Chapter 7: Creating Rapport 113
Matching and mirroring are ways of becoming highly tuned to how someone
else is thinking and experiencing the world: it’s a way of listening with your
whole body. Simple mirroring happens naturally when you have rapport.NLP suggests that you can also deliberately match and mirror someone
to build rapport until it becomes natural. To do so, you need to match
the following:✓ Body postures and gestures
✓ Breathing rates
✓ Rhythm of movement and energy levels
✓ Voice tonality (how you sound) and speed of speech
Beware of the fine line between moving in rhythm with someone and mimicry.
People instinctively know when you’re making fun of them or being insincere.
If you decide you want to check out mirroring for yourself, do so gradually in
no-risk situations or with strangers you aren’t going to see again. Don’t be sur-
prised though if it works and the strangers want to become your friends!When rapport helps you say ‘no’
Perhaps you’re one of those people who prefer
to say ‘yes’ to everything, to be helpful and
pleasing to the boss, clients, and family. You’re
the first person to put your hand up in commit-
tee meetings, the one who organises the school
jumble sale or charity dinner, who drives the
kids around, and you’re always the one who
ends up having to do the tasks. Discovering
how to say ‘no’ sometimes is one of the greatest
skills for modern living, if you’re to protect your-
self from being overloaded and then becoming
sick with the stress.At work, a manager can easily be tempted to
ask the willing worker to take on more. Consider
James’s story.As a maths teacher who loves his job, James
was finding it increasingly hard to say: ‘I’m
not going to take that on.’ He felt he was let-
ting people down by saying ‘no’ and was in
danger of making himself seriously ill through
overwork. He discovered that by simply match-
ing the body language of his head of depart-
ment, he was more easily able to smile and say
very politely: ‘I’d love to do that, but my time is
already fully committed. If you want me to take
on extra responsibility, you must decide what
you’d like me to stop doing to make time for
this.’ In this way he refused to take on a greater
load than he was able to handle.