The Great Rapport Experiment of 2008
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Photo-Credit: Sharing The Same Brain
The New Year is a good time to start new goals and new experiments. This year I will be doing a series of persuasion and covert hypnosis related experiments, and publish them here for all of us to learn from.
What better topic to start with than rapport?
Rapport is one of the most important ingredients in the persuasion recipe. And it is what you need to get first in order to go onto the other sneaky hypnosis stuff.
Get rapport or get out.
So we kick off the New Year with what I will call “The Great Rapport Experiment of 2008″.
I am going to experiment with one of the classic NLP strategies that you probably already know of.
She Approached Him!?
I was in Las Vegas two years ago at persuasion seminar. Some of the seminar attendees and I were in the main lobby of The Luxor Hotel having a few drinks, and across the room was a lovely woman socializing with her friends. One of the attendees Mark, a less than strikingly handsome, gentleman from Canada was sitting chatting with us. When all of a sudden the women walked across the room and began to chat up Mark.
As Mark’s new female friend went to buy him a drink, Mark gave me that sneaky wink that most persuasion artists give each other to let their colleagues know they are using a persuasion strategy.
Naturally, I was dying to know what the hell he did to get a beautiful stranger to walk across the room and introduce herself!
He said matching and mirroring.
I heard stories like this and my bull sh*t detector goes haywire, but witnessing the results did silence my B.S. detector a bit.
I’m still skeptical though, so this months experiment is going to be on matching and mirroring.
Photo Credit: Heather’s Twins
Matching and Mirroring
You probably already know that matching and mirroring is mimicking the breathing, posture, movement and speech tempo of the person you are persuading. The theory behind it is that, when the unconscious mind sees that you are moving like them that you are “like them” and can be trusted. This “likeness” can create a trust and bond that will open the doors for effective persuasion.
Matching and mirroring is my least favorite rapport building strategy because in the past it seemed, to me, to be the least consistent of the rapport gaining strategies. On top of that, it seems to take longer to gain rapport Since I read a basic NLP book years ago there have been a lot of developments that have lead to some advanced methods that I have found to be more effective. (Don’t worry I’ll do an experiment on those too eventually)
I know some persuasion teachers, like Tom and Kim of essential skills, have thrown matching and mirroring out of their persuasion model completely. Tom always tells the story:
“Somebody gave some professor $200,000 to walk around and mirror people. For $200,000 this is what they found out. If you are already in rapport with someone mirroring increased that rapport slightly. If you did not have rapport with someone, mirroring irritated them.” –Tom Vizzini Essential Skills
On the other hand you have Kenrick Cleveland, who many people in the NLP, covert hypnosis, and persuasion community refer to as “better than Bandler” Kenrick swears by matching an mirroring. If you attend one of his seminars you will hear him say “when they move, you move” at least a dozen times.
Here’s The Deal:
I am going to get to the bottom of the great matching and mirroring debate myself and experiment with matching and mirroring.
I am going to try to get rapport with people 100 different people in business/ sales and social settings using matching and mirroring alone. Experiments produce best results in a sterile environment, so I will not use any other rapport strategies while I am testing matching and mirroring.
I will publish the type of setting, the type of subject, the results (or lack of results) as well as any new insights I learned. At the end we will have 100 different experiments, and that should give an excellent resource whether or not you want to use matching and mirroring in your persuasion artist repertoire.
Popularity: 2% [?]
