CD07 - The Magic of Rapport

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Patterns Of Excellence CD 7 –
The Magic Of Rapport
By Adam Khoo
© 2007 All Rights Reserved. Adam Khoo Learning Technologies Group Pte Ltd
www.Patterns-Of-Excellence.com
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Welcome to this session on building rapport. In this CD, we will help you to uncover the
processes of rapport building in order to make you an effective communicator.
How many of you believe that the key to a person’s success is their ability to
communicate with others? As you listen to this program, you know that it is important to
know how to build rapport effectively in order to maintain some kind of connection with
the people you want to influence.
Language allows us to communicate and communication allows us to influence. Do you

realize that when you speak, move or look at people in a particular way, you actually
trigger off certain judgments?
Through listening to language, you can identify people’s personality, the way they think
and the way they know how to accept information. Likewise, using language, you can
create a powerful impact in making them understand you better. If you are not yet aware
how your language affects others, it could put you in a dangerous position, particularly
when others might interpret your communication in the wrong way.
I would like you to notice that there are certain patterns of behavior that occur naturally
in the process of communication and rapport. This means that it is actually going to be
very easy to build rapport with other people once we understand how to repeat these
patterns.
In fact, I can bet you that if you were to walk into a restaurant and observe people,
particularly couples, you would be able to tell which couples are in very close rapport
with each other and those who have been married for way too long. Just simply observe
their body language.
For instance, if the woman is leaning forward, it is very likely that she would be in
rapport with her partner, and he would be leaning forward too. The uncanny harmony
makes them somewhat like mirror images to each other. And very often when one starts
to move, the other also moves, making the entire communication process looks like a
dance of harmony.
Their body postures look very similar. Here are some other examples. Have you seen a
couple’s photograph? Take a close look at their facial expressions. Many couples tend to
look a lot like each other, especially in their smile and in their eyes. It happens probably
because of the intimate contact that they have had over the years, leading to a lot of
unconscious modeling of each other.
Also, do you know anyone who owns a pet? I would be willing to bet my bottom dollar
that the pet looks somewhat like the owner, maybe physically, maybe in terms of their
behavior.
These all boils down to one interesting fact; that we tend to like things that are like
ourselves. Think about your close group of friends. I am certain you hear similar
language, phrases, opinions and the like in a social gathering.
You probably share similar mannerisms, interests and even values. The more similar you
are, the greater in rapport you tend to be. Therefore, the primary objective in rapport
building is to create similarity.
Similarity leads to trust, and trust leads to an open flow of communication. What results,
is a positive feeling of being in the company of someone you like.
In building rapport, you get others to like you. This is merely the means to an end.
Whether you realize it or not, when you get people to like you, you use it to a certain
extent, even though you may not immediately intend to do so.
You might ask someone to go out with you for a movie. If the person likes you, there is a
high chance that they might say yes. Rapport plays such an important role in our lives
that you know you will approach people whom you totally trust if you are in trouble.
Rapport allows us to establish social relationships that work for us. It is in a sense a way
for us to know that we can trust others. Perhaps then, the idea that ‘birds of a feather
flocks together’ may not be too far-fetched at all. The process of creating similarity is
known as pacing and I will elaborate about this in greater detail later. In order for us to
know how to match, we must first be able to observe others with precision. In NLP, we
call this calibration.
Calibration is a process to help us to fine tune our distinctions from an objective point of
view rather than a subjective point of view. Calibration is the single most important
element in modeling and we will continue to refer to this over and over again in the next
few CDs.
How do we calibrate? First of all, our ability to calibrate comes from the various senses.
Let us focus on building our ability to observe through these three basic senses, namely
the visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses first.
Although we cannot really do an exercise over the CD program to teach you how to
calibrate, you can find opportunities in order to practice this and reach mastery for
yourself.
The main objective of calibration is for you to make comparative distinction, pretty much
like the game they play in Sesame Street, where you are suppose to figure out which of
those people are not doing the same thing as the rest. So, observe differences in body
language, tonal voice, and words that are used by people and notice what difference there
are in these three things that affect these people’s states.
The key focus for calibration is to describe, not evaluate. For example, for instance, if a
person is sitting down, your description could sound like this, “You are crossing your
right leg over your left, with your left arm crossed over your right, and your head is tilted
slightly to your right.”
Whereas, an evaluative judgment could probably sound like, “You are being defensive.”
Likewise, instead of saying, “You are angry!” you could say, “You are frowning, your
arms are crossed, and you are breathing heavily.” The test for you to determine if your
statement is an evaluative judgment would be to ask yourself, “Could this behavior mean
something else to someone else in the room?
Would they disagree with my judgment?” If you can find an alternative judgment, then,
there is a very high chance you are making an evaluation. Keep to the objective details as
best you can. I would recommend some personal exercises that you can do in order to
improve your calibration skills.
You can do many visual calibration exercises. One way is to compare what you friend
just wore yesterday with what he is wearing today, or to be able to identify certain slight
changes in a person’s breathing pattern or in a person’s sitting posture.
Another way would be for you to identify different mix of cars simply by looking at its
silhouette. For those of you who would like to do some auditory calibration, pay attention
to a person’s footsteps by closing your eyes. As you do that, will you be able to identify
who that person is?
