"My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me."
- Winston Churchill

Communication Skillbuilding Module 254:
Rapport Building as an Important Business Skill

When it comes to interpersonal communication, how do we get more of what we do want, and less of what we do not want?

As professional communicators, whether we are coaches, facilitators, consultants or trainers, much of what we do consists of establishing and maintaining rapport with our clients, colleagues, friends and other relationships. Enhancing our rapport building skills makes sense interpersonally. It is also simply a solid business skill. Without the ability to establish and build rapport masterfully, your success in business and in your personal relationships will be very limited.

In this brief article, you will become familar with the art and science of building rapport. You will be invited to practice what you are being reminded of here, and you'll enjoy additional resources for further study and skill building.

What is Rapport?
Rapport is the presence of agreement or alignment. This can exist intrapersonally or interpersonally, and can easily lead to impressive outcomes. None of us are born with powerful rapport building skills, these are learned, and you can master them, leading you to an extraordinary life.

In Jerry Richardson's book, The Magic of Rapport (published by Meta Publications and available at Amazon.com) you will be reminded of the "secret" of establishing and maintaining rapport...pacing. Pacing, a practice we have engaged in for many thousands of years, was recently evolved to an art form by a famous medical hypnotist, Milton Erickson. Defined by author Jerry Richardson, pacing means meeting the other person where he or she is, reflecting what he or she knows or assumes to be true, or matching some part of his or her ongoing experience.

If you or someone you know would benefit from developing rapport building skills, you'll want to check out the resources below. This article is written to encourage you to take action to empower yourself around honing your skills in this important area.

For Further Reading
If you would enjoy learning about, practicing and developing your rapport building skills, consider reading The Magic of Rapport, a book written by Jerry Richardson.

Links to relevant articles
Here is an article describing research relating to three women who consistently demonstrate the ability to establish credibility and rapport with clients. The common thread in all of the women studied is their advanced skill with neurolinguistic programming (NLP) technology. If you are very serious about developing your interpersonal skills, you'll want to learn more about NLP.

Here's another article on rapport, which mentions NLP. You'll find that often in exploring how to develop rapport, NLP is present in the conversation.

What is NLP?
NLP is a technology explaining how one becomes masterful at anything. Passionately and persistently applying the technology of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) will allow you to do whatever you want to do masterfully. Those who have invested the time to master NLP tools and techniques tend to enjoy more out of life as a result.

There are many resources relating to NLP on the web.
Here is a page with links to some of these resources.