the quick guide to rapid rapport
There are countless books that offer rapport-building skills and training. You will learn a condensed version of about 130 different techniques here and it is presented in sections to enable you to use each one along with your training planner. Some of the methods in this chapter have never been released to the public.
Linguistic Harvesting
Building trust involves convincing the subject that you are like them. The end result of a well-executed rapport development effort is having the subject liking you and focused on you. When you hear someone speak, they will use a wide array of words to communicate. While traditional Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) training focuses primarily on sensory word identification, the expanded, and more sophisticated methods offered here have been proven to be exponentially more effective than traditional approaches offered by simple NLP methods.
There are two methods of profiling the linguistics of subjects in the Ellipsis system. You will learn first to interpret what a subject is saying, then analyze how they are saying it.
Anytime you listen to a subject speak, they will reveal dozens of useful and revealing behavioral cues, regardless of what they are talking about. This chapter alone is enough to take to the field and begin social experimentation. The amount of hidden information concealed within our daily speech is astonishing. You will have a brand new skill set at the end of this chapter, and while it can be addicting to consistently process speech in conversation to ‘peer behind the curtain’ of the thoughts and social masks of your subject, it is important to let this skill develop. This skill should be sharpened simultaneously with other linguistic behavior control methods.
There are five phases of this training module. The skills will develop on their own as long as you maintain reference to your training planner and this volume. There are large lists of words and what might seem like a college-level English lesson to follow. Rest assured that none of it needs to be fully committed to memory. Having the reference to access when needed will prove to be invaluable, however.
The five phases are as follows:
1. Adjectives
2. Gestural Reference Side
3. Sensory Preferences
4. Phrasing
5. Pronouns
Adjectives
The description words subjects use to define, explain or otherwise communicate anything will reveal the words you will need in phase one of the linguistic analysis process. Adjectives are very important when collecting behavioral intelligence for the covert hypnotic phase of your interaction with subjects. Adjectives tell us how our subjects color their world. The descriptive language they use provides you with information about how they think about negative things and the way they view positive ones. As you converse with anyone, begin letting the adjectives they use come out of their language and fly onto the screen you’ve imagined over their shoulder. Imaging the words as they say them will help you to recall them for the deep level hypnosis phase of the interaction. The following is an example statement similar to something you might hear in a conversation on a normal day. See how many adjectives you can spot.
“…and it’s usually like that too. There are so many disgusting things happening in our world. I’m just extremely glad we live in such a free country. I think a lot of us take our ability to live comfortably for granted. Watching the news only makes people grumpy and nervous. I don’t like to watch the news. I’m relieved at the end of the day when I can still feel calm and be in such an agreeable mood when I walk into my old house.”
Let’s take a look at the ramblings above and find the adjectives in there. We will further break them down into negative and positive columns.
The adjectives the subject used above can later be applied to conversational control tactics. If you wanted to create negative feelings toward anything, you can use the negative adjectives above to pepper into your hypnotic language. Conversely, the positive words can be powerful when you need to create positive emotions or when you are creating obedience and control routines for a particular subject. It’s not imperative that you keep your internal ‘record button’ pressed throughout a conversation. Attempting to memorize too many things before the skill set is fully developed will only lessen the effects of the other techniques you are using.
Imagine that concentration in the field is like spending money. You only have 100 dollars to spend and the more experienced you become at each skill, the cheaper it becomes. So while you may have to spend 30 dollars on the linguistic harvesting process in the beginning and another 50 dollars somewhere else, every time you purchase something, a few dollars gets shaved off the price for the next time you use it. Eventually you will only spend a dollar or two on each skill and get to the point where you have plenty of extra ‘money’ to spend on more advanced methods and bringing more sophistication and elegance to your skills.
The following table is an example list of specific adjectives that are divided into 12 types that you can begin reading through in order to sharpen your ability to pick them out at the speed of conversation. Keep in mind that it’s not necessary to collect every single adjective that a subject communicates. Your focus should be on anything they discuss with emotional content or anytime their behavior shifts to a more animated set of gestures and expressions. A full list of adjectives is provided in the appendix for mastery-level study.
Linguistic Harvesting
Building trust involves convincing the subject that you are like them. The end result of a well-executed rapport development effort is having the subject liking you and focused on you. When you hear someone speak, they will use a wide array of words to communicate. While traditional Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) training focuses primarily on sensory word identification, the expanded, and more sophisticated methods offered here have been proven to be exponentially more effective than traditional approaches offered by simple NLP methods.
There are two methods of profiling the linguistics of subjects in the Ellipsis system. You will learn first to interpret what a subject is saying, then analyze how they are saying it.
Anytime you listen to a subject speak, they will reveal dozens of useful and revealing behavioral cues, regardless of what they are talking about. This chapter alone is enough to take to the field and begin social experimentation. The amount of hidden information concealed within our daily speech is astonishing. You will have a brand new skill set at the end of this chapter, and while it can be addicting to consistently process speech in conversation to ‘peer behind the curtain’ of the thoughts and social masks of your subject, it is important to let this skill develop. This skill should be sharpened simultaneously with other linguistic behavior control methods.
There are five phases of this training module. The skills will develop on their own as long as you maintain reference to your training planner and this volume. There are large lists of words and what might seem like a college-level English lesson to follow. Rest assured that none of it needs to be fully committed to memory. Having the reference to access when needed will prove to be invaluable, however.
The five phases are as follows:
1. Adjectives
2. Gestural Reference Side
3. Sensory Preferences
4. Phrasing
5. Pronouns
Adjectives
The description words subjects use to define, explain or otherwise communicate anything will reveal the words you will need in phase one of the linguistic analysis process. Adjectives are very important when collecting behavioral intelligence for the covert hypnotic phase of your interaction with subjects. Adjectives tell us how our subjects color their world. The descriptive language they use provides you with information about how they think about negative things and the way they view positive ones. As you converse with anyone, begin letting the adjectives they use come out of their language and fly onto the screen you’ve imagined over their shoulder. Imaging the words as they say them will help you to recall them for the deep level hypnosis phase of the interaction. The following is an example statement similar to something you might hear in a conversation on a normal day. See how many adjectives you can spot.
“…and it’s usually like that too. There are so many disgusting things happening in our world. I’m just extremely glad we live in such a free country. I think a lot of us take our ability to live comfortably for granted. Watching the news only makes people grumpy and nervous. I don’t like to watch the news. I’m relieved at the end of the day when I can still feel calm and be in such an agreeable mood when I walk into my old house.”
Let’s take a look at the ramblings above and find the adjectives in there. We will further break them down into negative and positive columns.
- Negative
- Disgusting
- Grumpy
- Nervous
- Old
- Positive
- Extremely
- Free
- Comfortably
- Relieved
- Calm
- Agreeable
The adjectives the subject used above can later be applied to conversational control tactics. If you wanted to create negative feelings toward anything, you can use the negative adjectives above to pepper into your hypnotic language. Conversely, the positive words can be powerful when you need to create positive emotions or when you are creating obedience and control routines for a particular subject. It’s not imperative that you keep your internal ‘record button’ pressed throughout a conversation. Attempting to memorize too many things before the skill set is fully developed will only lessen the effects of the other techniques you are using.