Likewise, if you close your eyes and stand by the side of the road, notice, you would be
able to tell whether a vehicle car passing by is a 1.6 liter or 2.0 liter car, or whether it is a
taxi or a van?
And for those of you planning to improve your kinesthetic calibration skills, I would
suggest that you go down to a garment sort of fabric store. Over there, just close your
eyes and feel the different types of cloths that are available within your grasp. Just go
there and feel what it is like.
Notice the texture and notice the feeling, the warmth or the coolness of that particular
fabric and make your judgment. Most importantly, any form of calibration activity
requires you to make a comparative distinction.
Remember early on in our program, we talked a bit about the communication model?
Well, let us take a look at it again here. We say that external information enters our
nervous system through our five senses, and this leads to the filtering of information
through three processes: deletion, generalization and distortion.
The things that cause the filtering of information to take place in our minds include things
like past memories, past decisions, our personal values, beliefs and attitudes, our
language and other filters such as Meta programs.
The filtered information is the information that we receive. If the person were to repeat
the information to back us, we might actually find that the information that we wanted to
bring across was not the information that they received. This is miscommunication.
I am sure many of you have had the experience, where you said something to someone,
but he or she did not hear you. Some people call that experience, the reaction to nagging.
It is an interesting phenomenon because we have the ability to tune ourselves out.
Remember the last time you were day dreaming, especially when you had a boring
teacher? And you went, “Huh?” All of the sudden you were in La La Land, not paying
attention to the teacher and everything gets deleted.
Your conscious attention is just not on the teacher at all. Deletion does not just happen on
trivial places. Sometimes, your unconscious mind protects you by deleting traumatic
experiences.
Many situations such as multiple personality disorder and situations of extreme stress
could lead to someone just selectively deleting the memory of that situation. This is often
known as selective amnesia.
And no, I am not referring to the times when you owe people money but you do not pay
back. Simply put, deletion is what happens when things just do not get through our filters.
Let us move on to distortion. I remember a time as a teenager, that my teacher told our
class to get our homework done so that we could submit our homework by tomorrow.
She offered to tutor anyone of us who could not understand our questions. Then, one of
my classmates began to get agitated and I heard him mutter under his breath, “You think
you so smart, always think we cannot do it on our own!”
Thinking back on this incident, I had a different representation. I thought that the teacher
was a nice lady who would go out of her way to help us get the answer. However, I can
understand that given my experience in life, I believe that the teacher was a kind hearted
person.
But, that was my distortion. My classmate may have had a different set of memories.
Perhaps when the teacher said that, she gave him the impression that she was looking
down on us, thinking that we could not finish our own work.
Which one of us is correct? I suppose that neither one of us was right or wrong. But I
know that my classmate’s distortion was not going to be very useful for him because it
would be extremely disempowering if he continued to hold on to such a belief.
Finally, let us move on to generalization. There is a widely publicized myth that men are
insensitive and women are unreasonable. These myths are generalizations.
We know that not all men are insensitive and women and men alike can be equally
reasonable or unreasonable depending on the circumstances. Hence, it is essential for us
to look beyond this generalization and to see possibilities. One of the characteristics
about generalization is that it tends to allow us to only focus on one thing.
For instance, all people are bad or everyone is kind-hearted. These generalizations, no
matter how they are viewed, allow us to see things from one point of view. Of course,
certain generalizations are more empowering than others.
For instance, if you believed that everyone was a nice person, it would probably be quite
empowering if you were involved in sales. However, not all generalizations work all the
time. Given a context of war, for instance, if you help the generalized believe that all
people were nice, you would be in for a very, very shocking surprise.
Too many problems in communication come from assumptions. In order for us not to be
misled by our own maps of the world, remember the two principles in NLP. First, the
map is not the territory and second, the meaning of your communication is the response
you get.
We need to constantly remember that other people are prone to have different
interpretation about us and the way we do things. By recognizing this, we can start to
clarify others’ judgment of us and give other people an opportunity to understand us
better and to see us the way we originally intended.
Also, we need to take responsibility for the result of our communication. If someone gets
angry at me every time I say something, I need to take that as feedback to calibrate
myself and ask if there was something I said that interpreted in a way that got the other
person angry.
That way, if I learn to read the signals, I will be able to change the way in which I
communicate to this person in the future. Back to our Ultimate Communication Success
Formula! We can say that our goal is to get our message across. If our message is
misinterpreted, it maybe, that our strategy for communicating this message was
inappropriate or not useful at that point in time.
Hence, the action that we took led to miscommunication. However, we also say that in
communication, there is also no failure but only feedback. Hence, we can take the result
of our miscommunication in order to revise our strategy until we reach our goal of being
understood.
For those of you holding on to our Module 2 training manual, you may refer to page 29
as we explain this next segment. When we communicate, we build an understanding of
the other person’s model of the world. Without the right tools, we cannot build the
understanding of other people.
If we want to bring a message across, we must learn how others can understand what we
are saying more easily. In order for this to happen, we have to learn to clarify, specify and
to really share our internal representations with the other person to build commonality
and shared understanding.
There are three main things we need in order to facilitate effective communication. That
is to be greatly aware how to build rapport through our body language, as well as our
tonality and words.
According to research by UCLA Professor, Albert Mehrabian in 1971, these three

