NLP: More About Rapport
What is Rapport?
We encounter rapport all the time—it’s the state that arises during successful communication. Think of good conversations: interest, trust, understanding, and mutual liking. That’s rapport. Rapport appears when people start acting as a unified system. A great example is partner dancing, where instead of two separate dancers, you see a “couple” moving as one. This doesn’t mean people copy each other exactly. To dance Latin or sports rock and roll well, partners need to coordinate their movements, but each still has their own unique style.
Interestingly, the ability to create rapport isn’t just a human skill—many animals that live in groups can do this to some extent. Otherwise, they’d constantly bump into each other and get hurt while moving together. Instead, a herd of horses runs, a school of fish swims, or a pack of wolves moves, and everyone stays mostly safe.
A more precise definition: Rapport is a state of interaction between people characterized by a high level of trust and the ability to lead or influence each other.
Why is Rapport Important?
- For effective communication: Without rapport, communication just doesn’t work.
- To convey information: Without rapport, your message may be ignored or not trusted.
- For verbal influence: Techniques like presuppositions, truisms, embedded messages, conversational reframing, and language patterns won’t work without rapport.
- In hypnosis: Rapport is a must. The term itself comes from hypnosis.
- For enjoyable conversations: Rapport simply makes interactions more pleasant.
What Happens During Rapport?
As mentioned, during rapport, people (and even animals) form a system and start acting as a whole. Imagine a school of fish swimming tightly together. When a predator appears, the group splits apart in an organized way, then comes back together. Such movement requires a high level of coordination.
People in rapport feel trust, enjoy communicating, and like being around each other. Rapport also creates a state of leading—if one person changes their state, the other follows. For example, if you start speaking more slowly, your conversation partner may slow down too. This is useful for managing others’ states: a coach raises their energy and the audience follows, a therapist matches a client’s mood and then gradually becomes calmer, helping the client relax, or you match a friend’s sadness and then slowly become more cheerful, helping them feel better too.
A strong state of rapport can even feel trance-like, with the main signs of a trance state. It’s believed that mirror neurons in the brain play a role in rapport—these are neurons that activate when someone else performs a certain action.
How to Create Rapport
To build rapport, you need to match your conversation partner—align your states. Personal congruence, or internal consistency, also plays a big role. Once you’ve established rapport, just keep an eye on it and restore it if it suddenly disappears.
“It’s like driving a car. When you’re on the highway, you make sure your car stays in the lane and adjust as needed. And you do this constantly.”
— Richard Bandler
How to Calibrate Rapport
The only sensory-obvious sign of rapport is the presence of leading. The simplest way to check is to try leading: slow your speech, move your hand, or relax your shoulders. If your partner follows—slows their speech, moves their hand, or relaxes their shoulders—then rapport is present.
Since rapport is a symmetrical state—if you’re in rapport with someone, they’re in rapport with you—you can also calibrate your own state. Notice how you feel around people you know you have rapport with. If you feel something similar, you probably have rapport.