Imagine that concentration in the field is like spending money. You only have 100 dollars to spend and the more experienced you become at each skill, the cheaper it becomes. So while you may have to spend 30 dollars on the linguistic harvesting process in the beginning and another 50 dollars somewhere else, every time you purchase something, a few dollars gets shaved off the price for the next time you use it. Eventually you will only spend a dollar or two on each skill and get to the point where you have plenty of extra ‘money’ to spend on more advanced methods and bringing more sophistication and elegance to your skills.
The following table is an example list of specific adjectives that are divided into 12 types that you can begin reading through in order to sharpen your ability to pick them out at the speed of conversation. Keep in mind that it’s not necessary to collect every single adjective that a subject communicates. Your focus should be on anything they discuss with emotional content or anytime their behavior shifts to a more animated set of gestures and expressions. A full list of adjectives is provided in the appendix for mastery-level study.
Gestural Hemispheric Tendency (GHT)
The movements and gestures of your subjects will always vary with emotional level, thoughts and feelings. Before you modify their thoughts and feelings, paying attention to their gestural habits will provide you with data you can later use to deliver covert commands and make subconscious decisions for them during the control phase of the Ellipsis system. If a subject gestures mostly with their left hands when referring to negative or disliked topics, they will likely gesture to their left using their hands, eyes, head movements and general postural shifts when discussing other negative things*. Each of us use one side more than the other when referring to negative or positive things. This behavior proclivity provides you with information, but it should by no means be relied upon to make outcome-affecting decisions. The information you receive from observing this behavior will assist you in the decision-control phase and can serve as a strong support for your other techniques you’re using with a subject for an engineered outcome.
Making mental note of the side of the body the subjects use or gesture towards, you can later use this information to perform the same gestures on the mirrored side to them to cause them to feel negatively or positively about a certain subject (in combination with other techniques). Let’s walk through a couple of examples:
· A subject uses a single hand, and may slightly lean in the same direction when speaking of something he dislikes while discussing a politician.
· A subject who appears to be emotionally healthy, begins speaking passionately about the level of dishonesty at his work place. As he does this, his right hand seems to be more animated and gestures to the right in an outward dismissive motion when talking about his coworkers. When speaking of the more ‘honest’ people at his office, his right hand moves closer to the center and his left hands become more expressive
· A woman you are speaking with shows a tight-lipped expression while using her right hand to describe another woman with whom she’s had a disagreement. Her face becomes natural and more expressive as she uses her left hand to describe the behaviors and qualities of one of her close friends.
As the above examples show, both subjects have negative associations on the right side of their body. This in NO WAY means that all of their negative references will be relegated to this side of their body. However, as our only sample of behavior from which to draw information, the above two examples show us that these two subjects have associated negative things with their right side. This information becomes more powerful the more times you are able to verify them using a reference to a particular side of the body.
Let’s say we want them to associate any thought or idea with negative feelings. We will give this example using only this SINGLE technique so it’s not polluted with excess data for the moment.
We know the right side of their reference point is associated (sometimes) with negative feelings. We can move our bodies to our left (their right) a few inches to get their head starting to turn into the negative direction and eventually use expressive gesturing with your left hand, causing them to look further right to increase their feelings of negativity. We can move and gesture in the opposite direction to increase the chances of a positive response as well. While there are multiple books and chapters dedicated to the use of this single techniques, this is all a successful operator actually needs to know about to use it. The training to come will be far more advanced than anything you’ve ever come across, and this seemingly interesting collection of techniques in the beginning of this volume will become distant.
During conversation, making brief and small physical contact with a subject’s hand or arm in order to regain attention can also be very effective in controlling the direction of thought. If you sense you’ve begun to lose a small amount of attention in the conversation, touching the hand associated with the positive side of the subject will allow them to physically reconnect to the conversation.
TRAINING NOTE: Subject’s will often re-establish focus during conversation when their name is used in a sentence.
Sensory Channels
The word choice of a subject will broadcast which sensory input they are processing and will, over time, provide a map of how they process information and through which sense they like to receive it. In Neuro Linguistic Programming, the sensory systems play an important role in the structuring of language to increase its impact on the subject’s subconscious mind. There are four main ‘representation system’ or channels as we will hereafter call them, that we use to gather information. Each subject you meet will have one or two dominant channels by which they unconsciously prefer to receive information:
1. Visual
2. Auditory (Hearing)
3. Kinesthetic (Touch / Hands on)
4. Audio-Digital (Inner Feelings and Sensations)
The movements and gestures of your subjects will always vary with emotional level, thoughts and feelings. Before you modify their thoughts and feelings, paying attention to their gestural habits will provide you with data you can later use to deliver covert commands and make subconscious decisions for them during the control phase of the Ellipsis system. If a subject gestures mostly with their left hands when referring to negative or disliked topics, they will likely gesture to their left using their hands, eyes, head movements and general postural shifts when discussing other negative things*. Each of us use one side more than the other when referring to negative or positive things. This behavior proclivity provides you with information, but it should by no means be relied upon to make outcome-affecting decisions. The information you receive from observing this behavior will assist you in the decision-control phase and can serve as a strong support for your other techniques you’re using with a subject for an engineered outcome.
Making mental note of the side of the body the subjects use or gesture towards, you can later use this information to perform the same gestures on the mirrored side to them to cause them to feel negatively or positively about a certain subject (in combination with other techniques). Let’s walk through a couple of examples:
· A subject uses a single hand, and may slightly lean in the same direction when speaking of something he dislikes while discussing a politician.
· A subject who appears to be emotionally healthy, begins speaking passionately about the level of dishonesty at his work place. As he does this, his right hand seems to be more animated and gestures to the right in an outward dismissive motion when talking about his coworkers. When speaking of the more ‘honest’ people at his office, his right hand moves closer to the center and his left hands become more expressive
· A woman you are speaking with shows a tight-lipped expression while using her right hand to describe another woman with whom she’s had a disagreement. Her face becomes natural and more expressive as she uses her left hand to describe the behaviors and qualities of one of her close friends.
As the above examples show, both subjects have negative associations on the right side of their body. This in NO WAY means that all of their negative references will be relegated to this side of their body. However, as our only sample of behavior from which to draw information, the above two examples show us that these two subjects have associated negative things with their right side. This information becomes more powerful the more times you are able to verify them using a reference to a particular side of the body.
Let’s say we want them to associate any thought or idea with negative feelings. We will give this example using only this SINGLE technique so it’s not polluted with excess data for the moment.
We know the right side of their reference point is associated (sometimes) with negative feelings. We can move our bodies to our left (their right) a few inches to get their head starting to turn into the negative direction and eventually use expressive gesturing with your left hand, causing them to look further right to increase their feelings of negativity. We can move and gesture in the opposite direction to increase the chances of a positive response as well. While there are multiple books and chapters dedicated to the use of this single techniques, this is all a successful operator actually needs to know about to use it. The training to come will be far more advanced than anything you’ve ever come across, and this seemingly interesting collection of techniques in the beginning of this volume will become distant.
During conversation, making brief and small physical contact with a subject’s hand or arm in order to regain attention can also be very effective in controlling the direction of thought. If you sense you’ve begun to lose a small amount of attention in the conversation, touching the hand associated with the positive side of the subject will allow them to physically reconnect to the conversation.
TRAINING NOTE: Subject’s will often re-establish focus during conversation when their name is used in a sentence.
