Читать книгу NLP Workbook: A practical guide to achieving the results you want - Joseph O’Connor - Страница 29

Matching at the behaviour level means matching another person’s movements while maintaining your own identity and integrity. It is like a musical duet – two people do not play the same tune, they harmonize to produce something greater. Look around in restaurants or parties where people are meeting socially and you will see that they intuitively match body language, particularly eye contact. Very good friends will often be seen in very similar postures and lovers will stare into each other’s eyes and often breathe in unison.

There are three important elements to matching on the behavioural level: body language, voice tone and language.

Body language.

You can gain rapport by matching:

breathing pattern

posture

gestures

eye contact

Voice tone.

You can match:

speed of speech

volume of speech

rhythm of speech

characteristic sounds (e.g. coughs, sighs and hesitations)

Matching voice tone is very useful for building rapport on the telephone, where you only have the auditory channel, so voice tone and words are all you have to build rapport.

Non-verbal matching is far more powerful than verbal agreement. We set more store by a person’s non-verbal behaviour than their words. When the two conflict, we tend to believe the non-verbal part of the message. For example, ‘That’s lovely!’ said with a sneering voice tone or ‘I am interested!’ while looking at your watch will give the opposite impression to the words spoken. You can verbally disagree with someone and keep rapport if you match their body language as you do so.

Be careful, however, of matching body language too closely. You can get good rapport simply by making sure you do not mismatch. In other words, adopt a posture that is similar but not exactly the same. Give the same amount of eye contact as the other person, though, because this is what they feel comfortable with. Lots of eye contact is not necessarily a good thing!

We do body and voice matching naturally and unconsciously. Some very interesting research was done by William Condon in the 1960s into what he called ‘cultural microrhythms’. He analysed short videotapes of people talking together and broke them down into thousands of frames. What he found (which has been confirmed by subsequent researchers) was that the gestures were harmonized and so was the rhythm of the conversation. Volume and pitch fell into balance and the speech rate – the number of speech sounds per second – equalized. The period of time that lapsed between the moment one speaker stopped talking and another speaker began (the latency period) also equalized.

Language.

You can match:

key words and phrases that designate values (for example when you summarize to check for agreement)

words that show how a person is thinking

These are called predicates. They show that a person may be visualizing, hearing mental sounds or voices, or paying attention to feelings. By matching predicates, you show the other person that you respect their way of thinking.

Matching behaviour needs skill and respect. It must be done out of an honest desire to understand another person’s model of the world. Simply mimicking body language is indiscriminate copying without respect and will lose you rapport very fast indeed as soon as the other person notices. And they will.

Often the best way to gain rapport at the behaviour level is simply to avoid badly mismatching (e.g. do not stand if the other person is sitting, do not talk quickly if the other person is a slow speaker, do not speak loudly if they have a soft voice). Be comfortable and congruent yourself when you match other people’s behaviour. Do not match anything that you feel uneasy about.

You can match one aspect of a person’s body language with a different part of yours if this feels more comfortable. This is called ‘crossover matching’. For example, you might match the rhythm of a person’s breathing with a small movement of your hand.