My ThinkRightNow!

Ever noticed how when a couple get together they start sounding and behaving like each other? And if the relationship is sound then over the years they’ll become even more so. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll agree about everything, or that they don’t have opinions of their own, rather it is a question of rapport. They probably naturally had a fair measure of it, and will have built up, albeit unconsciously, a whole lot more. If they didn’t have rapport they probably wouldn’t be, or stay, together, or if they did it would not be happily.

NLP set out to explain rapport, and to define how it works and how it can be cultivated. They discovered that there is a clear set of rules that apply to all relationships - husband/wife, boss/employee, salesman/prospect teacher/students etc.

Human beings have five senses, sight, sound, touch, taste, smell - our windows to the world. These are the ways we gather our information, and based on this we make our decisions (some would say that intuition plays a part, but that may just be the unconscious part of the other five).

NLP discovered that nearly everybody has a preferred representational system, i.e. they favour one sense above all the others as their way of representing their world. It is the sense they relate best to and use most. You can usually identify it quite easily by the way they speak. Consider the following;

1) I can see where you’re heading.
2) I hear you loud and clear.
3) You strike me as very blunt.

Some people (a minority) naturally use two systems more or less equally, and they will be deemed to be good communicators. They will have rapport with more people, and even two people who might not otherwise agree on much, will agree that this person is ok. This ability can be learned.

Whenever we experience something it gets stored as a memory, for later retrieval (or not, as the case may be!). It will be stored with all the input information that we received from our five senses, however the interesting bit is that it gets “filed” or “indexed” under the “lead representational system”, which may or may not stem from the same sense as the “preferred representational system”. The reason for this is unclear, but in a practical sense it simply means that for rapport we address preferred, whereas for recall we address lead.

Ok, enough of the boring theory, what can we do with it and how?

How come we sometimes know people are lying? Why are we suspicious of people who don’t make eye contact? It’s all in the eyes! Or to be precise, the eye accessing cues. Oh no, not more boring theory I hear you moan…

Actually it’s all good fun from now on. Everybody has a pattern of eye movement that is precisely correlated to the way they are thinking at the time. The diagram below shows the typical e.a.c. for a right-handed westerner (indeed it is by far the most common pattern world-wide). It is viewed as you would look at the other person, ie up and to the right is your right, not theirs.

This, as you will appreciate, is a generalisation, so if you try it with somebody the first thing you should do is “calibrate” them. Don’t worry, you won’t get arrested, it simply means that you ask them a few questions and watch carefully to see where their eyes go - before they answer! Yes you do have to be quick, movements may be rapid and slight, but they are always there, and with practice it gets easier and easier.

Oh! Yes, back to the point about lying - it has to be constructed - it can’t be remembered, can it?