118 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
Discovering how to break rapport and end a conversation is a real skill, partic-
ularly if your best friend or mother wants to chat. Do it with consideration.
Give clear feedback that you’d love to talk so long as it’s at the right time of
day, place, and length of time. You care about them as a person, and so try
and arrange a time to talk that suits you when work’s over for the day.Grasping the power of the word ‘but’
Sometimes a tiny word can make a huge difference between your ability to
keep rapport and break it. NLP pays attention to such details in the pattern of
conversation and so offers some useful clues for you to influence communi-
cation. Work by Robert Dilts on sleight-of-mouth patterns has demonstrated
the power of words to frame people’s experience: NLP calls this verbal
reframing. Even simple connective words such as ‘and’ or ‘but’ make listen-
ers focus their attention in different ways. When you adopt the word ‘but’,
people tend to remember what you say after it. With the word ‘and’, people
tend to recall what you said before and after it. When you use the connection
‘even though’, the effect is to focus attention on the first statement, as in: ‘It is
snowing today even though the weather men said it would be clear.’ By chang-
ing the order of words in a sentence, you can change people’s experience.Enough is enough
Ralph was a very competent engineer and a
great storyteller. He’d travelled widely, met all
the senior people in the corporation where he
worked as they were climbing the ranks, and
had had interesting jobs. All the newcomers
in the team loved to hear his anecdotes and
exploits at the coffee machine – for a while.Unfortunately, Ralph didn’t recognise the signs
when people had heard enough. As colleagues
were politely edging back to their desks or des-
perately trying to leave the building at night,
Ralph would corner them and carry on with his
stories oblivious to the bored stares or attempts
to end the conversation. The more they tried
to get away, the more he would become
entrenched in the next episode: ‘And let mejust tell you about.. .’ You had the feeling that if
you walked away and came back next year, he
would just pick up where he’d left off.In the end, team members began to avoid him.
They joked about him behind his back because
he refused to pick up the cues that he’d taken
more than his acceptable slot. They stopped
inviting him to meetings for fear he would domi-
nate. His career progress suffered. Colleagues
deliberately broke rapport, and in the end most
contact, to protect their own time.
As Ralph became more and more ostracised from
the team, he became more desperate to tell his
stories and gather an audience around him.