Establishing Rapport: Pacing and Leading (NLP 3/5)

More NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) highlights after my reading of Develop Your NLP Skills by Andrew Bradbury.

This post (#3 out of 5 total NLP posts) is about effectively establishing a rapport with someone. I think most of us employ the NLP techniques of "pacing" and "leading" to some degree, but it's good to be more aware of how we can bring it into play to enhance our interpersonal relationships:

Pacing - Use mirroring techniques to match the person in terms of tone, word choice, volume, breathing tempo, and body language to form a rapid bond or to strengthen an existing relationship.

Leading - You can then test your rapport with someone by "leading" with an action and seeing if they follow your lead - i.e. if you straighten up in your seat, cross your legs, or put your hands on the table during a conversation that person will soon follow if they're comfortable with you.

I found one of the examples in the book (Develop Your NLP Skills) to be very interesting - If a customer comes in or calls and is upset, frustrated, or yelling you'll have greater success in communicating with them if you first mirror them by also raising your voice and adopting their body language ("pacing") to show that you're also angry about the situation.

An example: Someone comes into your dry cleaning store fuming, "You missed this spot on the back of my favorite dress and I wore it out without noticing, assuming you had cleaned it thoroughly. Why didn't you get the spot out and why didn't you tell me when I picked it up?" Mirroring her tone, loudly and seemingly frustrated, you respond, "It makes me angry that we would let that happen since we pride ourselves on our customer service. It's totally unacceptable that we didn't mention it when you picked it up, and we can't continue doing business with good clients like you in that way. Now, what can I do for you to make this right?"

Once you have a rapport with them, then you can transition into "leading" by softening your voice and gesturing less to bring the customer with you to a calmer place where you can discuss more effectively. It seems like this technique would be great for negotiations and resolving conflicts quickly.

I think it would be difficult to match someone at first if they're yelling and angry because that's not the way I would naturally think to diffuse the situation. My inclination is to play it soft from the beginning and approach it with tact and appeasement, but maybe next time I'll try pacing and mirror their frustration at first. However, in personal discussions I'm not sure it would be as effective because emotions have a way of escalating and "discussions" often become bigger than intended.

• Have you ever tried pacing and leading either in a professional or personal situation?
• Was it intentional or unintentional, and how did it work?

NLP Tips: 2. Preferred Thinking Styles

More NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) highlights after my reading of Develop Your NLP Skills (3rd edition)by Andrew Bradbury.

This post (#2 out of 5 total NLP posts) is about how "Preferred Thinking Styles" can be helpful in communication. Personally, I'm not sure I believe it 100% but I found it interesting conceptually, so I thought I'd share:

"Preferred Thinking Styles" (PTSs) are ways in which we mentally represent the external world in our heads. The 3 common PTSs are visual (thinking in pictures), auditory (thinking in sounds), or kinaesthetic (feelings, physical and emotional). According to NLP, if you listen to the types of words someone uses frequently, it's a clue into what type they are. For example:

• Visual- "I don't see what all the fuss is about - it looks pretty straightforward to me."
• Auditory - "It sounds like a lot of fuss about nothing if you ask me. I'd say it was pretty straightforward."
• Kinaesthetic - "I don't know what people are getting so upset about. I found it pretty straightforward."

The NLP methodology says that each person is most comfortable being communicated with their Preferred Thinking Style. If someone is predominantly a Visual person, then others should try to paint mental pictures for them and use words that are "visual." If you find that your boss, your significant other, or business partner uses one kind of PTS (determined by the words they use in conversation), it's best to communicate with them using keywords from their PTS.

Naturally, it makes you wonder what type of PTS you are. I'd probably classify myself as a visual person, but that's from knowing how I think about problems (not from the language I use). I find that I do communicate best with other "visual" people when problem solving, but I'm not sure that applies to everything. It would be interesting to know if I end up using visual keywords when I communicate with others.

But at the same time, the words you use are often largely dependent on the context of the discussion - i.e. Did you see that giant elephant? Did you hear that woman at the store talking so loudly? How did you feel the presentation went? That's why I'm not sure if the words we use are indicative of our thinking style, but I haven't invested the time to test out the concept.

• Do you think there's something behind these Preferred Thinking Styles or is it bunk? Your thoughts...?
  

NLP Tips: 1. Communication

I just finished reading Develop Your NLP Skills (3rd edition)by Andrew Bradbury and am going to capture some of the interesting NLP tips in a series of posts (this one being the first).

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is a methodology and collection of tools to aid in communication and personal development. Because NLP claims to be based in science, I thought it would be up my alley, but I found it to still be a bit too fluffy. But I did learn some interesting things that can definitely help in my personal interactions and in my work as a coach.

The first thing I want to highlight is a very basic concept on communication, but useful to keep in mind.

Many people view communication as:

I Think > I Speak > You Hear What I Say > You Know What I Mean.

This isn't exactly right because communication involves some amount on translation and decoding. In reality communication is more like:

I Think > I Encode > I Speak > You Hear > You Decode > You Think You Know What I Mean.

Communication isn't easy because we have to translate our thoughts into words and then hope that they're "decoded" as we intended by the other party. Sometimes, communication is a bigger problem with the people closest to us.

Since we've had many years of interaction and communication with them, we expect our immediate family and friends to know how we "encode" and what we mean when we say X, Y, or Z. We believe that they've been "decoding" our communication for so long that they can read our minds.

But we have to remember - they don't have the perfect decryption key, and even if they did, it would be hard to do in real-time and under emotional conditions. A communication breakdown becomes even more frustrating because we think they should know what we're talking about (because they should have superior decoding abilities for dealing with us).

This NLP perspective on communication definitely made me think about how I encode my thoughts and why clear communication is difficult (especially with the people closest to us).

• Does this perspective bring up any observations you've had on communication?