144 Leading with NLP
are trustworthy, you will have rapport, but you cannot nec-
essarily create trust by building rapport, because rapport
happens in the moment and is created for a purpose. Trust
goes beyond rapport. It goes deeper because it spans all the
neurological levels and it goes through time as well. Rap-
port is built in the short term and trust is long term. When
you trust someone, you keep trusting them whether they are
present or not.
NLP has many means of creating rapport by pacing all the
neurological levels (see pp.48–52)– matching clothes, ap-
pearance and cultural mores on the environment level,
matching body language, posture, gesture and voice tone on
the behaviour level, matching ways of thinking, showing
competence on the capability level, and particularly by
matching beliefs and values. These create rapport in the mo-
ment and leaders do use these skills.
Rapport comes from an honest attempt to understand
how the world is for the other person, and being willing to
try and experience the world through their eyes and ears. As
the Native American saying has it, ‘Do not judge another
person until you have walked a mile in their moccasins.’ It is
important to understand the people you want to influence,
to show you acknowledge their beliefs and values, but un-
derstanding does not mean agreement, you do not have to
agree with them. So, a person who is good at building rap-
port will build good relationships. However, unless they trust
themselves and keep their word, they will not necessarily be
trusted. Trust evokes trust.
Trust begins by trusting yourself. It comes from being
clear about your own boundaries and your own values, what
you will do and what you will not do. When you say you will
do something, if you are trustworthy, you will keep your
word. Becoming trustworthy does not mean getting people
to trust you, it means becomingworthyof their trust, becom-
ing the kind of person people will trust. In NLP terms, trust
is an identity level value and not a capability.
Like leadership, trust turns out to be another of these
nominalizations that has to be reciprocal. It does not exist in