Rapport - Matching & Mirroring, Pacing & Leading

Rapport is when we seem to "just hit it off" with another person; when we click (Kinesthetic) and "see eye to eye" (Visual), etc. It is when we feel like the other person is like us. This is what we mean when we say "I like it" or "I like him/her". It means that that thing or person is like us. The word Like is a simile. A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two things through the explicit use of connecting words (such as like, as, so, than, or various verbs such as resemble).


We can use certain tools to be more liked by other people, and also to understand them more. We do this by literally copying their behaviours and mannerisms. Establishing and building rapport is very effective for therapy.

Pacing and Matching 

(subtle mimicry)

For: building rapport, empathy and awareness of peoples subconscious communications & important for modelling. It involves integrating various elements of their habitual style into your own for therapeutic purposes, making them feel comfortable and understood.

How: match body language and speech (VAKOG predicates) - see Lexical Predicates

Matching is different to mirroring because it has more vague imitation and is less specific/exact.

Mimicry is the opposite of standing out; it is blending in, like camouflage.

Behavioural Mirroring 

aka Reading People 

(self-inducing their state)

How: match behaviors that are mostly subconscious and symbolic; postures, breathing (can be done by tapping the fingers in the same rythym), facial expressions connecting things in peoples personalities (Patrick Jane does this often in the TV show The Mentalist, and also Cal Lightman in the show Lie To Me.)

There is a scene in the movie The Librarian: Quest For The Spear in which the main character is applying to become a librarian, and the interviewer at this point has seen many more potential candidates, all of which failed, and so she says to him "Tell me something you know that nobody else who has walked in here could tell me."

He proceeds as follows...

"You have mononucleosis. Your marriage broke up two months ago, you broke your nose when you were ...

... and you live with three cats. Is that what you had in mind? Swollen parajugular lymph nodes and distended eyelids are clearly mono. It takes three months for an indentation on the ring finger to completely disappear. Yours is approximately two-thirds gone. Your surgeon gave you a terminus para-lateral scar...

... which is given to children under the age of... 

And I can clearly see three distinct types of cat hair. A white Himalayan, a tortoiseshell and an orange-striped tabby."


In short, he read her, connecting all the things in her "Symbolic Behaviours". This is called behavioural mirroring.

All this information was on or around her body. He could have pointed out a lot more, and we can all do this. It just takes practice and a trained awareness. Having Low Latent Inhibition helps massively with being aware of all the little nuances and subtle cues in peoples behavior, including the tiniest movements, breathing, tonality, rate and pitch of speech, etc.

I recommend reading these books on reading body language:

Peoplewatching by Desmond Morris

The Definitive Book of Body Language: How to Read Others' Attitudes by Their Gestures by Allan and Barbara Pease

What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People by Joe Navarro

Body Language: How to Know What's REALLY Being Said by James Borg

Autistic people (specifically the "high functioning" ones) struggle with mirroring and establishing empathy because they have less mirror neurons, which are responsible for mimicry/modelling. It is a much more conscious process for them, and more instinctual for the average person. This is why people who experience symptoms of Autism appear to lack empathy, or are unaware other peoples feelings. But it's not that they lack these things, it's just that it's much more difficult for them to process their reality in this way, so that means it's the people without Autism that have to match and mirror them, building rapport to accommodate their needs.

Read More about Mirror Neurons.

"The sage has no interest of his own, but takes the interests of the people as his own. He is kind to the kind; he is also kind to the unkind: for Virtue is kind. He is faithful to the faithful; he is also faithful to the unfaithful: for Virtue is faithful." - Lao Tzu

"Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss." - Lao Tzu

Imitation and mimicry are very natural, and our brains are designed to notice differences for survival purposes. When we do it consciously - as in therapy - we can generate much better outcomes than if we didn't, for non-verbal communication makes up about 93% of communication. The other 7% is words.

Note: Do not mirror or pace peoples suffering; stick with general physical and symbolic behaviours. If you were to pace an asthmatics breathing, you'd find yourself struggling to breathe, and that's no good. A bit of genuine empathy is more than enough for establishing and building rapport.

Pacing and Leading 

(sales)

Pace by building rapport/matching or mirroring, and then lead them somewhere else/into another state - a positive one. Only match positive body language, or match negative postures, but then gradually/subtly change to positive ones. E.G. from crossed arms to open, literally making them more emotionally open and comfortable.

Match negatives by sharing resentments you have in common, e.g. "Yeah, I hate that too" etc. and then lead out of by saying "but... "

"I hate X just as much as you do, but I would rather focus on the things that I like and love because that makes me feel better, and what I feel is my choice. So my question for you is: by adopting your thoughts and feelings in all things related to X, what do I get out of it? How does it help me? In what way does it directly improve my life? How does it contribute to me experiencing the things I want to experience?"