elements are important to different degrees in a one to one persuasive setting. In that
experiment, body language contributed a full fifty five percent of the impact of
persuasion, while tone of voice contributed thirty eight percent, and words, a mere seven
percent. However, this obviously does not mean to say that words are unimportant.
The truth is that our communication is more heavily weighed on the other two elements
in face to face communication. For instance, if I were to ask a woman out on a date, and
used the words, “Would you go out on a date with me?” It would be reasonable that she
might consider. However, if I used this tone of voice and said, “Would you go out on a
date with me?” She would run for cover. Alternatively, I could change the tone of my
voice and say, “Would you go out on a date with me?”
And it might sound a little more pleasing. However, even though I might use that tone of
voice, and I were making eyes at her and raising my eyebrow while asking her for a date,
she might also run away. The fact is that tone of voice and body language do have a
significant impact on the way we affect other people around us. Let us review the
Ultimate Communication Success Model.
First, we need to set our goal as getting our message across effectively. Next, we need to
outline a variety of strategies in order to make our communication successful.
Then, we need to take action. If we reach our goal, it is definite success for us. The other
person understands us well. However, if the other person does not understand us, it does
not mean that we have failed.
It merely means that we have received feedback. We need to open ourselves up to

calibrate effectively enough to able to receive that feedback and then later transfer that
feedback into changing our current strategy for communication.
That is the Ultimate Communication Success Formula.
Matching and Mirroring are parts of a process known as pacing. When we pace, we are
attempting to build similarity and harmony with another person. When we pace, we can
either match another person or mirror another person. There is a difference between
mirroring and matching.
The key difference in matching versus mirroring is that in mirroring, we act as a mirror
image of the other person and this tends to be focused purely on body language.
Matching, however, goes across body language, tone of voice, as well as words. What
can we match? We can match body language, tone of voice, words, values and beliefs.
Let us look at how we might match or mirror a person’s body language? For example, if I
noticed you sitting back on a chair and crossing your legs, I might do the same in order to
pace your experience. This achieves two goals.
First, by putting yourself in the same physiology as the other person, you might begin to
understand what he or she is thinking much, much better.
Secondly, because you are able to understand that person better, he or she would also
understand you better, leading to a greater sense of likability and trust. The most
important to do is to remember that matching is not mimicking.
The last thing you want to do is to follow exactly what someone else does, because if you
are noticed, they might think you are making fun of them. Anyway, imagine what it
would be like if someone were to mimic every thing you said or did. It would be very
irritating, will not you think?
So, what we are saying is you need to build similarity. This means that if the person is
rubbing his face, you may momentarily place your hand on your cheek, just to
acknowledge that unconscious movement. If that person crosses his arms, you may
momentarily put one arm across the other and then move somewhere else.
Alternatively, you might make it even less obvious and want to focus on cross-over
mirroring, which requires you to focus on mirroring and matching in a slightly different
way.
For instance, if a person combs his hair, you may pace the movements by nodding your
head or rubbing your hands in the same rhythm. If the person speaks fast, you may wish
to tap your fingers at the rate of the person’s speech. The process of cross-over mirroring
allows you to pay attention to the frequency and rhythms in the other person in order to
create rapport at a much deeper rapport.
Let me go into greater detail about cross-over mirroring. Many of you will ask if it is
possible that whatever we are matching is going to work all the time. After all, we said
that it is not just about mimicking but a process of creating similarity. In my experience,
what matters most is the ability to match rhythms. Sometimes, we are unable to match
something due to physical constraints.
For example, Milton Erickson was paralyzed in half of his body, preventing him from
being able to match exactly what the other person was doing. So, instead, he used cross-
over mirroring. This basically means that we can use one part of our body to match a
rhythm elsewhere in another person’s physiology.
There are two situations where you might use this. Firstly, because you do not want the
other person to directly notice that you are deliberately creating rapport, or matching or
mirroring.
Alternatively, it could be used in a place where too much movement would be distracting
or could be deemed impolite. As you continue to practice this with people you meet on a
day to day basis, you might find that you begin to develop more and more the exquisite
patterns of developing rapport unconsciously.
What can we match in body language? Let us move into the specifics of matching body
language. In our body language, we can match many things. The trick is for us to be able
to use our body to communicate in exactly the same way it was meant to communicate.
A lot of the time because much of our bodily expressions are not visible to us, we tend to
forget that other people are constantly watching us and making judgments on us. Hence,
we need to be very aware of our body language and the things they convey to other
people. There are several areas we must calibrate in order to know what to match or
mirror. These include posture, gestures, facial expressions, eye movements, blinking,
muscular tension and breathing rhythms.
Let us move into something called representational types. There are four main classes of
people in NLP and we normally refer to them as the visuals, the auditories, the
