Rapport Establishment

Rapport is the ability to hold someone's attention and create a sense of trust. It means implementing the feeling that you understand each other; that you have the other's best interests at heart and that you can be trusted to do whatever they've come to you for.

One way to establish rapport, something you've probably been doing anyway but without thinking about it, is behavioural matching. That means doing what the other person is doing – or something very similar. If the other person is sitting, you take a seat instead of standing. If the other is speaking with a soft voice, you modulate your own. It's what we do unconsciously, particularly in a new situations: following the other person's lead, a modified form of Simon Says, without being aware that we're doing it.

By becoming aware, which means making the choice to focus our conscious attention on matching another person, we can draw the other into a sense of rapport. You do something in order to create in him or her the feeling that you're kindred beings that you understand. Behavioural matching actually increases yourself understanding of the other person because you've aligned yourself with the other, literally put yourself in his or her position, and the increased understanding isn't pretence; it's real.

This is not the same as mimicking, however, which would almost have the opposite effect and break the rapport. Mimicking someone, copying the exact tonality or gait or repeating the words back verbatim is a way of teasing and making fun. Above all, it conveys disrespect. Instead, you want to create an environment of respect and understanding with the other person.

Specifically, you match posture, volume, and tempo. If the person you’re talking to is sitting, you won’t be standing because you don’t want to be placed at a higher level; it gives the impression that you’re speaking down, and that would not be the best way relating, to put it mildly. In business, with personal relationships, or even with new, still undefined contacts, you want to start out at eye level. If the other person speaks slowly, it makes sense (and increases rapport) for you to slow down your own speech; you’ll speak softer or louder, depending on the cues you’re getting. Matching is like dancing, following someone else’s lead.

Matching creates the experience of being on the same wavelength. I’m reflecting back what you’re doing so we can dance together; my movements suggest yours; we’re in tune and in step with each other, seeing eye to eye, aligned with each other.

When you’re mismatching the behaviour of the other, you’re out of sync, moving to a different drummer. You’re using a different tempo- or volume or posture- and it’s almost guaranteed to antagonise the other person so much that your communication has no real chance of getting through.

For example: You’re a Realtor, trying to convince someone to buy a house. They’re leaning forward and speaking slowly, and you're leaning back and speaking fast. No rapport. No sale. No way.

You, the Realtor, are a city person, used to a hurried pace and to the distance city folk migh like to put between themselves. Your clients are country people, used to slower ways, more time, intimacy. If you move your upper body forward, giving the impression that you’re really interested and that you have lots of time to hear them out, and speak in a slow, deliberative way, chances are good they’ll want to buy from you. If not this property, for sure the next.