Tom MacKay’s NLP Blog

In the last NLP blogs, I have been talking about creating rapport with people. There are however situations where matching and mirroring might not be appropriate. 

I am running an NLP Practitioner training up in Scotland at the moment – I started today. It reminded me of a previous time I had been running an NLP training in Scotland and one evening someone asked me to work with a client. The client suffered severe panic attacks at the mere thought of flying on a plane. This would clearly not be a good time to match someone else’s breathing! Matching breathing of someone with a panic attack could result in you having one also.

However, cross over mirroring provides the solutions…more about how to do this in the next blog

So after you have attended an NLP training and you are a master of rapport!

So what happens when you are at a party and stuck with someone you don’t want to speak to? Or what happens when you want to end a business meeting and you have such great rapport with everyone that noone wants to leave?

Too much rapport could be dangerous

Fortunately, there is a solution. Just as you build rapport through the process of matching, to break rapport you can do the opposite – mismatch.

Mismatching is all about doing things differently from the other person. If you do this gracefully, then when it comes to the end of the meeting and you start to mismatch the other person, they will ‘know’ it is time to finish the meeting.

Many years ago, a couple of students were attending my NLP Practitioner training course and they were staying in a hotel in North London. Their room booking included an evening meal of 3 courses. They decided on the evening after learning rapport skills, to try some of these things out at the hotel.

After the meal, they asked to speak to the chef. They built great rapport with him and by the end of the evening the chef told them he would cook them anything they would like the next evening, even if it wasn’t on the menu. The next evening they were given a 7 course meal!

That is one great example of the power of rapport!

Sometimes someone attends one of our trainings who thinks ‘I could never build rapport with some people….’. I remember many years ago I read a book “How To Win Friends And Influence People’ – the main thing I took from this was how to conversationally build rapport – fine if you can find a common topic of interest with someone, but what if you have no common conversationally topics you can discover?

Someone on our NLP training was a prison counsellor and he was having real problems building rapport with some of his clients. He wanted to know how to do this with someone he didn’t have anything in common with.

The secret in NLP is to build rapport even before speaking with someone by matching and mirroring physiology, as discussed in recent blogs. Do this and you can build rapport with anyone!

Matching the voice in difficult situations is a little like verbal aikido. There are two different ways that martial arts are sometimes categorised – hard and soft martial arts.

Hard martial arts use more strength and power whereas soft martial arts are more about how you channel the energy in movements. So in Karate, you would use more strength and power to block a punch, whereas in aikido you might not try to block the punch, but gracefully move slightly and redirect the punch as it comes towards you the the force the person uses is instead used against them.

In a similar way, matching someone’s voice in a difficult conversation and then gradually changing your own voice tonality, tempo and volume is a great way to quickly defuse a situation.

These are essential NLP skills.

Using NLP skills to resolve difficult situations can be incredibly useful. As I mentioned in the blog yesterday, by starting with matching the other person’s pitch, volume and tempo you can then rapidly help the person calm down. The whole key to rapport is that you know you have rapport because when you lead, the other person follows. So you pace the other person for a while (match what they are doing) and then after a while you do something or say something that leads the other person, and the should follow you.

So by matching the elements of the other person’s communication, even in a tense situation, will be the rapidest way to do this. To get a full understanding of how to use this technique, I highly recommend attending an NLP training.

Recently I came across another great blog with useful information on management training – follow this link for more details.

A question I am asked frequently is about building rapport in tense situations. Rapport is built through matching and mirroring – communicating and behaving in a similar way to the other person. The question I am often asked is ‘what if the other person is angry – surely you don’t want to match their anger?’

Of course you don’t want to put yourself in an angry state – that would never be useful. However, if you have ever been angry about something and someone says quietly and calmly ‘just calm down…’ – does it make you calm?!? No – it makes you even angrier!

Matching the volume, tone, tempo, but not the anger, and then gradually lowering the intensity is a much quicker a much quicker way to achieve a better result. This is what we teach on our Practitioner trainings. More in the next blog.

Many people come on our NLP Training Courses because they want to learn cutting edge techniques they can apply in business. Some of the areas that it can be exceptionally useful are in:

• Building rapport with prospects, clients and anyone else!
• Learning advanced communication skills and using language effectively
• Negotiating to find a win-win outcome
• Presentation skills – how communication operates at conscious and unconscious levels
• Using NLP in sales
• Understanding how other people think
• Verbal personality profiling – incredibly useful in recruitment and training
• Modelling excellence – finding out how people produce incredible results and how to train other people to achieve similar success

Today, I was sitting in a cafe when suddenly a piece of music was played which I hadn’t heard for years. Suddenly I was transported back to that time years and years ago when I first heard it and I was relaxing with friends. I felt that same feeling of relaxation that I had had all of those years ago.
A friend of mine was recently telling me about how her grandfather used to wear a particular aftershave and now every time she smells that aftershave, she instantly thinks of that experience,
These are all examples of anchors – when emotions get linked up to a specific experience. In our NLP training courses we teach in depth all about how to use them to get amazing results.

An example of creating an anchor would be with the following exercise:
First, remember a time you felt really happy
Remember a specific time
Go back to that time and imagine you could float into the memory of that experience, so that it is as if it is happening now (the stronger you can get back into the emotion, the more powerful the experience will be
Imagine you can see what you saw, hear what you heard, and really feel the feelings
As you find yourself experiencing that emotion of happiness hold your thumb and forefinger together, and release them when you feel the emotion has reached its peak
Now release the fingers and after a few moments hold your thumb and forefinger together again and notice how easily you can get the emotion back