Positive Health Online

NLP Tools: Build Rapport to Elicit Strategies

by Frances Coombes Advanced Dip CBT/REBT Dip CBT

Rapport comes from showing other people by your behaviour and by your words that you accept the validity of their experience for them.  You are meeting that person in their model of the world.  By doing this you create the basis for communication that flows – and that is what builds rapport.

What does rapport do?  Rapport creates the effective basis for communicating with others.  If you are a salesman you know that you cannot sell an expensive product or your idea unless you have first established rapport.  If we have not built rapport first, all we are doing is telling people things, giving them orders, or responding to information.

The Map is not the Territory is one of the four pillars of NLP. It is a statement that helps us to remember that no two people see their world in the same way we do. We can build sensory acuity by listening to how people describe a situation and noticing how their map of the world differs from others and our own.  We all live within our individual maps of the world, which are rich and varied and designed to help us navigate our world although they may not be completely accurate.

The London tube map was designed to help people travel around the city on the underground. Even though the stations are not all laid out in straight lines like the map shows, the map is good enough to take us to our destination. We can build our awareness of other peoples’ maps and how they are experiencing their world when we listen closely  to how they are describing a situation through their language gestures and sensory descriptions,  As we listen to the language and metaphors they use this helps us to identify where they are going and what they are viewing in their maps.

Becoming Aware of our Listening and Thinking Behaviour Patterns

Sub-modalities are the building bricks of human experience, they help us to understand how another human being is experiencing their world. This helps us build rapport with them and makes the exchange of teaching and learning possible.

Exercise:  Ask your partner to describe a scene a wedding, a holiday experience and listen to their sensory language. Pay attention to the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic ‘touchy-feelie’ clues they give.  Build a picture of what they are noticing when they are viewing the world, notice how different it is to your own picture.  

Visual Imagery Checklist

Think of a most recent and vivid gathering you have attended, i.e. wedding, party or group setting.

Circle the descriptions that fit your experience. Do you see in colour, black and white, do your images move?  Just how clearly do you ‘see?’

Think of Building Rapport When:

• When you want to increase you influence in a way which is genuine and non-manipulative. g. to help a colleague improve their performance;
• When you disagree with someone’s view but want to maintain a good relationship with them;
• Making people feel more c omfortable when they appear ill at ease or lacking in confidence;
• When you want to encourage someone to confide in you or ‘open up’ and say more;
• When you want to know how they do something well and elicit their strategy.

 How You Can Use Rapport.

No one has to tell you anything just because you ask them to, but if you have built rapport with someone first you can ask them for their strategy for doing something well and they are likely to explain it to you.  For instance, if you have a tendency to procrastinate then find someone who is a finisher and ask them for their strategy for getting things done.

This is a compulsive finisher’s Do it Now! Strategy.

Sheila is a ‘big picture’ thinker and makes decisions and acts of them quickly.  Once she gets motivated to do a task, she has a picture of the completed task and asks:

1. What are my steps? She visualises the first step and the outcome as already having occurred.  She asks herself ‘what is the order I need to take my steps in?’ and writes down a list of the things she needs to do to achieve her outcome.
2. How do I do it? She says: ‘Being able to see the finished project in my mind, I can then work backwards to see how I did it and decide, do a drawing, or make a list so I know what to do. ‘
3. How long will it take? I break the task down into segments, so I know how long each bit takes. This lets me know how much I can expect to complete each day.’

“The aim of NLP is to create the richest map possible for people, by enriching the choices that they perceive as available to them in the world.” Richard Bandler