WHAT IS GOING ON IN PEOPLE'S HEAD?

Matt was on point with a potential client. He knew his facts and was able to clearly and concisely articulate to his prospect all of the benefits associated with purchasing the fitness membership he was selling to her. In order to achieve his sales goal and make a bonus that month he had to make this one last sale. He was determined and confident, but regardless of his self-assurance, could not close the prospect and missed the sale and his bonus that month.

Matt was not in rapport with his client, he thought he was and he did not test it. Before you wan to sell anything, or simply want to convince your spouse to go see a movie, or your kid to eat their vegetables, you need to be in rapport. Here is how to test it.

Last week, we talked about the first part of creating Rapport. If you missed it, you can find the article here.

PACING

As the person you are creating rapport with moves, you continue to move with them. You will do this to continually stay in the other person’s model of the world. At an unconscious level, they will perceive this as if the differences between you and them had been reduced significantly.

LEADING

If you want to ‘test’ whether you are in rapport or not, make a change in your own physiology and notice if the person follows your ‘lead’. For example, scratch your chin, take a sip of your drink, shift your weight to one side, etc. If the other person copies you, unconsciously, you know you are in rapport. That is usually your cue that they are now ‘open’ for your to introduce a conversation topic that could have led to a heated discussion if it had started before rapport was created.

LOOKING FOR WHAT’S IS GOING ON INSIDE

Body language is a great tool to get in rapport with someone and to evaluate and get information about what is going on. You can also collect valuable insights observing their eye patterns. The way we move our eyes in a patterned way when we speak and interact is a way for you to know firstly, if a person is remembering or inventing something and secondly, what is their favourite way of accessing and processing information.

EYE ACCESSING PATTERNS

Generally speaking, if a person is looking up to their right, they are remembering something visual. If they are looking straight to the right, they are remembering something auditory, like a song or something someone said. If they are looking down to the right, they are accessing their emotions.

If a person is looking up to the left, they are creating something visual; straight to the left, they are making up something to say, down to the left, they are doing self-talk and deep thinking.

How observing eye-accessing patterns can be useful in your relationships? You may have watched spy movies, or have gone through border customs and heard about the training that professionals go through in order to be able to detect when people are telling the truth or not. Their training is a lot more extensive than what we are mentioning in this book. The roots remain the same. The eyes are a window to the soul.

For example, if you ask your teenager where they spent the previous night and their eyes look to their left (to your right, when you look at them), you know that they are creating a response for you. If they look to their left, they are remembering what they did. Continue to ask questions until you can see a pattern. Nathalie’s clients often get surprised when she asks them a question, they respond and then Nathalie would say: “Did you just remember what the answer was, then remember how you felt that day and then told yourself that you did not really want to talk about it, so you made up another answer instead?” The client usually responds with a stunned look: “How did you know?” Nathalie is not clairvoyant, she just knows how to observe eye-accessing-cues in order to know what is really going on. It is with that information that she is able to get people transformational results.

Gaining an understanding of how people process information will certainly help improve your relationships with others. You can practice with a friend with the following questions:

1. What was the colour of the walls in your bedroom growing up?

2. How does it feel to put on wet socks?

3. What does a saxophone sound like?

4. What would you do with a million dollars?

5. What would a horse with a congestion-cold sound like?

6. How much is 40 x 5 + 2?

Answers: 1. Up to their Right: Visual remembered; 2. Down to their Right: Kinesthetic (feelings); 3. Straight to their Right: Auditory Remembered; 4. Up to their Left: Visual Construct; 5. Straight to their Left: Auditory Construct; 6. Down to their left: Auditory Digital (self-talk, deep thinking).

This was an excerpt of my latest book: THINK Yourself® A RELATIONSHIPS PRO written in collaboration with Maureen Hagan.You can order your copy here.