How Important is Rapport to Your Business?

When building our business we’re not always able to work with people we naturally connect with. If we rely only on that natural connection in business we are totally limiting our success. Imagine being able to skillfully create that connection and build rapport with employees, customers and future clients.

Communication is the most overlooked reason for failing to achieve our outcomes and goals. Rapport is a word which is often misused and seldom given the respect it deserves. It is one of the most important elements in successful communication. Our ability to connect with people, to inspire, motive or influence people is based on our ability to build rapport. When people have trouble communicating, they most often struggle for more words to prove their point or stand their ground. The words won’t help if rapport is missing.

What is rapport? Rapport is an unconscious process which at times happens naturally and at other times must be skillfully established.

When we have rapport, we have trust, acceptance of ideas and openness and receptivity to our ideas.

People often think that they can build rapport by chatting about common experiences. This is only one small element. Your tone of voice and your physiology are the major components of rapport.

In our NLP Practitioner training we have participants do an exercise which is in 2 parts. The first part is sitting with someone and discussing a topic which you both agree on and as you discuss this topic, you pay no attention to the person you’re speaking to. You deliberately look around the room, check your phone, tie your shoe any number of distracting things. We call this mismatching your physiology. The second part of of the exercise is finding a topic you both disagree on and during this discussion, you match the body posture of each other. At the end of the exercise we ask participants which one did they feel most comfortable and connected in. In every instance it was the second part. Even though their opinion differed, they felt connected and were interested in the other person’s opinion. Matching physiology is very powerful.

The reason for this is that a large part of building rapport is matching our body posture and the second part is matching our tone of voice and the least important part is the words you speak.

Whether you want to sell yourself, your ideas, or your product, you will only be successful if you have established rapport first. It is also important to be aware that , just because you establish rapport initially, doesn’t mean it’s there for the duration of the conversation. Not only do you have to establish it, you have to maintain it throughout the conversation. Agreement presupposes rapport. The moment you disagree, rapport has been lost and you’ll find that your physiology and tonality are no longer aligned with that person. It’s a natural result. Before going any farther, you must stop promoting your idea, go back in the conversation to the point you had agreement, reestablish rapport and then you can continue moving forward and be in a position of influence.

By developing skills that build rapport, you’ll be amazed at how much this will positively impact the bottom line of your business. If you’re serious about your business, get serious about building rapport.