Sensory Channels
The word choice of a subject will broadcast which sensory input they are processing and will, over time, provide a map of how they process information and through which sense they like to receive it. In Neuro Linguistic Programming, the sensory systems play an important role in the structuring of language to increase its impact on the subject’s subconscious mind. There are four main ‘representation system’ or channels as we will hereafter call them, that we use to gather information. Each subject you meet will have one or two dominant channels by which they unconsciously prefer to receive information:
1. Visual
2. Auditory (Hearing)
3. Kinesthetic (Touch / Hands on)
4. Audio-Digital (Inner Feelings and Sensations)
The language a subject uses to communicate shows you what sensory descriptions you will later use in the hypnotic and psychological control phrases and the weaponized linguistic phase of the Ellipsis System. As you speak with a subject, keep an attentive ear to the language they use; it will provide great rewards in the end. A subject’s behavior is much more likely to be swayed by the language they think in, so the phrases they use, like the ones in the previous tables, will give you all of the ammunition you need to accomplish your goals.
Speech Characteristics Analysis
You’ve learned the skills in the previous section to analyze the content of a subject’s speech. This section, while brief, will introduce you to the process of hearing the characteristics of speech, in addition to simply listening for content.
Before getting into this short lesson, consider the difference in these responses to the following question:
“What was your favorite Christmas?”
1. “I think my favorite Christmas was probably when I was 13. My family and I went to Florida and it was amazing. I loved that trip.”
2. “When I was 14. I got a new bike and a bunch of clothes I wanted.”
3. “When my family all went to my grandma’s house together.”
4. “Not sure. They all were pretty good. Got a lot of cool stuff every time!”
Response number one contains the frequent use of the word, ‘I’. This is used by those who feel of lesser status than others and children. There is an undertone of the importance of the holiday being on family and time well spent.
Response two uses slightly less I’s than response one. However, within the language, it becomes apparent that the subject only describes the holiday in terms of what they ‘got’.
Response three also indicates a love of family, but is lacking in the group pronouns like, ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘us’, and ‘ours’. This person may be family oriented, but we can also see that self pronouns are the only ones they use.
The fourth response is cold, distant and unconcerned. The removal of pronouns shows either the subject’s distance from the event, from the operator, or shows withholding or deception.
Paying attention to the contextual cues within the speech of subjects can show how they process information about their life. Their own process of retrieving memories is also affected by this filtering system. As an exercise, try watching an interview or a candid conversation online. Divide a paper into two columns and as you watch the videos, begin picking out sensory channels and adjective usage, writing them into the left column and keep track of the contextual needs and pronoun usage on the right. Becoming familiar with the moods and life priorities HIDDEN within the language you hear every day becomes easier with practice and casual exercise in social settings. Your training doesn’t require you to engage is endless drills or exercises in order to become proficient. Simply having the knowledge of the linguistic harvesting techniques in this section will eventually shift your awareness into a natural mastery of linguistic harvesting.
Common Pronouns:
all, another, any, anybody, anyone, anything, both, each, each other, either, everybody, everyone, everything, few, he, her, hers, him herself, his, I, it, its, itself, little, many, me, mine, more, most, much, my, myself, neither, no one, nobody, none, nothing, one, one another, other, others, our, ourselves, several, she, some, somebody, someone, something, that, their, them, themselves, these, they, this, those, us, we, what, whatever, which, whichever, who, whoever, whom, whomever, whose, you, your, yours, yourself, yourselves
Pacing and Leading
You’ve likely been exposed to information before about mirroring body language or matching gestures in sales books or pop psychology books. This module will expand the capabilities of those techniques and show you methods that aren’t common public knowledge.
Mirroring other’s body language is a naturally occurring behavior in all humans and primates. When one person becomes familiar and begins to like another, their body language and gestures will naturally begin to match and mirror each other. We automatically begin copying and syncing behaviors with those that we like and trust. The opposite of this natural occurrence is the natural human tendency to dislike or fear things that are different than we are. While this is a naturally occurring behavior within our species, we can use deliberate behaviors in order to subconsciously influence the thought patterns of subjects in the field. A vast majority of the training to come is very similar, in that we take naturally programmed human behaviors and manipulate and engineer them into interactions that seem and feel natural.
We tend to like and trust people who are like ourselves. The concept of mirroring body language is simple to understand and requires a little bit of in-field practice in order to become ‘unconsciously competent’ in its use. We can also mirror other parts of behavior. Speech style, vocal tone, speed of speech, gestures, breathing and even blinking.
This module has 5 sections:
1. Mirroring Fundamentals
2. Body Language
3. Speech Styles
4. Gestures
5. Breathing and Blinking
Mirroring Fundamentals
The concept of mirroring behavior is a natural occurring human trait that you, as the operator, are going to deliberately control in order to shift the behavior and emotional state of the subject. Behavioral mirroring is not a gesture-for-gesture mimicry of the subject. Most of the gestures you replicate will follow a three to four second delay. Some gestures shouldn’t be copied at all. Two concepts are at work when mirroring body language: The mirroring of body language and the matching of body language. Mirroring occurs when you are positioned opposite (or facing) the subject and replicates a mirror image of behaviors. Matching occurs when you are next to a subject (facing a similar direction).
If positioned opposite a subject and you observe them cross their left leg over their right, you would need to mirror the behavior by crossing your right leg over your left. This creates a mirror image to the subject of the body language display. Conversely, if you and the subject are standing or seated so that you are both facing a similar direction, you would match their gesture instead of doing the mirror opposite; your left leg would be crossed over your right.
The shifts in body language should be subtle and appear natural. Drawing the subject’s attention to unusual displays of your behavior will only activate their conscious defense systems (which we need to be offline in order to use Ellipsis Systems). Never become obvious in your observations of their behavior before mirroring and matching. Beginner operators typically make the mistake of almost staring at a subject’s movements before making their own movement, then staring again to confirm they’ve done it right. This is hard to resist in the beginning phase of training and will occur when you are practicing some of the exercises in the training planner. Your level of mastery will be directly proportional to the amount you exercise your skills in everyday life outside of operations.
Body Language
When mirroring body language and gestures, the best rule of thumb is to mirror/match three gestures and movements, and ignore the fourth. This cycle should repeat until you have the ability to lead their body language. Leading body language occurs when you’ve developed enough rapport within the interaction to the extent the subject begins unconsciously mirroring/matching your gestures. Once you’ve gained the ability to unconsciously influence behavior in this way, the brain becomes easily led. Leading the physical body creates a social context in which the subject’s brain begins to follow you as well.
Training Note:
The physical movements of our bodies influence our emotions and thoughts. Try this exercise: Slouch your body and posture to the point where anyone who saw you in this position would believe you’re having the worst day of your life. Make your facial expression match the feeling of having a horrible day as well.
While maintaining this posture, try to force yourself to feel happy and confident. It will become apparent that the movements of the body serve as sort of a gateway to feeling emotions.
Since body language has so much influence on how we feel, imagine how easily it would be to modify a person’s mood simply by making them follow the body language signals you wanted them to. Typically, it takes about four minutes of mirroring and matching body language and gestures in order to cause a subject to follow your movements. After this point, the rule of thumb is to follow one of their movements every two minutes or so. While many experts have dedicated timelines to this process, conversation and interaction is so organic that any specifics applied to them would only degrade from the influence capabilities of an operator.
