116 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
✓ Speak more slowly and precisely than in face-to-face meetings.
Remember you can’t get clues from the body language.
✓ Listen for the style of language – check whether people have visual,
auditory, or kinaesthetic preferences, and match your language style to
theirs as we suggest in Chapter 6.
✓ Get attention before making your point (otherwise the first part of the
message gets lost). Begin with phrases along the lines of ‘I have some-
thing I’d like to mention here... it’s about.. .’
✓ Use people’s names more than in face-to-face meetings. Address ques-
tions to people by name and thank them for their contribution by name.
✓ Visualise the person at the other end of the phone line as you listen to
the conversation (you may even like to have a photo of the person in
front of you).
✓ Summarise and check your understanding of points and decisions
continually.
Knowing How to Break Rapport and Why You May Want To
At times you may choose to mismatch people for a while in order to break
rapport deliberately. Mismatching is the opposite of matching or mirroring
(which we describe in the earlier section ‘Matching and mirroring’). To mis-
match someone, you aim to do something dissimilar to that person, such as
dressing very differently, speaking in a different tone or at a different speed,
adopting a different physical posture, or behaving quite differently from the
other person.
We worked with a team of doctors who were suffering from an increase in
patient workload due to the long-term sickness of one partner. In the initial
assessments with them, we noticed how most of the meetings with patients
were completed within the allotted one hour, and yet meetings with one
partner took nearly twice as long. This particular doctor had a reputation for
being especially kind and helpful with her patients; she topped the popular-
ity bill in a patient survey. Indeed she is a great listener, and patients loved
her approach. However, in order to get through her case load during normal
surgery hours, she had to discover how to limit the time with each patient
in a more disciplined way. She found a way to mismatch sensitively and get
through her patient list.
