110 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
✓ The skills you develop
✓ The values you live by
✓ Your beliefs
✓ Your purpose in life
✓ Being true to your natural identity
Sharpening your rapport with eight quick tips
For starters, try the following immediate ways to begin building rapport:
✓ Take a genuine interest in getting to know what’s important to other
people. Start to understand them instead of expecting them to under-
stand you first.
✓ Pick up on the key words, favourite phrases, and manner of speaking
that an individual uses and build these aspects subtly into your own
conversation.
✓ Notice how a person likes to handle information: lots of details or just
the big picture? As you speak, feed back information in this same por-
tion size.
✓ Check how a person uses the representation systems with visual, audi-
tory, and kinaesthetic language (which you can read more about in
Chapter 6), and use similar words during your conversations.
✓ Breathe in unison with the person. You can do this discreetly by watch-
ing their neck and chest to see when they inhale and exhale, and then
matching your breathing to the other person.
✓ Look out for someone’s overall intention – the person’s underlying aim –
as opposed to the exact things done or said. People may not always get it
right, but work on the assumption that people’s hearts lie in the right place.
✓ Adopt a similar stance to another person in terms of your body lan-
guage, gestures, voice tone, and speed of talking.
✓ Respect people’s time, energy, friends and favourite associates, and
money. These items are important resources for you.
The next four sections contain some more advanced rapport-building
techniques.
