Pacing & Leading (4)

Pacing and leading can have powerful effects and it pays to use these techniques wisely. Have clear intentions. Why do you want to lead? How will your leading affect the other person and their interests (ecology)? You might succeed in manipulating the other person on one occasion; but in the longer term the relationship will probably suffer, and you will lose out. Sometimes in NLP we have to defend ourselves against accusations of manipulation. A tool or process cannot, in itself, manipulate - only the person who uses it. People manipulate with intention. Human beings have influenced each other for millennia, using all sorts of persuasive devices. If the intention brings mutual benefit, pacing and leading will help in just about any sales, negotiation, business meeting or learning situation. Used in a skillful, professional, morally sound way, it provides a powerful tool of communication.

 

Pacing & Leading (3)

But physiology and feelings closely relate. Thus. by changing your physiology, you can usually lead the other person to change their state. If you gradually pace and lead more positive physiology, voice patterns or language, you will help them regain a positive state of mind.

 

Pacing & Leading (2)

Put another way, when matching or pacing, you follow behaviour to achieve rapport. Once in rapport, you lead behaviour to persuade, humour, influence or whatever - to bring about your communication goals or outcomes. Through pacing and leading you can thus calibrate or measure the rapport you have created. Your success in leading a person depends on the quality or level of rapport you have built up. At the same time, your degree of success in leading calibrates the depth of the rapport. You can testyour pacing and leading skill. Change your actions slightly and notice if the other person follows - allow for a delay. Do they adopt a similar behaviour, voice tone or whatever? If not, you need to return to simple pacing (matching) to achieve rapport, then try again. When the person does instinctively follow, you have evidence both of rapport and your ability to lead. As well as affecting the other person's physiology, you can use leading to influence someone's feelings, approach, point of view or decisions. For example, if the other person's body language reflects a low emotional state, yours will too if you simply match them.

 

Pacing and leading (1)

Through pacing and leading you can establish and maintain rapport, and also bring about changes in the other person. NLP uses the term 'pacing' to refer to matching as an on-going process. The person with whom you wish to gain rapport sets the 'pace', including the speed and tone of voice and physical gesturing. Rather than instantaneous, reflex-like matching, you pace as if in a long race. In other words, you stay with the person. So you can use pacing as a strategic rather than a tactical skill, for instance in an important negotiating situation where you need to establish a meeting of minds. Although usually applied to physiological matching, you can also pace, for instance, experience, beliefs and values, and language, as I explained above. When 'leading', you gradually change your own behaviour (whilst maintaining rapport), in such a way that the other person intuitively matches, or 'follows' you.

 

Ability to lead

Ability to lead - Sometimes the other person begins to follow some of your movements, voice qualities or language. They 'keep pace' with you, and you 'lead' them. The next section discusses this in more detail.

 

Spontaneous comment

Spontaneous comment - People will sometimes literally tell you how they feel about a communication, and you may miss this if you only watch for hidden indicators. Listen for the other person making some positive statement, such as 'I agree', 'that's right' or 'absolutely'. 'We're on the same wave-length' or 'You must have read my mind' may indicate stronger rapport. In more formal situations, or with less explicit comments, you may have to detect and interpret such spontaneous indicators of rapport.

Colour change

Colour change - Watch for a change of colour in the other person's skin. You may not match such involuntary changes directly. But, having calibrated them, you may then match the state they indicate in your own way. For example, you will build rapport if you match the other person's mood - excited, animated, serious, amused or whatever characteristic their changes in skin colour might indicate. Along with skin colour, other minute changes have individual significance, such as breathing, lip size, pupil size, facial muscle tone, and small movements in the hands and feet.

 

Calibrating rapport (2)

An internal feeling - You may get a sense of 'connectedness' with the person. This calls upon natural, 'right-brain' intuitive skills that may have atrophied if you have not used them much. However, with practice, you can learn to sense these internal feelings. You may have to take a few risks in trusting your intuition, as it may not seem to square with logic. Right-brain feelings or 'chemistry' may not spell out any 'message' clearly. So choose simple, low-risk situations in which to try this out.

Calibrating rapport

Once you have practiced the different matching techniques, you can carry on to perfect your rapport skills to any level you wish. As well as establishing rapport, you also need to recognize whether rapport exists, and to what degree. We have already stressed the need for careful observation (sensory acuity) so that you can detect or measure (calibrate) rapport. Calibration, a term borrowed from engineering, refers in NLP to the way you can notice small reactions and 'measure' moment-to-moment changes in other people. You can then, if necessary, adjust your own behaviour. Calibration takes a lot of practice, and at first it may seem impossible to watch for so many things at the same time. Above we learnt about the different areas in which we can create and recognize rapport (matching physiology, voice, language and thinking style, beliefs and values, experience and interests, and breathing patterns). Now we introduce four more ways in which we can create and recognize rapport.

 

Matching breathing

As you learn to observe the 'micro' physiological movements and gestures covered earlier, you may also notice differences in breathing patterns. Breathing offers another opportunity for matching. Calibrating (or measuring) breathing takes practice and you may need to start using your movement-sensitive peripheral vision. While making eye contact you may notice peripherally the rise and fall of the person's shoulder which gives the rhythm of the breathing. You can then change your own breathing to match, which has the added benefit of allowing you to maintain control of your emotional state. Alternatively, you can crossover match by nodding your head in time with their breathing again, usually undetectable but powerful in building rapport.

Matching experience

Put one or two accountants together, or nurses, or aeroplane enthusiasts, and before long you will have plenty of conversation and rapport. The same thing happens when you meet a stranger from your home town or someone who attended the same school or university. Your experiences or 'maps' overlap, so you share common ground or 'likeness'. You can use the experience matching principle even more widely. When communicating with a random group of people, for instance, you can usually identify a common experience to which they can relate. Using the training analogy, for instance, all the participants have probably had to:

Drive through traffic to the event Brave the weather Give up other important things, or Get work duties sorted out before leaving the office

Even a common experience like 'We have all given up a day of our life to attend today's seminar, so let's make the most of it' can create an initial rapport on which to build a successful training or similar group event. Keep in mind perceived likeness. Give a nod of assent at every stage in the communication, especially when establishing rapport.

Matching beliefs and values

Deep-rooted values have special importance to people, and by matching them you can sometimes touch a person's 'hot button'. Universal, or macro, values and beliefs, like 'fairness', 'honesty' and 'courtesy' help to establish early rapport which you can build on, using physiological and other types of matching. Once you find a common basis of understanding, other matching techniques will usually work well.

Matching language and thinking style

Once you notice how differently people behave in everyday communication, you will start to recognize their thinking style and preferences. Matching a person's thinking style produces powerful rapport. The way we think in the three primary senses mirrors the way we use our senses externally.

Visual - People who think primarily in a visual way tend to use language that contains visual words and phrases, such as, 'I get the picture' or 'Let's try to put this into perspective'. You can create rapport by thinking in this way yourself, picturing internally the person's description and using the same sort of 'sensory words' (known in NLP as predicates).

Auditory - In the same way, auditory predicates, such as 'I hear what you say' or 'It sounds good to me', may indicate auditory thinking. By matching these words and recreating the sounds in your head, you will start to think the way the other person thinks, identify with their thinking style, and create rapport as you begin to 'speak their language'.

Kinesthetic - People who have a primarily kinesthetic thinking style will tend to use words related to feeling or touch, such as, 'We are getting to grips with the problem' or 'Things are going smoothly'. Start to get a feel for how these people express themselves, and use similar words and figures of speech. You will see how (notice I use a visual predicate), sometimes almost miraculously, rapport increases as you share their experience.