In the media……….

We will regularly be featuring press cuttings that highlight the application of advanced human communications and success strategies.

This month we are focussing on a report that appeared in the Evening Standard. Scientists in the Netherlands have recently confirmed what the NLP community has known for the last two decades.

A study conducted by Mr Rick van Baaren, an assistant professor at Nijmegan University showed that restaurant staff who copied customers speech patterns saw their tips rocket by up to 80%.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder first formally documented this phenomena back in the 1970's. They were modelling the family therapist Virginia Satir who obtained amazingly fast results with her clients without apparently having to try. Satir was going beyond mere voice matching. She also matched and mirrored her clients physiology including their blinking and breathing.

Matching doesn’t only occur in the human species. You have probably observed the spectacle of a flock of birds whose wings are beating in graceful unison. The scientist Yitzak Benton also reported in his book 'Stalking the Wild Pendulum' that grandfather clocks with different sized pendulums start to swing in unison after some time.

When Isis deliver corporate trainings, we often amaze business people by splitting them up into pairs. We get them to match physiology and voice tone whilst picking a topic that they passionately disagree on. What they find is that it is impossible to passionately disagree whilst maintaining rapport. They either have to break rapport, agree to disagree or end up agreeing.

The flip side is when we ask them to pick a topic that they agree on before instructing them to mismatch voice tone and physiology. They find that either the conversation becomes stilted and dies or that they start unconciously matching each other as the conversation flows.

By matching the voice tone and physiology of people that we come into contact with, we fire off the internal neurology that tells them we are like them. They start to trust us but the reason why is outside of their conscious awareness.

There are obviously many benefits to consciously matching the voice tone and physiology of your clients, associates, suppliers and family. For further details of how your organisation can start to benefit from the implementation of advanced rapport techniques please contact one of our team.

Vintage Book Review | 'London Business Matters' Article | NLP in the News