NLP

by Tom Hoobyar

  Make a mental movie of that interaction—and watch it from third position. As you watch yourself, notice what you looked and sounded like.

  Were you standing or sitting close to the other person? How comfortable did that feel?

  Were you facing them, standing behind them, or sitting side by side at a bit of an angle? Were these body positions determined by the environment—or did you influence how you were physically in relationship to one another?

  Was your posture open or closed—so that your heart was exposed? If not, what were you doing to cover up your heart? How open were the positions of your feet/legs and arms/hands? What specifically do you notice?

  Because this interaction was a little uncomfortable, there may have been ways that your body language mismatched your companion’s. What differences do you see now?

  Did you use touch to connect with the other person? What did you do—and how did that feel?

  What gestures and facial expressions did you use? How did these reflect how you were feeling?

  Think about your eye contact with this person. How would you describe it? Can you recall the color of their eyes? Did you notice yourself looking away or down?

  And what about your paralanguage? Did it match your companion’s in terms of tone, volume, and speed? If not, how were you out of sync with your companion?

  Now that you’ve revisited that experience, take a moment to capture what you learned. Make note of what worked well in this interaction—and what could have been better.

  Review this list of discoveries and consider if these nonverbal behaviors are typical for you when you’re with this specific person. Are these cues typical whenever you’re feeling uncomfortable?

  If you could stand outside yourself, how do you think your nonverbal cues supported or inhibited your ability to make your companion feel safe, interesting, and “felt”?

  As a closing step to this reflection, refer to the lists you made in Chapter 5 about what makes a good companion. You might even consider the behaviors that trusted friends asked you to stop doing—or start doing. Look for opportunities to improve how you’re interacting with others. Pick one behavior you’d like to change and practice doing a preferred behavior the next few times you find yourself feeling uncomfortable.

  In Another’s Shoes: The View from Their World

  Because you already know what you were thinking and feeling in these two recollections, you don’t have to imagine what’s involved—you know. Now suppose for a moment, that when interacting with someone else, you noticed some of the nonverbal behaviors that you exhibited in the uncomfortable situation you just revisited. If so, you might suspect that that person feels like you felt. Would that conclusion be on target? Maybe. If you have a strong second position, you may really be in tune with the other person and be able to understand them with a useful degree of accuracy.

  Here’s what I’d recommend you do when you notice what feels like uncomfortable nonverbal behavior. First, check in with yourself. Are you feeling comfortable? Second, step into third position and objectively observe what signals you’ve been sending.

  If, after these reflections, you determine that the discomfort isn’t yours, avoid matching a behavior that feels intense. For example, mirroring someone’s scowling expression or an aggressive stance might match them, but it might also contribute to escalating the negative feelings. (“Oh yeah, well take that!”) However, it might be beneficial to lean away a little if the other person is leaning away or to match their breathing.

  Although matching often happens naturally, it’s a little bit of an art, too. So let’s explore intentional matching a little further.

  Just Like That? How Matching Nonverbals Creates Rapport

  People have a language of their physical movement. As I said, postures and gestures are habitual with most people, and it’s like a dance. So interacting with them is like dancing with them.

  Now, I’m not talking about a conversation with a waiter or a toll-taker at a tollbooth where you don’t have time. In those situations, your nonverbals are limited to eye contact (“the gaze”), facial expressions, and paralanguage. But if you’re really interacting with someone—having a conversation with them, interviewing them, making a sales pitch, or participating in a business meeting—you can begin synchronizing with them. This is an irresistible subliminal message to them that you like them and you are like them.

  So here’s what you do. Set your intent to notice the nonverbal behaviors we just reviewed. Notice someone’s gestures. Notice their posture. Notice their overall body movement—their head tilts and their nods, their facial expressions, and their breathing—and gradually begin to match those. You want to be careful not to mimic them—so don’t imitate them so obviously that they catch you doing it. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to just match their posture. Their legs are crossed? Then cross yours. Their hands are on the arms of their chair? So are yours. One hand is on a knee, the other hand is on the table? So are yours.

  I do this when I’m coaching people and it just deepens our rapport. It’s never viewed as disrespectful or artificial at all—and here’s why it’s not. This is a language we all know. You probably won’t remember learning it because it won’t be in the foreground of your memory. But this kind of unconscious conversation is happening all around us—all the time.

  Restaurants are a great place to see this in action. When people are getting along well they’re leaning toward each other, they’re staring into each other’s eyes, and their mouths are slightly open and smiling. They’re nodding, their heads are tilted, and they may even be reaching toward each other. Their feet may be in contact under the table if they’re a romantic couple. They’ll be facing each other open, heart to open heart, and they will be matching each other’s gestures. Their body postures will be similar.