Speech Styles
When you listen to the way a person speaks, you can match their style of speech slightly. The mannerisms each person displays while speaking are varied, and the dynamics of which speech idiosyncrasies to mirror are complex. The following bracketed diagram displays the types of speech mannerisms you can mirror, and how precise you should be in your behavioral matching.
Speech Characteristics Analysis
You’ve learned the skills in the previous section to analyze the content of a subject’s speech. This section, while brief, will introduce you to the process of hearing the characteristics of speech, in addition to simply listening for content.
Before getting into this short lesson, consider the difference in these responses to the following question:
“What was your favorite Christmas?”
1. “I think my favorite Christmas was probably when I was 13. My family and I went to Florida and it was amazing. I loved that trip.”
2. “When I was 14. I got a new bike and a bunch of clothes I wanted.”
3. “When my family all went to my grandma’s house together.”
4. “Not sure. They all were pretty good. Got a lot of cool stuff every time!”
Response number one contains the frequent use of the word, ‘I’. This is used by those who feel of lesser status than others and children. There is an undertone of the importance of the holiday being on family and time well spent.
Response two uses slightly less I’s than response one. However, within the language, it becomes apparent that the subject only describes the holiday in terms of what they ‘got’.
Response three also indicates a love of family, but is lacking in the group pronouns like, ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘us’, and ‘ours’. This person may be family oriented, but we can also see that self pronouns are the only ones they use.
The fourth response is cold, distant and unconcerned. The removal of pronouns shows either the subject’s distance from the event, from the operator, or shows withholding or deception.
Paying attention to the contextual cues within the speech of subjects can show how they process information about their life. Their own process of retrieving memories is also affected by this filtering system. As an exercise, try watching an interview or a candid conversation online. Divide a paper into two columns and as you watch the videos, begin picking out sensory channels and adjective usage, writing them into the left column and keep track of the contextual needs and pronoun usage on the right. Becoming familiar with the moods and life priorities HIDDEN within the language you hear every day becomes easier with practice and casual exercise in social settings. Your training doesn’t require you to engage is endless drills or exercises in order to become proficient. Simply having the knowledge of the linguistic harvesting techniques in this section will eventually shift your awareness into a natural mastery of linguistic harvesting.
Common Pronouns:
all, another, any, anybody, anyone, anything, both, each, each other, either, everybody, everyone, everything, few, he, her, hers, him herself, his, I, it, its, itself, little, many, me, mine, more, most, much, my, myself, neither, no one, nobody, none, nothing, one, one another, other, others, our, ourselves, several, she, some, somebody, someone, something, that, their, them, themselves, these, they, this, those, us, we, what, whatever, which, whichever, who, whoever, whom, whomever, whose, you, your, yours, yourself, yourselves
Pacing and Leading
You’ve likely been exposed to information before about mirroring body language or matching gestures in sales books or pop psychology books. This module will expand the capabilities of those techniques and show you methods that aren’t common public knowledge.
Mirroring other’s body language is a naturally occurring behavior in all humans and primates. When one person becomes familiar and begins to like another, their body language and gestures will naturally begin to match and mirror each other. We automatically begin copying and syncing behaviors with those that we like and trust. The opposite of this natural occurrence is the natural human tendency to dislike or fear things that are different than we are. While this is a naturally occurring behavior within our species, we can use deliberate behaviors in order to subconsciously influence the thought patterns of subjects in the field. A vast majority of the training to come is very similar, in that we take naturally programmed human behaviors and manipulate and engineer them into interactions that seem and feel natural.
We tend to like and trust people who are like ourselves. The concept of mirroring body language is simple to understand and requires a little bit of in-field practice in order to become ‘unconsciously competent’ in its use. We can also mirror other parts of behavior. Speech style, vocal tone, speed of speech, gestures, breathing and even blinking.
This module has 5 sections:
1. Mirroring Fundamentals
2. Body Language
3. Speech Styles
4. Gestures
5. Breathing and Blinking
Mirroring Fundamentals
The concept of mirroring behavior is a natural occurring human trait that you, as the operator, are going to deliberately control in order to shift the behavior and emotional state of the subject. Behavioral mirroring is not a gesture-for-gesture mimicry of the subject. Most of the gestures you replicate will follow a three to four second delay. Some gestures shouldn’t be copied at all. Two concepts are at work when mirroring body language: The mirroring of body language and the matching of body language. Mirroring occurs when you are positioned opposite (or facing) the subject and replicates a mirror image of behaviors. Matching occurs when you are next to a subject (facing a similar direction).
If positioned opposite a subject and you observe them cross their left leg over their right, you would need to mirror the behavior by crossing your right leg over your left. This creates a mirror image to the subject of the body language display. Conversely, if you and the subject are standing or seated so that you are both facing a similar direction, you would match their gesture instead of doing the mirror opposite; your left leg would be crossed over your right.
The shifts in body language should be subtle and appear natural. Drawing the subject’s attention to unusual displays of your behavior will only activate their conscious defense systems (which we need to be offline in order to use Ellipsis Systems). Never become obvious in your observations of their behavior before mirroring and matching. Beginner operators typically make the mistake of almost staring at a subject’s movements before making their own movement, then staring again to confirm they’ve done it right. This is hard to resist in the beginning phase of training and will occur when you are practicing some of the exercises in the training planner. Your level of mastery will be directly proportional to the amount you exercise your skills in everyday life outside of operations.
Body Language
When mirroring body language and gestures, the best rule of thumb is to mirror/match three gestures and movements, and ignore the fourth. This cycle should repeat until you have the ability to lead their body language. Leading body language occurs when you’ve developed enough rapport within the interaction to the extent the subject begins unconsciously mirroring/matching your gestures. Once you’ve gained the ability to unconsciously influence behavior in this way, the brain becomes easily led. Leading the physical body creates a social context in which the subject’s brain begins to follow you as well.
Training Note:
The physical movements of our bodies influence our emotions and thoughts. Try this exercise: Slouch your body and posture to the point where anyone who saw you in this position would believe you’re having the worst day of your life. Make your facial expression match the feeling of having a horrible day as well.
While maintaining this posture, try to force yourself to feel happy and confident. It will become apparent that the movements of the body serve as sort of a gateway to feeling emotions.
Since body language has so much influence on how we feel, imagine how easily it would be to modify a person’s mood simply by making them follow the body language signals you wanted them to. Typically, it takes about four minutes of mirroring and matching body language and gestures in order to cause a subject to follow your movements. After this point, the rule of thumb is to follow one of their movements every two minutes or so. While many experts have dedicated timelines to this process, conversation and interaction is so organic that any specifics applied to them would only degrade from the influence capabilities of an operator.
Speech Styles
When you listen to the way a person speaks, you can match their style of speech slightly. The mannerisms each person displays while speaking are varied, and the dynamics of which speech idiosyncrasies to mirror are complex. The following bracketed diagram displays the types of speech mannerisms you can mirror, and how precise you should be in your behavioral matching.
