The basis of rapport
Have you ever had an experience where you were chatting with a person you had just met and you felt as if you had met them before or that you had known them your whole life?
Have you ever formed an instantaneous connection with another person for no particular reason other than you felt that they were your kind of person?
Have you ever had an experience where you were working with another person on a particular task and your combined input led to the task flowing effortlessly to completion and produced results far in excess of what you had both originally thought possible individually?
Have you ever had an experience where your communication with another person was so effortless and synergistic that you found yourselves completing each other's sentences?
The chances are that you can answer Yes to at least one of these questions and if you can then you have experienced rapport.
Rapport is something that we as human beings do naturally every day and often without being consciously aware of it.
As a rule of thumb people like people who are like themselves. It's very easy to get into rapport with a person you identify with strongly, where there are common experiences and frames of reference that give you a common ground for communication and interaction.
Over the next few pages we will identify ways in which we can actively build rapport with another individual even when we don't immediately have access to the common ground that would cause rapport to occur naturally.