  You can even observe this natural, unconscious communication in groups. You can look at people sitting in an audience and see subtle behaviors that telegraph someone’s attitude or inner state. As you look across the rows—and I’ve seen this in training classes—you’ll see a bunch of legs all crossed in the same direction. Then you’ll see somebody with their legs crossed the other way or legs apart. We have told ourselves that this difference is probably just a matter of comfort, habit, or space limitations. But here’s something to consider: those things may not true. Most nonverbal behavior is run by the primitive brain, which says, “I like this person. I want to be like this person because I want to communicate,” so we synchronize. The person who is mismatching the group is probably out of sync—or may be distracted and not really present.

  Here’s what I’m suggesting—just get ahead of the curve. Simply match someone’s body or paralanguage (rate, rhythm, volume of speech, etc.) so it signals your brain and the other person’s brain that you want to be in rapport. It doesn’t really matter which came first—whether you become fascinated and then you match their body language, or whether you match their body language and then become fascinated. For many people, this is a relief—they find they can more easily put someone at ease nonverbally than coming up with just the right thing to say.

  When you can influence your environment, it may also be helpful to consider how the body position dynamics will play out. A friend of mine, who was planning to sing at a party, brought not only his guitar and amplifier, but also a tall stool. When I asked him why he bothered to bring his own seating rather than just use the folding chair they’d set out for him, he said that he felt more comfortable being eye to eye with people when they came up to talk with him or make requests. As I watched him that night, I could see that he was absolutely right—that being seated on a stool made him easier to approach and talk with.

  Similarly, if you’re talking with a client, it can sometimes be helpful to be seated at a forty-five-degree angle to one another—rather than having to present to them across the barrier of a desk. This affords you the opportunity to be on the same side and yet be in a physical position wher
e you can easily see them and notice their nonverbal behaviors. This side-by-side position is especially helpful when you are discussing a problem. Put the problem opposite the two of you—so it’s out there—something you’re addressing together.

  Nonverbal behavior is all around us, isn’t it? It works with all of us, all the time. Now, when you notice a behavior and decide to match it, you’re just doing something with intention that you’ve been doing unconsciously for years.

  The More the Merrier? How Matching Works with Groups

  Some of my clients, who frequently work with teams or groups, have asked me about how to effectively use these nonverbal communication tips when they’re interacting with more than one person. As you might imagine, I watch each of them carefully to notice their unconscious communication. What is each person’s posture and body position? What are their gestures and facial expressions? How do these differ when they’re interacting with me—as compared to when they’re interacting with one another? It’s a fascinating exploration.

  But as you know, observing is just the beginning. How do you make a connection with each person? The trick is to spread your attention among the participants. Although you can’t mirror each person’s body language simultaneously, you can use an open body position, extended eye contact, a smile, their name—and, of course, you can still engage each person by asking open-ended questions.

  Just the Opposite: How Breaking Rapport Can Be Useful

  Staying open and curious serves you well in most interactions. However, there are exceptions. One client asked me whether there might be situations where someone would intentionally be closed or send a signal of discomfort.

  Think about it for a moment. When would you want to break rapport? Imagine, for example, that someone is making an inappropriate advance—or perhaps somebody’s had a bit too much to drink and they’re going on and on—and you want to break off a conversation.

  The way you break off the conversation is to break rapport. The first thing you do is break the synchrony of your body language and start positioning yourself to leave. In other words, you mismatch their gestures, you mismatch their posture, and you turn yourself away from them as if you wanted to leave. That will break rapport.

  In a civil, social conversation like a cocktail party or with somebody who’s fairly sophisticated, switching from extended eye contact to distracted eye contact will send a signal. They will immediately start looking away from you because they will understand that they’re being dismissed. This is also something that other people may do with you when you talk too much or focus on something that’s not of interest to them.

  Most people recognize when someone is not receptive—simply by a person’s willingness to make eye contact. But with someone who’s a little more aggressive, you can use your body language to communicate: “This is an unwelcome conversation and I’m ending it right now.” Although you’re usually focused on building rapport, you can use your matching skills to mismatch someone in order to establish a clear boundary.

  For the most part, however, you want to focus on creating safety and interest. As you become more comfortable within yourself and with the different communication skills you’re learning, you will make others feel at ease, you will gain insight into what’s going on in their minds, and you will find them opening up to you.

  With this in mind, I invite you to become a keen observer and listener. When you’re focusing your nonverbal communications lens on people you know, disconnect yourself from whatever your habitual way of thinking about them is—and just objectively observe them.

  Set your intention to look and listen for nonverbal cues with everyone—with family members, friends, coworkers, even people in restaurants, airports, and stores. You’ll find it’s easier to do this when they’re communicating with others. Be curious as you notice how they’re behaving with other people when they’re not focused on managing the impression they’re creating.