Gestures
The gestures a person uses frequently can be mirrored. The time constraint in mirroring body language is not present with this skill. You are able to memorize gestural tendencies and feed those back later to highlight a point you want the subject to feel more agreement with. Subjects will naturally use certain hand gestures and head movements more than others. When choosing the gestures you want to use to activate psychological submission or control, ONLY memorize the gestures they use when speaking of things associated with POSITIVE emotional content. For example, if a subject uses a baton gesture (bg) while speaking negatively about a political candidate, this gesture becomes ELIMINATED from your mannerisms for the duration of the conversation. If the subject Tilts their head or makes the shape of a ball with their fingers to illustrate a POSITIVE point, you will immediately file that information away to be used for later phases of conversation.
Breathing and Blinking
The rate of breathing will vary in every subject throughout the organic process of conversation. There is no need to pay attention to the per-minute rate of breathing in conversation. When analyzing breathing, the appearance of slow or fast breathing is all you will need in order to mirror it. In the first few minutes of conversation, you should match the subjects breathing and eventually slow it down when they begin to follow your body language shifts. When speaking to their subconscious, as you will learn later, you can also match their breathing by speaking or starting to speak when they are exhaling, and pausing while they inhale.
The average human blink rate varies from about 17-25 blinks per minute (BPM). As we become interested, curious, entertained or otherwise focused on a stimulus, our blink rate can slow significantly to around 7-10 BPM. During stressful times and emotionally pressing events, our blink rate can soar up to about 50 BPM without us even realizing it.
How does this apply to real life?
As you become more interesting or your conversational topic starts to gain more focus and attention, you will actually see the blink rate of your subject(s) start to decline. This isn't a skill you will have to practice much. Within two days, you can likely become very proficient at observing this behavior.
What happens when you're talking and the subject's blink rate starts to get faster and more frequent? You're boring someone, or the topic is causing emotional stress.
• As a public speaker, you can single out a random sampling of an audience and monitor the 'room average' blink rate.
• You can INSTANTLY determine how someone feels about you.
• In a negotiation, the blink rate of everyone in the room changes as they become satisfied or as they feel threatened.
• As a police officer, blink rate increases could spell coming violence.
Confessions
No person is socially attracted to absolute perfection in other people. Making small and sometime humorous confessions of flaws will assist in bringing down the defenses of subjects and lowering resistance. Even something as small as an admission that you can’t stop yourself from eating certain types of candy can open a subject up psychologically. Confessions that contain an element of truth are the best to use, because of the authenticity that will automatically show in your behavior when you make them. Small confessions that are also semi-universal experiences can create more rapport as well because the person can relate to your ‘imperfection’ when the confession is made. The following list can aid you in developing awareness of the technique and creating a list of your own:
1. Not being able to stop yourself from eating certain types of candy or sweets.
2. Worrying about an intruder in your bathroom while shampooing your hair.
3. Having an inability to control yourself from buying a particular product when you see it.
4. Wanting to examine the contents of cars of people you ride with.
5. Having a small thing you frequently procrastinate about.
6. Checking the time on your watch and then not being able to tell anyone what time it is.
7. Opening your phone to check something and getting distracted by other apps.
8. Saving greeting cards and not being able to throw them away.
9. Coming close to adopting or getting new puppies every time you see them for sale.
10. Having trouble making your schedule fit into your designated work hours.
11. Not keeping in touch with people you should call more often.
12. Talking ‘trash’ to your GPS unit when you get lost.
13. Worrying ‘too much’ about germs.
14. Having a secret career or hobby you wished that you pursued but never did.
15. Looking in your rear view mirror several times after passing a police officer.
Deliberate Social Errors
Noticing a nonverbal display of timidity or defensiveness can affect your behavior in the field. Seeing a subject becoming defensive can influence your decisions and cause you to be more impulsive in order to alleviate the defensiveness you see in the subject. However, there are small, but powerful techniques you can use to diffuse their worry and lower their barriers. Masterfully trained interrogators will commonly employ these methods during their work to give the appearance of being slightly less than perfect, sloppy or otherwise non-threatening when they speak to subjects with high barrier behaviors. Here is a list of common deliberate errors:
• Leaving a part of your shirt untucked
• Having a stain on your collar
• A small piece of food in your teeth
• Mispronouncing words deliberately
• Stuttering once or twice
• Tripping during the initial introduction phase
• Showing deliberately calculated insecure gestures from the Table of Elements
• Using a small pencil to take notes on a tiny, cheap notepad instead of an interrogator’s notebook
• Leaving a shoe untied
• Creating wrinkles in your shirt prior to the introduction
• Driving coffee grounds under fingernails to appear unkempt
• Having a childish ringtone installed and allowing a ‘planned’ call to come through
When speaking to a subject, if you’ve placed them on the Needs Map and they need intelligence, deliberately feigning inability to work a certain feature on your phone or having ignorance of the finer points of something you know they are proud to speak about can change their behavior markedly. Each person on the Needs Map will require different deliberate behavioral errors or shortcomings in order to feel contextually relevant or confident in your presence. While confidence is by no means the desired end result of any subject you work with, seeing them in a state of diminished capacity or lacking self-esteem requires you to use tactics in order to make them feel more comfortable.
Changing Personal Appearance
Your appearance can have tremendous influence over the outcome of an interaction in the field. When time permits, your appearance can be altered in order to conform to the subject’s manner of dress, behaviors and appearance. Some methods can increase likeability and trustworthiness that can be physically changed (with training) about your body.
Manner of Dress
The way you dress can be made to be similar in economic status to the subject, thereby increasing their trust of you. However, if authority is more important in the objective (like an operation requiring more extreme levels of obedience), dressing in a way that inspires automatic trust or following behaviors may be more important to you than matching their manner of dress. For instance, an objective of having them believe you are trustworthy, friendly and someone they want to be around again in the future, matching the subject’s manner of dress will assist you to be more like them.
On the other hand, if you need to recruit an asset, use more coercive methods or need an outcome that demands more direct obedience to suggestion, you would want to dress for that as well. If you need the subject to trust your opinion and view you as more of an authority, you can modify the way you dress to suit the scenario.
Think for a moment about whom we trust to make important decisions. As a whole, our society tends to view people in sharp suits, doctor’s uniforms and law enforcement personnel as worthy of authority. You can recall reading about this earlier in this chapter when we discussed the nature of human obedience.
Something as small as having a stethoscope hanging from your bag can work the same way on the unconscious as a full doctor’s outfit. A medical looking pager on your hip (even in 2014) can serve the same purpose as well.
Small modifications in your appearance can go a long way towards getting the behaviors you want from your subjects. The appearance alone can do all of the ‘heavy lifting’ in the initial phase of an interaction. Subjects react to authority symbols like these on an unconscious level.
Wearing glasses to build rapport is also very helpful if being seen as honest is more important to your outcome than being seen as authoritative. However, if the subject wears glasses, you can put yours on anytime during the interaction in order to increase rapport.
Physical Appearance While there may not be a lot you can do to actually change your appearance, the following two methods, based on research findings, can help quite a bit in the rapid-rapport development process:
Studies have shown that people with shiny eyes are seen as more physically attractive and healthy (Patzer, 2006). Regardless of the sex of the person with whom you are dealing, increasing your level of attractiveness also increases your ability to develop rapport. Before an interaction, you can do two things to increase the physical appearance of your eyes, carry an eye-moisturizer or deliberately pull a few nose hairs to cause your eyes to water immediately before the interaction begins. These can have lasting effects on the subject as you are creating a first impression that will stay in the subject’s mind.
