NLP ideasrapportYou want to be communicating effectively with other human beings, and you might think about rapport as an essential foundation for what comes next. When we're communicating, a lack of rapport sticks out like a sore thumb, like a bump in the road, like suddenly finding three meaningless capital letters squeezed between two sentences, waiting to grab your attention and demanding your attention please, and action, now. NLP. Rapportful relating (or, relating rapportfully) is a little bit like a refrigerator, and completely not. You've heard people described as 'cold', just like a refrigerator. Being cold has nothing to do with relating rapportfully, unless you are relating rapportfully in a cold climate. However, and this is leading somewhere, you've lived around refrigerators for a lot of your life. For the majority of your life, so far, somewhere in the backround, is a refrigerator. Just like lots of other electrical products, refrigerators have electric motors. I'm no engineer, yet I guess that the motor drives a fan. The fan's not really the relevant part here either, although its role in elucidating the presence of rapport is integral, and there is a striking similarity between it and the fan that you can hear, cooling the CPU in the computer that is driving the software that's enabling you to read this, now. And the sound of you breathing in, and out. And you don't normally hear the noise of the electric motor driving the fan in the refrigerator, and you'll notice when the machine turns the fan off. And you can stop noticing that whenever you want. At a push I might say that you notice because it's difference that gets noticed, and mapped, and it's usual for you to be living in a noisily humming electro-static world most of the time that you don't always consciously hear, just like you often aren't noticing what is supporting you, and how the surface that is supporting you feels below you, and that the people who are communicating with you really effectively are enabling you to feel connected, and back to our connection with rapport. You already understand the importance of connection. The importance of rapport is apparent to you when you really notice that someone is attempting to relate to you without rapport. It grates. You're grateful when it stops. Communicating with someone who is relating with you rapportfully is flowing. You notice when it stops. thingification There is a risk inherent in labelling the process, a risk of thingification. Lots of us love to thingify, just like all of us love generalising. Rapport isn't something you can get sent over or pick up from the local store, although you'll see plenty of rapportful relating if you go looking for it at a local store. It is a process of connecting, communicating that is coded non-verbally, a dance, a song, a nod and a smile to the one who is nodding and smiling. Next time you're around a group of humans, being, take a little time to really notice what's not being said. Notice the family groups. Watch couples. Follow the intricate and elegant dances that people engage in as they weave through crowded pedestrian traffic. Notice how people within groups identify themselves as members of that group through their behaviour. Watching people welcome each other, say goodbye. Notice the person who is giving you a quizzical look as you get noticed, noticing. Don't run, they'll chase you for sport if you run. Rapport. When you're delivering metaphor effectively you'll be noticing how the other person is communicating, and be using that information to communicate with them effectively by adjusting your behaviour to match their behaviour. matchingWhether you're delivering metaphor or engaging in any other kind of communicating, when you're communicating effectively you'll be noticing how the other person is communicating, and be using that information to inform your own behaviour, matching their behaviour. And behaviour might include how you hold your body, how you gesture, your voice tone... ...Breathing. If you want to find out how incredibly powerful it can be to match someone else's breathing whilst you're matching other behaviours with the intention of building rapport, try it...and match your sentence structure to the pace...of their breathing. If you don't want to match exactly - maybe the other person breathes too quickly, or too s l o w l y for your comfort - you can cross-match, matching the behaviour with maybe finger movements of the same pace... You are building a connection with the other person that transcends the spoken word, and you've already been doing this all of your life, matching behaviours with the intention of building rapport, whether consciously or not... pacing and leading...and once you're pacing the other person, and building rapport, and connecting, you can lead towards where you want to go. You might be introducing new behaviours...smiling at another person can be an interesting way to check whether they're smiling back at you. I love raising an eyebrow or two, just to see if it raises an eyebrow, or two. It's funny how yawning gets other people yawning, and sometimes just mentioning a yawn can get me going... ...and there was a time before you'd even heard of 'the internet', and then you heard about it, and you were interested to find out more about it, and send email, and visit websites, and somehow you happened upon this one, and read through some information about metaphor, and something called NLP, and you had a feeling about that, and before you knew what was happening, and how you moved from that, then, into the present, now, you find yourself thinking of some of the ways in which you can apply this learning in your life, helping you to harness some of the most powerful language patterns to help you to have more of what you want in your life... ...and that kind of back-track pacing of experience, of what must be true, developing a 'yes-set', can be a fun way of pacing and leading towards new experiences... ...and sales...and change... representation systemsI've heard it said that people have different ways of representing the world outside, inside. If you see me, you don't really see me. I'm a visual happening on your occipital lobes. Allegedly. You can re-present that information as a memory, re-construct that visual memory at any time...and I guess that there are so many happy memories you have, it's easy to choose just one. It doesn't need to be the time you were happiest, and it can be if you want, just a moment of glee. Just take a moment to remember what it was like, then... ...and only wait for as long as it takes to complete that transderivational search, and you know you've waited long enough when you know the moment you've chosen... ...and remember it now,as if you were there, now, seeing what you see, hearing the sounds that you can hear in this