  Galaxies Away:

  Why It’s Important to Step into Another’s World

  Political commentator and author Walter Lippmann said, “We are all captives of the picture in our head: our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.” Yet most people don’t realize that their world is not the only one, that, in fact, it’s shared by few or only by them. So they focus on how people are like them, and people who are like them, and when someone is different than they are, they often experience that difference as something that’s “wrong.”

  In Chapter 4, you discovered some new things about how you create your world. How you use pictures, sounds, and feelings to make sense of things. And how your brain’s efficiency strategy helped you form beliefs and develop meta-programs and preferred communication channels. You learned that each of these ways of being is revealed in your language. While all this rich and complex processing is going on inside you, it’s also going on inside other people.

  Now you can build on this understanding of yourself to improve the way you interact with others. You can take a look inside yourself and check, “Do I really know what they mean? Does that feel okay to me? Is that something that I believe, too?”

  The Grand Canyon:

  How Missing Details Create Gaps in Understanding

  Even though we use the same language, we often don’t know what someone else really means. Despite this potential disconnect, people seem to be conversing all the time.

  Without asking questions to get the details that put us on the same page, we don’t really know where someone else is coming from and how they reached the conclusion that they did. Yet we rarely go into much detail with others. Asking who, what, when, where, why, and how may seem unnecessary or even a bit intrusive. So instead, what we do is kind of hallucinate.

  Here’s how that works. When people tell you something is hot or something is really good or it’s beautiful or it’s tasty, the only way for you to accept that statement at face value is to fill in the information gaps in your mind by providing your understanding of those words.

  This happens because language is designed to abbreviate, to summarize, to give us the bare bones. The trouble is we don’t all have the same bare bones. We don’t have the same reference experiences, so we frequently don’t really know what people mean. Even if you’re in the same family, the same company, or same group of friends who frequently have shared experiences, you may still not know what someone really means.

  When somebody says, “I had a terrible time at that party,” all you know is they didn’t like the previous experience they had. There are lots of missing pieces to this puzzle, aren’t there?

  You don’t know what kind of party it was. Was it this person’s birthday party? Were there two people or thirty-five? You don’t know what they mean by having a terrible time. Were they wearing uncomfortable shoes that made their feet hurt all day? Did they see an old flame, who was with someone else? Did somebody make a remark that they allowed to poison their whole day? You really have no idea.

  Now, in this person’s mind they know exactly what they’re saying, right? In an effort to understand and enjoy rapport, you get sucked into making assumptions and that leads you down the wrong path. In our sincere desire to understand, we unconsciously fill in the missing pieces. A great intention, but not always a great result.

  When these gaps occur, as they frequently do, it’s important to understand that the other person isn’t deliberately giving you only a part of what they’re thinking. They’re just being brief because they know perfectly well what they’re saying. They know exactly what they mean.

  When you fill in the gaps from your personal reality, you’re really just making guesses or assumptions. In contrast, you can more accurately imagine what’s going on inside someone else when you step into the other person’s reality. Although some people call this “mind reading,” it’s really just a brief visit to second position.

  If you’re going to be successful in understanding what a person means, you need to le
ave your point of reference and step into theirs. Asking myself, “For that statement to be true, what must be going on inside that person—what’s it like in their world?” reminds me that this person’s world is being reflected in their language—and that they are inviting me to step into their world.

  Zooming In and Out:

  Tips to Understanding Someone Else’s World

  Remember, what someone is saying is complete enough for them; it just doesn’t have enough information for you. If you can stay curious and emotionally loose while you’re trying on what might be true, it helps.

  Some people ask clarifying questions in a way that feels like an interrogation or in a way that makes other people feel silly because they should have been more specific. However, when you ask them from a sincere place of wanting to be better company, you’ll find that asking questions will help you know people better. You’ll begin to understand how they think and to really enjoy the unique and miraculous divinity in each human being. We’re all so different.

  If you really dig in, you’ll notice these differences. Because there are plenty of these, it’s quite an adventure! Here are a few tips to keep in mind when you’re gathering information to understand someone else’s world.

  Zoom In: Focus on Them

  The way to “try on” someone else’s world is to concentrate on their behavior, not your reactions. When you stay focused on their behavior instead of your feelings, you can avoid hasty reactions. This in turn frees you to have more choice in how you ultimately respond. Among other benefits, you can avoid a lot of drama this way.

  Rather than focus on how you’re feeling, keep your attention outside yourself, focused on the other person. Although your feelings provide information that may be important to notice, they are about your reality. As you focus on the other person and begin to understand their reality, they will then feel safer, more interesting, and understood—simply because of the quality of your attention. And they will tell you more, because you are making it a pleasant experience to do so.