The point is, the more different something / someone is from ourselves, the more we fear it. This goes
for anything - cultures, races, religions, species, it doesn’t matter. This is why mirroring is so effective,
it is the art of making yourself more similar to your chosen person. On an unconscious level, this builds
trust and rapport.
Positive Reinforcement vs Mirroring
A favourite author of mine, Professor Richard Wiseman, carried
out a study which involved waiters using mirroring and matched it
against waiters using positive reinforcement. The results were quite
stunning.
The waiters were told to take orders from their tables, with one
group of waiters using positive reinforcement (“sure, no problem,
great”) in response to each order. The other group of waiters were
told to mirror their customers simply by repeating their orders back
to them. The waiters who used the mirroring got a staggering 70% larger average tip than those who
used positive reinforcement.
NLP and Mirroring
The classic NLP take on mirroring is to determine (by listening to someone’s language patterns) wheth-
er they are talking in a state that is visual, audial, or kinaesthetic:
State Primary sense Language patterns
Visual Sight I see / It looks good
Audial Hearing Sounds good / That rings a bell
Kinaesthetic Feeling That doesn’t feel right / I can’t put my finger on it
These are not set-in-stone guidelines, however. Sometimes we use words of a certain state just be-
cause we’re used to hearing them ourselves. If you can modify your own language to be the same as
the person you are talking to, this can go a long way towards building rapport and trust.
For example, if you can determine that someone is a visual person, you would be better off describing
how something looks rather than how something sounds.
Try the NLP Mirroring Quiz
Find out how good you are at building rapport through mirroring! This 3-minute quiz is a light-hearted
approach designed to help you remember some of the basic rules of mirroring.
Go to http://www.nlp-secrets.com/nlp-technique-mirroring.php to take the test!