NLP & Rapport (1): What is rapport?

What is rapport?

Rapport is the feeling of being at ease and in tune with someone; it’s what we experience when engaging in a mutually satisfactory relationship.

We have all had the experience of instantly feeling quite at ease with someone. And the feeling of being instantly ill-at-ease with someone else. In the first case there is a natural experience of rapport and in the latter case rapport does not exist.

Rapport means ’emphasising similarities’

In NLP rapport is process of emphasising the similarities between us – and of playing down the differences.

People have been doing this for millennia; NLP simply provides us with a way of clearly understanding the process, or the ‘mechanics’, of rapport.

It also extends our range of ways to create genuine rapport – and the range of people with whom we can easily relate.

This article is part of a series on Rapport:

NLP makes rapport easier

It’s easy to get along well with people with whom you share common interests. That’s why most of us engage in a searching process when we first meet someone; we look for common ground upon which to build rapport such as do we:

Share an interest in the same sport
Come from a similar part of the country or world
Have children, have no children
Have pets, have no pets
Share the same hobbies, interest in food or drink, past-times
Go to a similar part of the world for holidays

This search for common interests can become almost desperate – to the point where people try to discover if they share the same dislikes or fears – or whether they have experienced the same aches, allergies or even illnesses.

Rapport: created or pre-existing?

‘Pre-existing’ rapport: Seeking shared interests like this is really just uncovering pre-existing rapport that we did not know existed. It’s how rapport is normally created and is based on how alike we already are.

It does work and can even lead to life-long friendships. But it can take a lot of time and sometimes we need to be able to quickly develop relationships with people with whom we have little in common and who we may not even like – as with work colleagues or customers.

This is where the NLP approach to creating rapport comes in especially handy since it provides us with a range of ways of creating rapport above and beyond the pre-existing common interests level.

‘Created’ rapport: the two main ways of creating rapport are

Using non-verbal communication to build rapport
Taking a genuine win-win approach to communicating with one another

These two approaches work well together (and we explore these in a later article). We can use non-verbal rapport to smooth the way while we discover what we both wish to get out of the relationship.

But if we only use the non-verbal approach and do not take their interests into account it is unlikely that the relationship will thrive.

Can we use NLP to fake rapport?

Yes, of course. As with any system of advanced communication skills NLP can be misused. We can use NLP to abuse people – at least for a while. But happily there are two deterrents to engaging in this form of manipulation:

We won’t get away with such manipulation for very long. Most people have a pretty good ability to see through this kind of fakery and will quickly move on and find better relationships elsewhere.
We won’t get a second chance! Once a manipulator has abused trust through fake rapport they are unlikely to ever again be able to communicate satisfactorily with the other person! Most people have a ‘never again’ reaction to people who abuse trust. As George W Bush unsuccessfully attempted to say “fool me once shame on you – fool me twice shame on me.”

However the more pertinent answer to question of can we fake rapport is “Why bother? Why not just get into genuine multi-level rapport with people right from the start?”

Rapport can actually lead to friendship

There is an interesting phenomenon that can occur when we approach rapport-creating from the purely necessary or functional angle…

We need to get along with someone so we begin working at emphasising the similarities between us – we begin ‘creating’ rapport. And we are now actively emphasising the similarities between us and playing down the differences.

This is precisely the opposite to what is subconsciously occurring when we dislike someone. Which is why deliberately created rapport can often result in our discovering that not only can we get along comfortably and efficiently with the other person but we may even begin liking them.

We may begin needing to get along with them but, if we use a number of NLP rapport processes simultaneously, we can end up genuinely liking them.