The NLP Blog

Let’s face it, we all need to communicate with other people at some time or another and often it may be to ask for their help.  May people don’t like asking others for help for fear of rejection or even because they just aren’t sure how to approach it.  By having the ability to develop and maintain a good rapport with a large number of people you will be able to get help with anything you want.  Having a good rapport with someone will allow you to do anything.  Therefore, rapport is one of the most important skills that you can have if you want to have good communication skills.

Rapport works generally by people that are like each other tend to like each other.  Likewise when people are nothing like one another they tend to dislike each other.  If you like someone you are much more likely to want to help them than you are with someone you dislike.   Only a low 38% of communication is tone of voice and a big 55% of communication is physiology.  So a lot of how we communicate we are not even consciously aware of, which actually gives us an enormous advantage if we know how to consciously use the physiology side of communication.   To be a really great communicator you need to realise that you will communicate best with people when you take on their primary modality.  So if they are in an energetic, excited mood then you will come across well to them if you act in that sort of mood also. Often communication takes place where people are unconsciously mismatching modalities.  To have a good rapport it is vital to match the modality of the person you are communicating with. You need to try and act in a similar way to what they are doing.  For example when talking to someone who is auditory, you want to slow down and really listen. When talking to someone who is in high visual you want to sit up, breathe from the top of your lungs and be excited.  When talking to someone who is kinaesthetic then you want to slow way down and talk to them about feelings.  You need to change your tone of voice so that it matches theirs. Another way to establish a good rapport is by using similar gestures as the person you are communicating with is using.  Hand gestures or postures play a huge part in communicating but we just don’t consciously realise it.  By mirroring person’s gestures they will not consciously notice but subconsciously they will and they will like you and enjoy communicating with you much more. These are skills that once learned can make an amazing difference in your life and in communicating with others.  It can help to practise these skills by doing simple things like going into a restaurant and test your new skills out when ordering your meal.  For a week or so make a big effort in watching people’s gestures and modalities and try to mirror their actions. It will take a little effort at first to keep remembering to do this, but once you have mastered these skills they will soon become automatic and you will do them subconsciously. Neuro Linguistic Programming is a set of techniques that can help you improve many aspects of your life including communication.  The above is just a small part of what Neuro Linguistic Programming can do to improve your life.  

This article was written by Shezz P who has successfully changed her life using self taught NLP techniques.

You too can change your life and create personal and professional success by using NLP techniques learned through the The NLP Toolbox!’