kinesthetics and the digitals.
Each of them has certain general observable patterns of behaviors. Of course, these
models are not meant to be cast into stone and followed like a set of rules. There are
some exceptions and combination patterns.
However, we can say that at that point in time during which you interacted with this
person, such cues can give you clues as to the person’s representational type. This can
then be used to help you establish rapport with them.
This is the first category, the visual. You will tend to notice that a visual person is
someone who tends to sit upright and is well organized and well grouped. Here is a
tendency to speak rapidly in quick bursts.
They also have a tendency to have a higher pitch in voice and they tend to visualize
images in their minds. They have an active mind that wonders unless you have a good
visual presentation. They also tend to look upwards in order to access information.
These are people whom I classify as high frequency people. If you take a look at their
breathing patterns, they tend to be breathing high up in their chest. Neurologically, these
people operate based on the neuro firing that takes place in their brain. When electrical
impulses go off in their head, they generate images more rapidly than chemical changes,
such as in a kinesthetic.
On the other extreme, there are people who are much slower in their speech and tend to
have deeper, more resonant sounding voices and you will notice that breathing is much
lower in the stomach.
They have difficulty sitting down for long periods of time, and are custom doing things
moving around and touching. There is also a tendency for them to look down to get a feel
for things.
These are people who also speak as slowly as I am doing now. I would classify these
people as low frequency people. It does not mean that they are slow people. It means that
in order for them to get a real feel of things, they need to allow the chemical changes in
their body to take place first rather than waiting for the electrical impulses in their brain.
There are two classes of kinesthetics.
One type, which tends to be more active. Usually are sports people, and enjoy the
outdoors very much. The other class of kinesthetics tends to be more of, what we call, the
couch potato, who does not like the outdoor activities and prefers to laze around and
allow his mind to wonder.
The auditory person is the type of person you might hear as DJs over the radio. They
have impactful and attractive voices that characteristically have wider variations and fully
articulations. These people love discussions and are able to repeat things to you easily.
There is also a tendency for them to lean forward and tilt their ear towards you or their
hands might be on their cheek or close to their lips and ears. Their eyes tend to move to
the left and right and most auditory people tend to be musically inclined.
The have the ability to tell the difference between sounds, tunes, and melodies. These
people also tend to also breathe in the diaphragm and I will classify it as mid frequency
people.
The digital personality is what you might consider a procedures and sequences person.
He tends to do things step by step and a person who loves abstract concepts. There is
plenty of internal dialogue and this person tends to process information logically. This
category exhibits characteristics of the other representational systems as well, and the
digital personality tends to look downwards and to the left in order to access information.
Knowledge of these four representational types will allow you to recognize differences in
body language and gestures in order for you to be able to establish rapport with them
effectively.
The next stage is for you to match tonality. Remember that you need to distinguish many
aspects of tonality, such as volume or loudness, pitch: How high the tone is? Timber:
How rounded the sound is? Inflection, the rising and falling of tones, and cadence or
emphasis: How striking the sound is?
Here is a statement with varying loudness. Here is a statement with varying pitch. Here is
a statement with varying timber. Here is a statement with varying inflection. Here is a
statement with varying emphasis.
Remember, that in your interaction with other people, you need to learn how to model
after their tonality. Learning the different aspects of their tone will allow you to be more
effective as you calibrate to the differences more readily.
In order to make this work even better for you, pick any video you have watched, and
model the tone of voice of different people in different states. Are they angry? Frustrated?
Frightened? Persuasive? Seductive? Comical? Relax? Relieved? The possibilities are
endless. Get into the same state as them and see how well you model after their tonality.
Let us now move one to the matching of words. Again, there are four classes of words
that I associated with the four main types of representational systems. This is what a
visual person might say, “I see what you mean and it certainly provides me with a good
perspective because I get the picture of the overview of the plan.”
This is what an auditory might say, “I hear what you say and I can tell that this idea
speaks volumes about the people working around the clock.” This is what a kinesthetic
might say, “I feel what you said really hit a nail on the head and really reaches out to the
target audience we want to grab.”
This is what a digital might say, “The foundational cornerstone of highly illustrious work
is dignified so that the principal offerings of committed individuals dedicated to the
achievement of our course.”
For more words that different categories of people use, simply logon to the member’s
website and download the information on sensory words. If you realized that a person
was speaking to you in a visual manner, you might actually establish rapport with that
person by speaking to that person using visual predicates.
Likewise, if an auditory person is speaking to you, you might want to match their sensory
predicates by speaking as if you were an auditory as well. Kinesthetic people will tend to
be able to establish rapport with you if you use more kinesthetic words. There was an
interesting case that I encountered at McDonald’s.
I happened to be in that restaurant reading something because I had to prepare for a

