Building Rapport

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31 January 2020 - 0 Comments

Building Rapport

The first session

Coaching begins at the first meeting between client and coach. This is where the rapport is built, trust begins and coaching starts.

The initial meeting set the scene, deals with practical details of how coaching will work, explores the client’s present situation and designs how coach and client will work together in the future.

Building rapport and trust
● Managing the client’s expectations
● Assessing the client and gathering information
● Discovering the client immediate concern
● Designing the coaching alliance
● Dealing with the practical arrangements
● Committing to the coaching programme
● Beginning coaching with the immediate issue

Rapport:
Rapport is a relationship of mutual respect and influence.

● Rapport comes from an honest and true attempt to understand the other person in their terms, to see the

world from their point of view, to imagine what it would be like to walk in their shoes.

● It doesn’t mean friendship but a willingness to be present in that moment, open and fully listening.

● Rapport is not agreement

● Rapport over time develops into trust.

● Respect client’s beliefs and values

Mirroring is the behaviour in which one person subconsciously imitates the gesture, voice, or attitude of another.

● This concept takes place in everyday interactions, and often goes unnoticed by both the person enacting the mirroring behaviors and the person who is being mirrored.

● Mirroring is the subconscious replication of another person's nonverbal signals.

● Mirroring leads to the individual building rapport with others.

● Mirroring can establish rapport with the individual who is being mirrored, as the similarities in nonverbal gestures allow the individual to feel more connected with the person exhibiting the mirrored behavior.
Consciously decide to mirror, then stop thinking about it.

Words reflect thoughts and thoughts represent the client’s reality.

● Identify important words or phrases the client uses to describe their values, goals or achievements.

Notice how some words can be emphasized by a gesture.

● When you use the client’s exact words for their important goals and values, you show them you are paying attention to what they are thinking and what is important to them.

● Paraphrasing doesn’t show you understand because it gives your words and comes from your reality

● Thinking means different things to different people.
To some people it’s mainly pictures in their mind.
To others it’s an internal voice or feeling that can’t be analysed too closely.
In other words - we see, hear and feel in our minds just as we see, hear and feel in the outside world.

● We re-present or re-experience the world to ourselves using our senses.

● When we use our senses inwardly to think, they are known as ‘representational systems’.

Just like in the outside world, we don’t use 1 or 2 senses in isolation.

And just like the outside world, some of our senses are better developed or more sensitive, the same applies to our representational systems. Most people have a preferred representational system: we think more fluently and more easily with our preferred representational system

Visual - Seeing

○ Auditory - Listening

○ Kinaesthetic - Feeling

○ Olfactory - Smelling

○ Gustatory - Tasting

When someone is reflecting or really pondering what they’re saying, the favourite representational system becomes more present and as a coach you are able to access cues. For example, someone with a visual favourite representational system will use words such as look, see, I see what you mean, show me what you mean, it appears to me.

Once you identify your client preferred representational system, you can: build rapport more easily, make them relate more to the coaching process, meet them really where they are.

Listen to the words the client uses.

● Words are clothes to our thoughts so they can venture out of our minds and appear respectably dressed in the

outside world.

● When a client says ‘I see what you mean’, they must be making a mental picture.

● Each representational system has its own language of words and phrases.

→ Listen to how a client is saying something.

→ Identify the representational system.

→ Respond with words from the same representational system. When a coach replies with words from the same representational system as the client, a client unconsciously perceives they understand them at a deeper level.

Posted by Oracle Portal

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