by the language, the inclusive language that we use the day before to vivify experience. We also use that same kind of language to make room. Now, it's important to practice this kind of language because you find out it's hard. Your brain has very specific experiences encoded there. And when you access them, you access the specifics. The specifics of the way you understand, the way you respond, the way you prioritize. And using inclusive language forces you over and over again to reset, to open up, and to recognize that those very specific things in your brain may not match the very specific things in somebody else's brain.

And in fact, this is why working together gives us maximum impact when we work with people who think a little bit differently than we do, who share our objectives and maybe share our values, but don't share our experiences and our beliefs entirely because that way we get more information to work with, more possibilities. And so it's very useful and important for human beings to not only open up the conversation using this kind of inclusive language, but to recognize that if we don't use inclusive language on purpose, we may be getting agreement, but the agreement on the other side may be to something quite different than what we intended. So this is always a process of guess and test of put something in and check it out of understand that language is an approximation that allows people with very different backgrounds, experiences, expectations to come together in a way that's useful. And that's what we look at as we look at intentions through the lens of rapport. And we start out with calibrating two different ends of scales for relationships. One is think about a mentor and think about a friend and notice where they overlap and where they're different. One of the things you'll notice at NLP Canada Training is we rarely give you the easy distinctions to make.

Think of a friend. Think of somebody you don't like. No. What we want you to do is start sorting out. What is the difference between having a friend and having a mentor? And how do you know where in your body do you know the difference? Where in your filtering of what comes through your senses do you notice that you are different depending on whether you think you're with a mentor or with a friend.

And the other relationship we explore here is the one between people we compete with and people we collaborate with. There's lots of talk about competition where people say competition makes me better. There is enormous information in your being about collaborating because so much of what we do as human beings needs to be completed or supplemented by somebody else's action or knowledge. We collaborate a lot.

And so the first thing to do in terms of setting intentions for your rapport is to know what kind of a relationship do I want to have at this moment with this person? And that changes of course through the day through different interactions. Somebody might be your collaborator at work but your friend in your own time. Somebody might be your mentor but also challenge you in a way that reminds you of competition. These things can all overlap. Sorting them out reminds us that we're looking for something specific every time we enter into rapport. And if we know what that specific thing is, we can notice whether or not we're getting it.

If we bump into people and let things happen, then it's very hard to know what to notice. So, it's hard to understand the results we get, much less predict the results we'll get next time. Final exercise for this day is imagining a very clear intention to get somebody else to do something and then sorting through it. Using triple description from the other person's point of view and within the context to find out what we've really asked in terms of a situation. It comes from work done in an organization where asking one person to do something is also viewed by many other people potentially has an impact on other relationships.

So, will you pass me the salt is usually a pretty simple request, but even that depends on whether or not I'm supposed to have salt, for instance, whether or not I'm on a low sodium diet and you're really worried about giving me salt. These are very different things than what springs to mind when I say, "Well, pass the salt. What could be in that?" So what we want to do is think of something specific we want somebody to do. Could be somebody at home, a kid, a partner, could be somebody at work, could be a management task that you need completed. And then really thoroughly explore that ask from the point of view of your situation and other people who might be aware of it and from the point of view of the person you are asking to do something. And to explore not just how it happens in the moment as you see them doing the thing that you've asked them to do, but what implications it has for your future relationship with those people and with other people that are aware of the ask. You've probably been in a position at least once where you pushed somebody into doing something and you know that when you did eventually you got pushed back.

That doesn't make it the wrong thing to do. Sometimes it is a necessary cost of getting something done. But it's a lot different to walk into a necessary cost than to walk into an ask thinking there will be no price to be paid for it. So in this day very familiar situations made slightly less familiar so that we can observe ourselves as we connect to other people and we can remind ourselves to develop a pattern of having an idea about a connection that needs to happen and then checking what are the signs that it really did happen. How can I test my assumptions about my communication so that if they're off, I can make corrections in real time, not after a long period of difference. Not necessarily damage, but difference. Managing rapport means managing connection with relation to your intentions.

Not just so you get what you want, but so you like and accept the consequences of getting what you want. I'm Linda Ferguson and that is day three of the NLP Canada Training practitioner certification. Follow the series for a summary of each day of the training.