106 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
Knowing Why Rapport Is Important
The word rapport derives from the French verb rapporter, translated as ‘to
return or bring back’. The English dictionary definition is ‘a sympathetic
relationship or understanding’: rapport is about making a two-way connec-
tion. You know that you’ve made such a connection when you experience a
genuine sense of trust and respect with another person, when you engage
comfortably with someone no matter how different the two of you are, and
when you know that you’re listening and being listened to.
Although you may want to spend your time with people who are just like
you, the world is full of a huge variety of different types of people to meet, all
with special skills, opinions, and backgrounds. Rapport is the key to success
and influence in both your personal and professional life, because it’s about
appreciating and working with differences. Rapport makes getting things
done much easier and allows you to provide good customer service to others
and enjoy being on the receiving end of it, too. Ultimately, rapport preserves
your time, money, and energy. What a great stress-free way to live!
Recognising rapport when you see it
You can’t take a magic pill to acquire rapport instantly; it’s something you
develop intuitively. So, in order for you to understand how you personally
build rapport and what’s important to you in different relationships, carry
out the following steps:
- Think for a moment about someone with whom you have rapport.
What signals do you send out to that person and receive back that allow
you to know that you’re on the same wavelength? How do you create
and maintain your rapport?
- Think for a moment about someone with whom you don’t have rap-
port, but would like to.
What signals do you send out to that person and receive back that allow
you to know that you’re not on the same wavelength? What gets in the
way of creating and maintaining rapport with that person?
- Think about your experience of the first person.
What can you do differently in your behaviour with the second person
to help you build a stronger relationship?
You may think that the first person (with whom you have rapport) is simply
easy to get on with and the second (with whom you share no rapport yet) is
just a difficult person. Yet, by being more flexible in your behaviour and in
your thoughts about the second person, you may find that you can build rap-
port through some simple actions.