Having healthy looking skin and hair can show the same qualities to a subject. Keeping your skin clear and your hair shiny and healthy-looking can provide you with influence opportunities you would have otherwise had to work hard to achieve.
Manipulating Subject Physiology
You read a moment ago that the movements of the physical body will create internal experiences. When you can linguistically modify the physiology of a subject, you can open doors to the behavior engineering methods that follow.
Think back to the last time you saw someone correct or adjust their posture while you were both speaking to each other. This behavior causes immediate awareness of your own posture, and likely made you want to adjust your own posture. As humans, we become aware of our bodies and behaviors when our attention is drawn in that direction. In a linguistic sense, all you have to do is speak about physiology or behavior to make the subject become aware of their own bodies and feel that same need to adjust their own.
Thinking about the physiology you WANT your subject to exhibit, the physiology of comfort, interest and trust most likely come to mind. Once you can cause a subject to exhibit these PHYSICAL behaviors, you are actually creating an internal state that matches the one you’ve just created with their body. Making them exhibit these behaviors requires nothing more than a short, easy linguistic technique. Consider the following physiological indicators of comfort, interest and trust:
1. Abdominal breathing
2. Slowed Breathing
3. Shoulder relaxation
4. Neck exposure
5. Facial expressions of happiness
6. Facial expressions of curiosity and interest
7. Open and welcoming posture
These behaviors are all indicative of rapport. They signal comfort, interest and trust. Engineering these into a subject’s behavior is simple. Let’s examine each behavior and how to control a subject’s physiology using linguistics so that your messages and commands are heard more clearly, open-mindedly and the subject, in turn is more receptive to everything that follows.
Abdominal Breathing
Abdominal breathing is how we breathe at our most relaxed state; sleep. Knowing the power of language and its influence on behavior. Consider the numerous ways you could bring abdominal breathing into a conversation.
“I read the most interesting article last week about successful people behave differently. They said when they watched all of these successful people, they actually breathe into their stomachs instead of their chest. They had that ability to just relax, I guess. It was interesting to read.”
The simple mention of this is enough to draw awareness to it. Now that we have also associated the quality with successful people, the subject is even more likely to begin to mimic the suggested behavior.
Slowed Breathing
Simply mentioning the speed at which most people breathe is enough to focus someone’s awareness on their breathing. Doing this helps them to slow it down, which is the natural reaction to focusing on the breathing, as no one consciously wants to breathe faster in social environments.
Shoulder Relaxation
The main reason for the rise of shoulders, as you made notes of while studying the BTOE, is fear. Most people, even in comfortable social environments, have a slight shoulder-raise in social environments. Assisting them to relax it is something that is as easily done as slowing their breathing down using linguistics. Mentioning an article about how successful people have a lot of shoulder relaxation would work, as you read about a moment ago. However, the physical motion of raising your own shoulders for a second or two and making an obvious effort of lowering them and showing the physical relaxation will cause the subject to follow suit, just like the adjustment of posture.
Neck Exposure
Using behavior, you can cause a subject to expose their neck in a few different ways. These are behaviors that are meant to make the subject tilt their head or slightly lift the chin during conversation.
First, using your body to match theirs, as you've read in the mirroring chapter, you can then perform the action with your own body that you wish for them to take. Tilt your head the direction you'd like them to tilt theirs.
Second, using your hand while speaking in a natural way, raise your hand to where it is almost bladed to your face (you're looking at the thumb of the hand, held together almost like a salute). When you raise your hand, it should be in the midline where it's near your head, and almost in front of your face. As you move your hand outward, exposing the palm a bit toward the subject and slightly to the ceiling. Your head should tilt at the same motion of your hand. This movement should appear natural and is easily performed. It gives the subject more than one reason to copy the gesture you've given their unconscious to follow.
The third method to get the subject to expose their neck is to use a hand gesture similar to the previous, except that you preface the gesture with a covert, but natural hand movement that points at the subject's head. This allows you to draw attention to their head in a covert way before the gesture is performed. Taking no less than half of a second, this gestural point to the subject's head should be casual and appear to have a natural place in the gestural harmony of your speech. This is much easier to accomplish than most people initially believe.
Facial Expressions of Happiness
You’ve thus far become very familiar with the concept that human physiology and movements can trigger internal emotions. Conversationally forcing a subject to display a happiness facial expression creates a feeling of wellness and enjoyment. The subject should then, ideally, associate this with you. Simply asking the subject about a time they immensely enjoyed themselves is a great way to get them to display a happiness facial expression, however, you can prime their unconscious to make the facial expression by feeding them information that causes them to think about the gesture. You’ll soon learn the absolute importance of rehearsal in behavior engineering, and this method is a way of causing the subject to rehearse the mental process. The thoughts of the facial expression will naturally bring a small amount of awareness to their own facial expressions before you deploy a conversational means of discussing the happiness facial expression.
Facial Expressions of Curiosity and Interest
Triggering facial expressions in a subject can be done the same way almost any other behavior is socially or behaviorally forced. Using stories, mirroring and eliciting the information that causes the expression to come naturally. Facial expressions of curiosity are similar to the head tilt force, in that it opens the physiology up and therefore opens the subject up psychologically. This method simply uses a story about watching a youngster come downstairs for Christmas morning. When you describe the scene (briefly) you will talk about a curious facial expression on the children and gesture with your hand to the persons face in a way that does not draw attention to your hand.
Open and Welcoming Posture Causing a subject to open their physiology will inevitably open them mentally, making them more receptive to suggestion and influence. When a subject has crossed arms, is facing slightly away or seems to exhibit closed behaviors, you can do one of three methods to open their physiology:
First, cause them to physically alter their body posture by using objects. Handing them a pen, asking them to hold something or asking them to look a certain direction at something are all ways to create a shift that opens their physiology.
Second, use mirroring; copy their bodily movements for a moment or two and open your own body language as you take in a large breath, as if it feels good. As you do this, you can comment on how awesome the place is where you are, the weather or something else positive. The subject, wanting to absorb positivity, will be more likely to follow the movement in order to ‘soak up’ the feeling.
Third, discuss an article you read about how body language effects success, and closed off people were more likely to be the underachievers. This need to mentally associate with success and enhance a self-identity can cause them to bring awareness to their own body posture. It is important to remember that the methods in this technique should be used without reference or gesture to the subject’s body movements. Also, when you reach the part of the story about the article that describes body language of openness, look away briefly and give the subject a judgment-free opportunity to shift his or her own body language.
Conclusion
Developing rapid rapport is easy if you follow the patterns you’ve thus far learned in this book. Having rapport with a subject makes them exponentially more likely to follow your lead and become increasingly susceptible to commands and suggestions. Here’s a short, bulleted list of the basics of rapid rapport:
• No one likes ‘prefect’ people.
• Authenticity is one of the most socially attractive behaviors you can exhibit.
• Making others feel interesting creates automatic rapport.
• Listening and commenting on what you hear from subjects shows you’re paying attention.
• When you are nervous or insecure, your ‘chords’ are all vibrating (activating) the same frequency in the subject.
• The only information a subject has to judge you by is what you provide. Your authority and authenticity are only limited by your display of the techniques.
• Tilting your head while listening to detailed parts of a subject’s story will help to convey interest and curiosity.
• If a subject shows signs of timidity or insecurity, remove it by asking them questions about topics they are very confident about and getting them back into their mental comfort zone until they no longer show nonverbal signs of timidity.