lesson, and as I was reading, I was somewhat drawn to the table next to mine. There were
three people. One was a middle aged gentleman, who was facing a couple. With his
elbow propped up on the table, he was speaking like this, “I understand how you feel.
And the both of you need to be able to feel for each other.”
At that point of time, I thought he was probably some kind of a pastor or a church
counselor. Directly opposite of him was a girl, around her early twenties, sitting in an
upright posture, with her right leg crossed over her left. She said, “I do not see a point of
meeting, and why must I come here to see his stupid face?”
The moment she said that, the guy whose arm was sprawled across the table with his
head laying on top of it, suddenly sat up and said with this somewhat agitated voice,
“Like that-lorh, every time I want to say something to her, she do not listen and then
always fight-lorh, how to talk to her like that?”
I suddenly realized that all three of them were speaking in different representational
systems and all of them had been out of sync in their communication between one
another from the very start. Neither of them really knew how to communicate in the other
person’s language. No counseling session would ever work now.
Then, I contemplated to approach them but decided to leave the restaurant in order to get
my things done. When I returned to the restaurant forty five minutes later, they were still
there and the problem had not still been resolved. What was worse is, after a few
moments, the girl stood up and stormed angrily out of the restaurant, much to the dismay
of the two gentlemen.
Although this was one out of a million encounter, I am quite sure that in our day to day
conversations, we hardly, if ever, pay attention to our predicate patterns. Sometimes, that
leads to a lot of miscommunication, a building up of distrust, and prevents us from
establishing the rapport that we really should have had in the first place.
So, take some time to pay attention to the kind of rapport you are building with your
friends, colleagues and your family members. Listen to the predicate patterns.
Mismatching has two main uses. The first is to break rapport with someone, particularly
when the change in your words, tone and body language is fairly drastic and sudden. I
remember in one particular seminar that I conducted, called, ‘Attracting the People You
Like’, one woman actually approached me and asked me how it was possible for her to
stop attracting the people she did not like.
The first step would be to notice her body language and the body language of the other
person, and to deliberately sit in a different way. Her tone of her voice had to change,
such that it was drastically different from the other person, and the words that she used
had to be different, even in the predicate system that she was using. Another usage of
mismatching is a little bit more subtle, and it is used to test the level of rapport that you
have with another person.
This is known as leading. I had a wonderful experience of interacting with some of the
strangest people. One group included a highly rebellious group of children. The case was
in one of our public programs, where we had to deal with kids. However, this particular
group was somewhat uncooperative. So, I had to devise new ways for them to follow me.
In order to take control of the group, I had to ways and means to make myself
entertaining, and yet be in control, finding a win-win balance in the group.
In this instance, I had entered a room with a group of children who were not very willing
to listen. If I were to mismatch them, none of us would be listening to each other.
So, I had to create a severe mismatch in order to make them pace me instead. I took out a
handful of sweets and flunked it all around the room creating a pattern interrupt through
mismatching.
Suddenly, their attention was back on me. I took the opportunity to make them pace me
by asking, “How many of you want more sweets?” Soon, I had the entire room, literally,
eating out of my hand.
However, many people mismatch in a way that is not very useful. They do not realize that
the way they are communicating could be sabotaging their chance of success of
communication.
Even very subtle differences can break rapport. As many of you know, I conduct
trainings for Social Development Unit, in particular this course on rapport skills, called,
