On any NLP Practitioner training I've ever seen, students are taught how to get into rapport. Seriously, it's a total waste of time, and at worst, harmful to a normal working relationship.

 

We're a social species. Rapport is our default position. You don't have to do anything to get it.

You already know what rapport is. It's that thing you have with people you like, when you're on the same wavelength, see eye to eye and feel a real connection with them.

You can think of rapport as being a conduit for communication. Without it, it's very difficult to engage the processes of agreement and compliance, and you have to work harder to be understood. 

When you have rapport you can take a lot of shortcuts, such as asking a close friend to pass you “the thing”, and expecting that they’ll know you meant the TV remote control.

Let’s make a useful assumption: you already have rapport, so there’s nothing you need to do to create it. From the moment you walk into a room, you are already connected with the people in there. 

Some of them will be connected with the real you, some of them will be connected with their own mental models of what a trainer is like – their previous experience. And sometimes that previous experience will be helpful to you, and sometimes not, so there are certainly times when you don’t want to be in rapport with other people, so that you can avoid being drawn into their hallucinations.

If someone is reacting to you in an odd way before you have really started, the chances are they are reacting not to you but to their own expectation, so that’s a good time to stop and find out what is really going on.

As I said, we're a social species. Rapport is our default position, and while you don't have to do anything to get it, it is very useful to learn how to control it...

You can download my book NLP - Skills for Learning from Bookboon for FREE. Most of this post is an extract from that book.