Establishing Rapport

Have you ever been talking to someone and had a feeling of warmth inside, a colour change in yourself or noticed it in the other person, or the other person says ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’, and when you move forward in the conversation (lead) and they follow, then it is likely that rapport has been established.

What is Rapport? Rapport is the process of building a relationship based on trust, harmony and understanding. It is about meeting the other person in their model of the world. Rapport is important in any relationship and useful for when you have issues to be discussed and can assist you in preventing issues from developing into complaints and problems.

When communicating, words consist of 7% of the communication, tonality 38% and 55% through physiology. Therefore 93% of communication is unconscious to the other person. Rapport is all about establishing common ground unconsciously.

Rapport is created through matching and mirroring the other person’s physiology, tonality and words. As physiology is 55% of our communication you can match and mirror someone’s posture, gestures, facial expressions, blink rate of the eyes and breathing. For example, a person is seated opposite and you are discussing with them an idea, they cross their right leg and you can either cross your right leg (which is matching) or cross your left leg (which is mirroring as in a mirror image). Importantly all matching and mirroring must be subtle and not obvious to the other person. You can also match someone’s breathing which means you match the in and out breath.

Tonality of the voice is made up of 38% of communication, so another way to create rapport is by matching their voice. This includes the tone, tempo, timbre (quality of the voice), and the volume. You can also match someone’s key words, maybe they say ‘as a matter of fact’ often, then use those words in a sentence several times during the conversation.

Other ways of establishing rapport includes matching chunk size which is the size of the pieces of information in another person’s speech, and also match their common experiences and associations.

In creating rapport it is important to match and mirror someone in a way that is subtle and is outside the other person’s conscious awareness. Rapport is important in any environment, whether it involves sales, teaching, or personal and business relationships. Next time you are in a conversation with someone and notice the other person is not listening then ask yourself is their rapport between us? If not, match and mirror their physiology, tonality and their words and notice the difference it makes to the relationship.