How to make people like and trust you by building instant rapport

Communication rules relationships. The person who communicates most effectively almost always gets what they want. And when it comes to establishing a relationship with your client or personal training prospect, rapport rules the entire kingdom.

“People like people who are like themselves or whom they want to be like.”

We have two different minds working simultaneously at all times. Our conscious mind, responsible for logic and critical thinking, and our unconscious mind, the one responsible for everything else including habits, behaviors, physiological processes, managing safety, etc.

Our communication is broken down into 3 different modalities:

Words (conscious) - 7% of communication

Tonality (unconscious) - 38% of communication

Physiology or body language (unconscious) - 55% of communication

As you can see, words account for a very small percentage of our communication. That means 93% of our communication is done on the “unconscious” (outside of our conscious awareness) level. You can think of it this way: it’s more important to understand HOW someone communicates best, more so than WHAT they say to communicate.

I’m going to cover the 5 most important steps to building a good rapport with anyone.

#1 - Listening for and matching Predicates

Predicates are words and phrases we use to identify and determine which representational system someone prefers. This includes our visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses. Someone who is a visual learner will typically use phrases like “I see what you mean”, “That’s clear to me”, or “I can definitely picture it.” An auditory learner will use phrases like, “Sounds good to me,'' I hear what you’re saying”, or “I can tell you understand.” Finally, a kinesthetic learner will use phrases such as, “I can feel what you’re saying,'' “I can handle it” or “I think I’m catching on.”

While most people are thinking consciously, they’re unconsciously selecting the words and phrasing that come up as they speak. Listening for these words and matching your language with their preferred rep system is an instant way to gain rapport with someone because they feel like you are speaking their direct language. 

#2 - Matching and Mirroring

Have you ever noticed yourself standing or leaning the same way as a person you’re having a conversation with? Matching and mirroring involve paying attention to someone’s physiology and matching their body movements and postures. When you do this, mirror neurons fire in the brain and put you into rapport with that person. Within matching and mirroring, there’s a technique called pacing and leading. Pacing and leading involve one person in the conversation leading the conversation where subtle body movements are mirrored by the other person. When the other person is following your movements, you are pacing and leading the conversation. This is a great way to have influence over the conversation.

#3 - Matching Voice

Matching your voice with the person you’re speaking to is another key element in building and maintaining rapport. When you match your voice to theirs, however subtle, it’s an instant way to experience rapport. People not only like people like themselves but people that also sound like them too. Especially if you can identify that person as an auditory learner.

#4 - Matching the size of pieces of information

This comes from the Hierarchy of Ideas, a concept in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) that gives some structure to the idea of navigating speech back and forth between abstraction and specificity. Moving towards abstraction in conversation is called chunking up while moving towards specifics is called chunking down. The person who controls the conversation by moving towards abstraction is typically leading and pacing the dialogue. 

Questions to ask when wanting to “chunk up” the conversation into more abstraction; “What is this an example of?” “For what purpose?” “For what intention?”

Questions to ask when wanted to “chunk down” the conversation into more details; “What are examples of this?” and “What specifically?”

Guiding someone towards abstraction through questions actually puts them into a more trance state, while moving them towards more specifics takes them further out of trance state. As you can see, moving someone towards abstraction controls the conversation by getting that person into a deeper trance. Deeper trance means their mind is more agreeable and able to be suggestable to your ideas. 

#5 - Finding common experiences

Lastly, one of the most important things we can do is find something relative to each other. When you discover a common experience with another person it almost instantly creates a bond. People who have common experiences feel more understood and will instantly build trust and rapport with someone.

Establishing rapport is one of the most important aspects of being a coach or any person of influence. As a fitness and nutrition coach, I’ve had thousands of conversations over the years and they’ve all started with building rapport. Every one of them. Most people don’t even realize they’re already doing 1 or more of these things. If you can master more than 2, or better yet, all 5 of these rapport-building concepts, you can get whatever you want out of any conversation you find yourself in.