• Never criticize or complain. Your efforts to create rapport may be tremendous, but as a master, you must never show that anything has challenged you. You must make it all look easy.
If you’re wrong or have made a mistake, admit it immediately and openly without attempting to justify your error.
We sincerely hope you enjoyed this.
Love,
EBL
*Credit for finding a mistake one here to Erik Kreitzmann. Thanks!
The gestures a person uses frequently can be mirrored. The time constraint in mirroring body language is not present with this skill. You are able to memorize gestural tendencies and feed those back later to highlight a point you want the subject to feel more agreement with. Subjects will naturally use certain hand gestures and head movements more than others. When choosing the gestures you want to use to activate psychological submission or control, ONLY memorize the gestures they use when speaking of things associated with POSITIVE emotional content. For example, if a subject uses a baton gesture (bg) while speaking negatively about a political candidate, this gesture becomes ELIMINATED from your mannerisms for the duration of the conversation. If the subject Tilts their head or makes the shape of a ball with their fingers to illustrate a POSITIVE point, you will immediately file that information away to be used for later phases of conversation.
Breathing and Blinking
The rate of breathing will vary in every subject throughout the organic process of conversation. There is no need to pay attention to the per-minute rate of breathing in conversation. When analyzing breathing, the appearance of slow or fast breathing is all you will need in order to mirror it. In the first few minutes of conversation, you should match the subjects breathing and eventually slow it down when they begin to follow your body language shifts. When speaking to their subconscious, as you will learn later, you can also match their breathing by speaking or starting to speak when they are exhaling, and pausing while they inhale.
The average human blink rate varies from about 17-25 blinks per minute (BPM). As we become interested, curious, entertained or otherwise focused on a stimulus, our blink rate can slow significantly to around 7-10 BPM. During stressful times and emotionally pressing events, our blink rate can soar up to about 50 BPM without us even realizing it.
How does this apply to real life?
As you become more interesting or your conversational topic starts to gain more focus and attention, you will actually see the blink rate of your subject(s) start to decline. This isn't a skill you will have to practice much. Within two days, you can likely become very proficient at observing this behavior.
What happens when you're talking and the subject's blink rate starts to get faster and more frequent? You're boring someone, or the topic is causing emotional stress.
• As a public speaker, you can single out a random sampling of an audience and monitor the 'room average' blink rate.
• You can INSTANTLY determine how someone feels about you.
• In a negotiation, the blink rate of everyone in the room changes as they become satisfied or as they feel threatened.
• As a police officer, blink rate increases could spell coming violence.
Confessions
No person is socially attracted to absolute perfection in other people. Making small and sometime humorous confessions of flaws will assist in bringing down the defenses of subjects and lowering resistance. Even something as small as an admission that you can’t stop yourself from eating certain types of candy can open a subject up psychologically. Confessions that contain an element of truth are the best to use, because of the authenticity that will automatically show in your behavior when you make them. Small confessions that are also semi-universal experiences can create more rapport as well because the person can relate to your ‘imperfection’ when the confession is made. The following list can aid you in developing awareness of the technique and creating a list of your own:
1. Not being able to stop yourself from eating certain types of candy or sweets.
2. Worrying about an intruder in your bathroom while shampooing your hair.
3. Having an inability to control yourself from buying a particular product when you see it.
4. Wanting to examine the contents of cars of people you ride with.
5. Having a small thing you frequently procrastinate about.
6. Checking the time on your watch and then not being able to tell anyone what time it is.
7. Opening your phone to check something and getting distracted by other apps.
8. Saving greeting cards and not being able to throw them away.
9. Coming close to adopting or getting new puppies every time you see them for sale.
10. Having trouble making your schedule fit into your designated work hours.
11. Not keeping in touch with people you should call more often.
12. Talking ‘trash’ to your GPS unit when you get lost.
13. Worrying ‘too much’ about germs.
14. Having a secret career or hobby you wished that you pursued but never did.
15. Looking in your rear view mirror several times after passing a police officer.
Deliberate Social Errors
Noticing a nonverbal display of timidity or defensiveness can affect your behavior in the field. Seeing a subject becoming defensive can influence your decisions and cause you to be more impulsive in order to alleviate the defensiveness you see in the subject. However, there are small, but powerful techniques you can use to diffuse their worry and lower their barriers. Masterfully trained interrogators will commonly employ these methods during their work to give the appearance of being slightly less than perfect, sloppy or otherwise non-threatening when they speak to subjects with high barrier behaviors. Here is a list of common deliberate errors:
• Leaving a part of your shirt untucked
• Having a stain on your collar
• A small piece of food in your teeth
• Mispronouncing words deliberately
• Stuttering once or twice
• Tripping during the initial introduction phase
• Showing deliberately calculated insecure gestures from the Table of Elements
• Using a small pencil to take notes on a tiny, cheap notepad instead of an interrogator’s notebook
• Leaving a shoe untied
• Creating wrinkles in your shirt prior to the introduction
• Driving coffee grounds under fingernails to appear unkempt
• Having a childish ringtone installed and allowing a ‘planned’ call to come through
When speaking to a subject, if you’ve placed them on the Needs Map and they need intelligence, deliberately feigning inability to work a certain feature on your phone or having ignorance of the finer points of something you know they are proud to speak about can change their behavior markedly. Each person on the Needs Map will require different deliberate behavioral errors or shortcomings in order to feel contextually relevant or confident in your presence. While confidence is by no means the desired end result of any subject you work with, seeing them in a state of diminished capacity or lacking self-esteem requires you to use tactics in order to make them feel more comfortable.
Changing Personal Appearance
Your appearance can have tremendous influence over the outcome of an interaction in the field. When time permits, your appearance can be altered in order to conform to the subject’s manner of dress, behaviors and appearance. Some methods can increase likeability and trustworthiness that can be physically changed (with training) about your body.
Manner of Dress
The way you dress can be made to be similar in economic status to the subject, thereby increasing their trust of you. However, if authority is more important in the objective (like an operation requiring more extreme levels of obedience), dressing in a way that inspires automatic trust or following behaviors may be more important to you than matching their manner of dress. For instance, an objective of having them believe you are trustworthy, friendly and someone they want to be around again in the future, matching the subject’s manner of dress will assist you to be more like them.
On the other hand, if you need to recruit an asset, use more coercive methods or need an outcome that demands more direct obedience to suggestion, you would want to dress for that as well. If you need the subject to trust your opinion and view you as more of an authority, you can modify the way you dress to suit the scenario.
Think for a moment about whom we trust to make important decisions. As a whole, our society tends to view people in sharp suits, doctor’s uniforms and law enforcement personnel as worthy of authority. You can recall reading about this earlier in this chapter when we discussed the nature of human obedience.
Something as small as having a stethoscope hanging from your bag can work the same way on the unconscious as a full doctor’s outfit. A medical looking pager on your hip (even in 2014) can serve the same purpose as well.
Small modifications in your appearance can go a long way towards getting the behaviors you want from your subjects. The appearance alone can do all of the ‘heavy lifting’ in the initial phase of an interaction. Subjects react to authority symbols like these on an unconscious level.
Wearing glasses to build rapport is also very helpful if being seen as honest is more important to your outcome than being seen as authoritative. However, if the subject wears glasses, you can put yours on anytime during the interaction in order to increase rapport.
