Building a good rapport for good outcomes

Building Bonds: Renowned motivational speaker Tony Robbins says that rapport is the ability to enter someone else’s world and establish that you have a strong common bond

Establishing a good rapport is considered essential for good outcomes in business, in sales and in any relationship. What is rapport? It is that feeling of familiarity and connection that occurs when you communicate with others, the in-sync feeling that makes agreement and liking more likely.

In Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), rapport can be created by subtly mimicking another person’s way of speaking or their gestures. When rapport is present, people tend to move and speak in a similar way. You can see this when people match their steps while walking together or match their breaths while working out. Humans are wired to connect in this way and this kind of neural synchronisation is good for 
your brain. Better yet, you can learn NLP techniques to increase your ability to establish rapport.

David Berreby of BigThink.com reports on a 2010 study by Princeton researchers on successful communication. These researchers report that in successful communication, people’s brains synchronise, a phenomenon known as ‘neural coupling’. In the study, researchers recorded brain activity with an MRI while one researcher told a story to 11 participants. The scan showed that as people listened, their brain activity came to match the storytellers. This neural syncing occurred in both the comprehension and the production regions of the listener’s brains.

In fact, the listener’s brains often fired in the same patterns as the storytellers but a moment before the storyteller’s. They were anticipating what she would say. The better the listeners used schemas or mental maps to predict what the storyteller would say, the better their overall understanding was.

Berreby posits that our tendency to synchronise brain activity may be the reason that people take pleasure in synchronised activities like singing, marching together and other such activities. Rapport is indeed a pleasurable feeling and if you can learn to use it in your dealings with employees, stakeholders and other work colleagues, you’ll be well ahead of the game.

Robert Dooley of NeuroscienceMarketing.com also looked at the Princeton study. He reports that neural coupling didn’t always occur. If the listener didn’t really understand the storyteller, their brain patterns would decouple. Synchronisation occurred when the listener was paying attention and understanding the information. That means it’s up to you to create compelling and intriguing stories to engage listeners and create rapport. It also means that you should use examples or scenarios that the listener will have some schema in place for, a foundation of familiarity, in order to have successful communication.

A 2012 study conducted in Finland has found that strong emotions can ins-pire brain synchronisation. According to a Science Daily account, the fact that emotions are so contagious may point to a basis for human interaction: when people share an emotional state, their brains and their bodies process the environment in like ways. Both negative and positive emotions cause people’s brains to synchronise, in processing and in sensory regions of the brain having to do with vision and touch. The researchers theorise that such brain synchronisation helps people to understand and tune in to other’s actions and intentions, facilitating social interactions and group processes. It would help you to develop your communication skills, your empathy and awareness of other’s emotional states, and learn how to best utilise this inform-ation and craft compelling stories.

While stories induce emotion and can result in rapport and brain synchronisation for the leader or salesperson, there is another reason brain syncing is a good thing: it induces altruism. In a Psychology Today article, David DiSalvo explains that when we perform a good deed, helping a person parallel park for instance, the brain synchronisation that occurs is very positive. When you make such a decision and the other person understands your intention, your brains align in terms of success. Your belief that you can help the person to succeed causes the driver’s brain to believe that they will succeed, making success more likely.

DiSalvo says that ‘paying it forward’ is good brain medicine because the more we do reach out to others, the more our brains register this kind of activity as worthwhile. We experience reward for helping others and we also strengthen our own belief in our ability to succeed. This reward causes us to seek out more opportunities to strengthen this success process, both for ourselves and to help others. Our brains actually grow when we perform altruistic acts or are on the receiving end of such acts. Learning how to think positive can help you become more influential, persuasive and truly kind and collaborative.

Kelly McGonigal, another Psychology Today contributor, reports on another example of altruism and brain synchronisation. You may have heard that gratitude exercises, taking the time to list the things you are grateful for, can improve your wellbeing. A study published in Psychological Science has found that asking yourself instead: “What have I done that other people might be grateful for?” can be even more beneficial.

The study was divided into two different parts. In the first, participants were asked to write either about what they were grateful for or what they had done that others might be grateful for. They performed this exercise for 15 minutes a day for four days. After the four days, they were given the opportunity to perform an altruistic act. The participants that had written about how others may have been grateful or benefitted from something the participants had done were much more likely to donate their time to a good cause than the participants that wrote about what they themselves were grateful for.

In the second part of the study, participants were asked to list either three instances in which they had received help or support in recent times, or helped others and how they had benefitted. Afterwards, the participants were given the opportunity to donate part of their participant pay to earthquake and tsunami victims. When participants wrote about how others had benefitted from their acts, they were more than twice as likely to help the disaster victims than those that had written about receiving help themselves.

Practising gratitude in this way, by thinking of how others have benefitted from your acts, may improve altruistic and positive brain synchronisation. If you look for opportunities to help others, you can improve altruism in other people in a viral way. It’s a win-win for you and society at large. Performing an altruistic act may be the simplest and most effective way to connect with others.

(Write to Oksana at oksana.designlife@gmail.com)