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.