Building rapport with pacing and leading, part 2

Leader question: How are your rapport skills?

Remember our last topic: rapport and how it can help you build better relationships with your team? Here's part 2!

It has been observed in numerous studies that people who like each other or have a good rapport with each other are similar in their behavior and even adapt. This principle also works the other way around: by adapting our expressive behavior to our counterpart = rapport. We become "similar" to the other person and thus build rapport. Because we trust especially people of whom we think that they are similar to us!

The best way to establish rapport for professional communication is pacing: a process of aligning and mirroring our communication partners through verbal and non-verbal elements. We can thus enter the reality island of the other person to pick him/her up where he/she is at the moment.

Pacing is created through mirroring:

👉 of voice, pitch, volume, rhythm.

👉 of word choice (same word choice and key words).

👉 of the breath

👉 of movement, rhythm, speed

👉 of posture

If we manage to establish rapport through pacing, Step 2 follows: Leading. This translates as "leading" and means that we gradually take our counterpart into a different state e.g. by initiating small changes through body or verbal language. Most people instinctively want to maintain good rapport with others and so will follow the steps of the leader. You can put a nervous employee in a neutral mood through successful pacing and leading to make the conversation process more successful or pick up and inspire a "difficult" customer on their reality island 🏝️.

In Short: Leading & Pacing originally comes from NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) and means to lead someone towards a specific goal or outcome based on rapport so that both benefit. It is a very helpful leadership and communication tool because sympathy comes from similarity. No mimicking!!! - but an empathic engagement with the other person, so that a relationship level can develop. Let's do this! 💃