experience. Notice the feeling on your skin, and other sensations you can notice. There's a smell that might bring this memory to mind, sometimes, and even a taste that you can sense. The world of sensory experience is very familiar, it's where you always are, now. If it's useful, you can think of the way that you access memories as a function of the systems that you are using to experience and sort the world. Your Central Nervous System. Your senses. Maybe there has been a time when you have sat near to a fire, once. Smell the smoke, see the flames, hear the sound of it as it burns. How warm is the fire? I guess for most of us, noticing what we notice isn't new. Noticing how other people represent the world might be. It's funny, how often we just ignore the information about how a person is representing their experience. Information that is communicated to us by a person when they're communicating with us is there for the noticing. We can choose to ignore it, or use the information to change our own behaviour, pace the person's experience, match their language... People use sensory-based language a lot of the time. I'm not sure whether you see the point I'm making when I say that it sometimes sounds like the person who's writing, tapping away at a keyboard, realising the unspoken words in their mind is saying something really deep, when really it's a roughly hewn thought that's been thrown together with the hope of creating a pearl of wisdom, a glittering gem of an idea that's actually a bit of a stinker. Sometimes it's useful to digest information over time, picking over the detail, encouraging new understandings and deeper meanings to surface, noticing the discordant elements of what might seem like a terrible proposal, which in the light of day is a fantastic idea, when seen from a different perspective. Almost too incredible to be true, almost. And never quite. And you'd be pretty unlikely to hear someone speak like that. People tend to favour representation systems, which shows up in how they language, or which can be heard in how they language, or which you can get get a feel for by absorbing how they language...and I'm sure that by now you're digesting some of these yummy ideas, and you're noticing how easy it becomes to sniff out those pesky little predicates. If you choose to use predicates from a different representation system, you're asking the person to translate, only you're not actually asking. If you match then you'll be working to adjust your own behaviout to buld rapport, quickly and effectively. Spend some time listening. You'll soon see what I'm getting at. Or hear it. The game then is to change your own behaviour, and adjust to follow someone else's trip through their sensory wonderland...and then practice leading them into another representation system, and see how far they follow...and back again... submodalitiesSubmodalities could be described as how we code experience. Every sensory experience has a range of qualities, and the qualities can be described as submodalities. You remember that happy moment you remembered earlier? Hey, it was a good time. Take a moment to remember more of that, now. And as you're recalling that experience, take some time to notice some of the visual qualities of your experience. The pictures you can see might not be as vivid as "in real life". That's just one of the ways you can tell the differecne between real life and hallucination. Unless of course you're suffering from some kind of psychosis, when it might all get a bit mixed up. And back to the pictures. If you're convinced you can't see anything, then just remember what it was like to be back in that place at that time again, seeing what you saw, and I wonder what images you might see, if you could see something. Is what you see moving, or still? Is that in colour, or black and white? How big? How close to you? Is that in three dimensions, or is it flat? Is it framed, or not? And what kinds of auditory qualities are you noticing? What can you hear when you're in that experience, hearing what you can hear as you're back in that place and time? How loud is that? Are there voices? Whose voices can you hear? What do you notice about the tone of those voices - is it high pitched, or low? What other sounds can you hear? Where do you notice any sounds coming from - in front, behind, left or right? And what kind of kinaesthetic or tactile sensations are you noticing? What can you feel on your skin? Elsewhere in your body? and with how much force do you feel that feeling? What are some of the olfactory submodalities that you are associating with this remembered experience, the smells that take you into this experience? And maybe you have some gustatory memories too, some tastes that remind you of what it's like to be here, in this happy experience. What are some of the qualities of that experience? We use submodalities to code experience, and we've been doing it for a very long time. Submodalities show up in how we language,too, in the predicates we choose to describe the world we are in, and how we are representing it internally. It's a bitter pill to swallow, and some of the sweetest learnings for me are when I notice the stuff I've been doing without even noticing. And learn to use it. After all, when you're up, you're up. Being down can be fun, too, except for when it's not. If you've got this far you may be wondering where does all this stuff come from? The short answer is just that it comes from inside you, just as it comes from inside me. You already know all of this, and you've been using it already for a very long time. I was talking to someone on the telephone yesterday, I was listening as they said that whenever [something] happened, it made her feel guilty. "Ahh, that damn 'it', 'it' gets everywhere!" I thought to myself, in a rather chatty, softly spoken, warm and somehow friendly voice just above my right ear. As I heard my own voice, I somehow knew my face was smiling. I asked my new friend on the telephone "that's incredible...how do you do that?" "Oh" she said "well, it's a voice that's right behind me that shouts at me about all the things I should be doing, and I'm not doing right, and I ought to do differently". There are so many other questions I could have asked at that moment, and not questioned anything. And you're feeling guilty. And when you're feeling guilty, that's guilty like what? We had a lot of fun just changing some of those submodalities for a while. It wasn't long before I heard the smile on her face, too. Strangely, that's a longer short answer than I intended. The long answer is just too long, and undoubtedly way beyond my comprehension, being merely mortal. You already have all of the resources you need. You could try our community pages if you wanted to find more people who are using some of these powerful ideas in their lives. |