‘Attracting the People You Like’. This program taught couples how to build rapport with
each other so that they could potentially find a person whom they might marry.
There was this doctor who came up to me, and said in this tone of voice, “Stuart, I think
your course is wonderful, but can you tell me why all the girls I just spoke to, kept saying
I am boring? I thought I was rather interesting.”
And, he said it with a poker face. I was tempted to ask him to look at himself in the
mirror, but I refrained from being mean. In situations like this, subtle mismatching had
actually prevented the doctor from being able to establish rapport with others in the group.
Of course, there is more to matching and mismatching, just based on words, body
language, and tone of voice alone. There are many aspects of our filters that we can take
control of, in order to match or mismatch another person. These include values, Meta
programs, behaviors, our own memories, and our emotions.
Matching or mismatching is an art that we need to be able to master. Values for instance,
can be matched rather easily. As long as we are able to see and clarify a person’s values,
we can actually use the values as trigger points for us to build rapport with them more
readily.
In fact, if we were able to understand and to repeat the value set, simple through the label
of that value, for instance, commitment, confidence, enthusiasm. And if these are values
that actually affect a person, they can actually be used in a very powerful way to
influence a person’s direction and decision.
Emotions are also another very powerful way of understanding and matching another
person, because being able to empathize with another person means that you have
connected to the person emotionally. At that stage, a person would normally feel he or
she is understood, thereby allowing him or her to open up to you more readily. Listening
to and calibrating to emotions is also an art. One way of being able guess what a person’s
emotion is, is really to be able to establish rapport through physiology.
Once you get into the same physiology as the other person, you tap into the same state,
therefore be able to empathize much, much better with the other person. This will be
useful in cases where they keep quiet, do not wish to speak to you, or feel that you might
be a threat.
Being able to understand a person’s emotion sometimes is a guessing game. But in order
for you to make the best guess possible, make use of all the possible strategies that we
have put forward for you so far.
At the end of the day, emotional rapport building is something that you can explore even
further as you gain more practice. The component on values will be dealt with in the CD
on Values. Building rapport through Meta programs will be dealt with at the Master
Practitioner Training.
How do we utilize all of these? First, begin to pick up key sensory predicates on how they
are used. Match them by using words in the same category. For instance, if someone
made this statement, “I feel really bored!” You might match it by saying, “It is weighing
you down!”
Second, remember that the process of rapport building is to eventually influence the other
person. To do this we must remember to pace and then lead. Let us listen to this
statement, “Every time I volunteer to pick up his load of work, he never looks grateful at
all!”
What are the predicate patterns in the statement? If you are not too sure, just rewind the
CD to hear it again. We can identify the predicate patterns in ‘pick’, ‘load’ and ‘looks’ as
a kinesthetic visual pattern.
To match it, you could use a KKV sequence like, “I am shocked to know that he is so
cold about your help! Maybe he does not see the point at all!” Most of you would still
remember the exercises that we did. The most important being the predicate identification
exercise.
Once we are able to identify predicate patterns, we can begin to match them and to create
alternative patterns using alternative representational systems. So, someone might say,
“That rings a bell!” You could actually translate it into the visual system by saying, “That
looks really good!”
Such an exercise can help you to develop statements from different predicate systems and
allow you the flexibility of learning how to translate between predicate systems. In NLP,
the successful use of pacing predicate patterns followed by the use of a leading predicate
pattern is known as overlapping. Overlapping representational systems gives you the