Read more about Milton Model Language Patterns.

Other examples of mimicry, matching and mirroring.

Pets (specifically dogs) that look like their owners.

Batesian Mimicry & Mimicry

The Lyre Bird

Parrots

When clock pendulums swing out of synch become synchronized and swing at the exact same rhythm.

Read more about the Mathematics of Synchronization Phenomena

Women who have their periods at the same time (but only when they're around each other.)

And many, many more. Mimicry is the basis of Modelling (in NLP), and therefore of learning. It is directly connected to the As-If Pattern, also known as "fake it 'till you make it."

"We are all what we pretend to be, so, we had better be very careful what we pretend"

- Kurt Vonnegut

A great deal can be learnt about matching & mirroring, pacing & leading and Meta Programs in Shelle Rose Charvet's book Words That Change Minds.

Low Latent Inhibition + High IQ = Creative Genius

Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto and colleagues at Harvard University have found that decreased latent inhibition of environmental stimuli appears to correlate with greater creativity among people with high IQ. (same press release available here and here)

The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.
"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."
Previously, scientists have associated failure to screen out stimuli with psychosis. However, Peterson and his co-researchers - lead author and psychology lecturer Shelley Carson of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard PhD candidate Daniel Higgins - hypothesized that it might also contribute to original thinking, especially when combined with high IQ. They administered tests of latent inhibition to Harvard undergraduates. Those classified as eminent creative achievers - participants under age 21 who reported unusually high scores in a single area of creative achievement - were seven times more likely to have low latent inhibition scores.

The authors hypothesize that latent inhibition may be positive when combined with high intelligence and good working memory - the capacity to think about many things at once - but negative otherwise.  

Peterson states: "If you are open to new information, new ideas, you better be able to intelligently and carefully edit and choose. If you have 50 ideas, only two or three are likely to be good. You have to be able to discriminate or you'll get swamped."
"Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked," says Carson. "It appears likely that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought might predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishment under others."

A less able mind has a greater need to be able to filter out and ignore stimuli. A less intelligent person with a low level of latent inhibition for filtering out familiar stimuli may well sink into mental illness as a result. But a smarter mind can handle the effects of taking note of a larger number of stimuli and even find interesting and useful patterns by continually processing a larger quantity of familiar information.

You can find the original paper here: Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated With Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals

The central idea underlying our research program is therefore that individuals characterized by increased plasticity (extroversion and openness)retain higher post-exposure access to the range of complex possibilities laying dormant in so-called ‘‘familiar ’’environments.This heightened access is the subjective concomitant of decreased latent inhibition,which allows the plastic person increased incentive-reward-tagged appreciation for hidden or latent information (Peterson,1999). Such decreases in LI may have pathological consequences,as in the case of schizophrenia or its associated conditions (perhaps in individuals whose higher-order cognitive processes are also impaired,and who thus become involuntarily ‘‘?ooded ’’by an excess of effectively tagged information),or may constitute a precondition for creative thinking (in individuals who have the cognitive resources to ‘‘edit ’’or otherwise constrain (Stokes,2001)their broader range of meaningful experience).

Note from the text of the full paper that stress causes the release of the hormone corticosterone which lowers latent inhibition. In a nutshell, when an organism runs into problems that cause stress the resulting release of stress hormones causes the mind to shift into a state where it will examine factors in the environment that it normally ignores. This allows the organism to look for solutions to the stress-causing problem that would be ignored in normal and less stressed circumstances.

So perhaps we could hypothesize something like this:under stressful conditions,or in personality congurations characterized by increased novelty-sensitivity,approach behavior,and DA activity, decreased LI is associated with increased permeability and flexibility of functional cognitive and perceptual category [see Barsalou (1983)for a discussion of such categories ].Imagine a situation where current plans are not producing desired outcomes —a situation where current categories of perception and cognition are in error, from the pragmatic perspective. Something anomalous or novel emerges as a consequence (Peterson,1999), and drives exploratory behavior. Stress or trait-dependent decreased LI, under such circumstances, could produce increased signal (as well as noise), with regards to the erroneous pattern of behavior and the anomaly that it produced. This might o?er the organism, currently enmeshed in the consequences of mistaken presuppositions, the possibility of gathering new information, where nothing but categorical certainty once existed. Decreased LI might therefore be regarded as advantageous, in that it allows for the perception of more unlikely, radical and numerous options for reconsideration, but disadvantageous in that the stressed or approach-oriented person risks ‘‘drowning in possibility,’’ to use Kierkegaard ’s phrase.

One can easily see how this response could have been selected for evolutionarily. At the same time, one can also see how chronic stress could lead a person to fall into a state of confusion as a sustained large flood of stimuli could overwhelm the brain by giving it too much to think about and make a person unable to clearly see solutions that will relieve the feeling of stress.