flexibility of maintaining rapport while allowing the other person to see from your point
of view, and therefore, allowing you to lead the person. This is a very powerful tool in the
basic language patterns that you are learning now.
You have discovered how all these are used in the process of rapport building. Always
remember, pacing is not enough when you want to create leverage and influence others.
You need to be able to lead them as well.
Take the time to begin to open up your awareness and notice the way other people
interact with you. Gather the feedback, notice what kinds of predicate patterns they use,
what kind of frequencies they are in, what kind of representations they are in and how
you might be able to interact with them at the appropriate time.
At the same time, pay very close attention to their tonality and their bodily expressions to
help you to create the trust that you need in order to make your interactions with others
work.
Of course this is not the end. This form of rapport building is the most basic pre-requisite
for establishing trust. As mentioned earlier, there are many ways of pacing and leading
people and this comes in greater detail when we cover other aspects of NLP.
About Adam Khoo

Adam Khoo is an entrepreneur, a best-selling author and a peak
performance trainer. A self-made millionaire by the age of 26, he
owns and runs three businesses with combined annual sales of $20
million.
He is the CEO of Adcom Pte Ltd, an advertising agency, the co-

founder of Event Gurus Pte Ltd, an event management company and
the CEO of Adam Khoo Learning Technologies Group Pte Ltd.
He is also the best-selling author of six books including ‘I Am Gifted, So Are You!’
that was ranked MPH#1 best-seller in 1998 and 1999. His other books include ‘How to
Multiply Your Child’s Intelligence’ and ‘Clueless in Starting a Business’.
His book ‘Master Your Mind, Design Your Destiny’ which was the second highest
selling book in Singapore in 2004, was on the best-sellers list for 36 consecutive weeks.
His book ‘Secrets Of Self-Made Millionaires’ also hit the No.1 spot on the bestsellers
list in Singapore 2006. His latest book is ‘Secrets Of Millionaire Investors’, which has
also reached the bestsellers list once again.
Adam holds an honors degree in business administration from the National University of
Singapore. As an undergraduate, he was ranked among the top 1% of academic
achievers and became a pioneer in the Talent Development Program, which is the
university’s Gifted program.
Over the last 15 years, he has trained over 245,000 students, teachers, professionals,
executives and business owners to tap their personal power and achieve excellence in
their various fields of endeavor. Some of his corporate clients include Tupperware,
Ministry of Defence, American International Assurance, Prudential, Lux Asia, Rolls
Royce Marine and many more.
His success and achievements are regularly featured in regional media like the Straits
Times, the Business Times, the New Paper, Lianhe Zaobao, Channel News Asia, Channel
U, Channel 8, Newsradio 938, The Hindu, The Malaysian Sun and many more.
Click on the links below to visit some of Adam’s websites:

www.Adam-Khoo.com
www.SecretsOfSelf-MadeMillionaires.com
www.Millionaire-Book.com
www.SuccessWithNLP.com
www.PavingTheWayToTheTop.com
www.SecretsOfMillionaireInvestors.com
www.WealthAcademyInvestor.com

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Language allows us to communicate and communication allows us to influence. Do you

According to research by UCLA Professor, Albert Mehrabian in 1971, these three

It merely means that we have received feedback. We need to open ourselves up to

That is the Ultimate Communication Success Formula.

I happened to be in that restaurant reading something because I had to prepare for a

pattern is known as overlapping. Overlapping representational systems gives you the

About Adam Khoo

He is the CEO of Adcom Pte Ltd, an advertising agency, the co-

Click on the links below to visit some of Adam’s websites:

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