Physical Appearance While there may not be a lot you can do to actually change your appearance, the following two methods, based on research findings, can help quite a bit in the rapid-rapport development process:
Studies have shown that people with shiny eyes are seen as more physically attractive and healthy (Patzer, 2006). Regardless of the sex of the person with whom you are dealing, increasing your level of attractiveness also increases your ability to develop rapport. Before an interaction, you can do two things to increase the physical appearance of your eyes, carry an eye-moisturizer or deliberately pull a few nose hairs to cause your eyes to water immediately before the interaction begins. These can have lasting effects on the subject as you are creating a first impression that will stay in the subject’s mind.
Having healthy looking skin and hair can show the same qualities to a subject. Keeping your skin clear and your hair shiny and healthy-looking can provide you with influence opportunities you would have otherwise had to work hard to achieve.
Manipulating Subject Physiology
You read a moment ago that the movements of the physical body will create internal experiences. When you can linguistically modify the physiology of a subject, you can open doors to the behavior engineering methods that follow.
Think back to the last time you saw someone correct or adjust their posture while you were both speaking to each other. This behavior causes immediate awareness of your own posture, and likely made you want to adjust your own posture. As humans, we become aware of our bodies and behaviors when our attention is drawn in that direction. In a linguistic sense, all you have to do is speak about physiology or behavior to make the subject become aware of their own bodies and feel that same need to adjust their own.
Thinking about the physiology you WANT your subject to exhibit, the physiology of comfort, interest and trust most likely come to mind. Once you can cause a subject to exhibit these PHYSICAL behaviors, you are actually creating an internal state that matches the one you’ve just created with their body. Making them exhibit these behaviors requires nothing more than a short, easy linguistic technique. Consider the following physiological indicators of comfort, interest and trust:
1. Abdominal breathing
2. Slowed Breathing
3. Shoulder relaxation
4. Neck exposure
5. Facial expressions of happiness
6. Facial expressions of curiosity and interest
7. Open and welcoming posture
These behaviors are all indicative of rapport. They signal comfort, interest and trust. Engineering these into a subject’s behavior is simple. Let’s examine each behavior and how to control a subject’s physiology using linguistics so that your messages and commands are heard more clearly, open-mindedly and the subject, in turn is more receptive to everything that follows.
Abdominal Breathing
Abdominal breathing is how we breathe at our most relaxed state; sleep. Knowing the power of language and its influence on behavior. Consider the numerous ways you could bring abdominal breathing into a conversation.
“I read the most interesting article last week about successful people behave differently. They said when they watched all of these successful people, they actually breathe into their stomachs instead of their chest. They had that ability to just relax, I guess. It was interesting to read.”
The simple mention of this is enough to draw awareness to it. Now that we have also associated the quality with successful people, the subject is even more likely to begin to mimic the suggested behavior.
Slowed Breathing
Simply mentioning the speed at which most people breathe is enough to focus someone’s awareness on their breathing. Doing this helps them to slow it down, which is the natural reaction to focusing on the breathing, as no one consciously wants to breathe faster in social environments.
Shoulder Relaxation
The main reason for the rise of shoulders, as you made notes of while studying the BTOE, is fear. Most people, even in comfortable social environments, have a slight shoulder-raise in social environments. Assisting them to relax it is something that is as easily done as slowing their breathing down using linguistics. Mentioning an article about how successful people have a lot of shoulder relaxation would work, as you read about a moment ago. However, the physical motion of raising your own shoulders for a second or two and making an obvious effort of lowering them and showing the physical relaxation will cause the subject to follow suit, just like the adjustment of posture.
Neck Exposure
Using behavior, you can cause a subject to expose their neck in a few different ways. These are behaviors that are meant to make the subject tilt their head or slightly lift the chin during conversation.
First, using your body to match theirs, as you've read in the mirroring chapter, you can then perform the action with your own body that you wish for them to take. Tilt your head the direction you'd like them to tilt theirs.
Second, using your hand while speaking in a natural way, raise your hand to where it is almost bladed to your face (you're looking at the thumb of the hand, held together almost like a salute). When you raise your hand, it should be in the midline where it's near your head, and almost in front of your face. As you move your hand outward, exposing the palm a bit toward the subject and slightly to the ceiling. Your head should tilt at the same motion of your hand. This movement should appear natural and is easily performed. It gives the subject more than one reason to copy the gesture you've given their unconscious to follow.
The third method to get the subject to expose their neck is to use a hand gesture similar to the previous, except that you preface the gesture with a covert, but natural hand movement that points at the subject's head. This allows you to draw attention to their head in a covert way before the gesture is performed. Taking no less than half of a second, this gestural point to the subject's head should be casual and appear to have a natural place in the gestural harmony of your speech. This is much easier to accomplish than most people initially believe.
Facial Expressions of Happiness
You’ve thus far become very familiar with the concept that human physiology and movements can trigger internal emotions. Conversationally forcing a subject to display a happiness facial expression creates a feeling of wellness and enjoyment. The subject should then, ideally, associate this with you. Simply asking the subject about a time they immensely enjoyed themselves is a great way to get them to display a happiness facial expression, however, you can prime their unconscious to make the facial expression by feeding them information that causes them to think about the gesture. You’ll soon learn the absolute importance of rehearsal in behavior engineering, and this method is a way of causing the subject to rehearse the mental process. The thoughts of the facial expression will naturally bring a small amount of awareness to their own facial expressions before you deploy a conversational means of discussing the happiness facial expression.
Facial Expressions of Curiosity and Interest
Triggering facial expressions in a subject can be done the same way almost any other behavior is socially or behaviorally forced. Using stories, mirroring and eliciting the information that causes the expression to come naturally. Facial expressions of curiosity are similar to the head tilt force, in that it opens the physiology up and therefore opens the subject up psychologically. This method simply uses a story about watching a youngster come downstairs for Christmas morning. When you describe the scene (briefly) you will talk about a curious facial expression on the children and gesture with your hand to the persons face in a way that does not draw attention to your hand.
Open and Welcoming Posture Causing a subject to open their physiology will inevitably open them mentally, making them more receptive to suggestion and influence. When a subject has crossed arms, is facing slightly away or seems to exhibit closed behaviors, you can do one of three methods to open their physiology:
First, cause them to physically alter their body posture by using objects. Handing them a pen, asking them to hold something or asking them to look a certain direction at something are all ways to create a shift that opens their physiology.
Second, use mirroring; copy their bodily movements for a moment or two and open your own body language as you take in a large breath, as if it feels good. As you do this, you can comment on how awesome the place is where you are, the weather or something else positive. The subject, wanting to absorb positivity, will be more likely to follow the movement in order to ‘soak up’ the feeling.
Third, discuss an article you read about how body language effects success, and closed off people were more likely to be the underachievers. This need to mentally associate with success and enhance a self-identity can cause them to bring awareness to their own body posture. It is important to remember that the methods in this technique should be used without reference or gesture to the subject’s body movements. Also, when you reach the part of the story about the article that describes body language of openness, look away briefly and give the subject a judgment-free opportunity to shift his or her own body language.
Conclusion
Developing rapid rapport is easy if you follow the patterns you’ve thus far learned in this book. Having rapport with a subject makes them exponentially more likely to follow your lead and become increasingly susceptible to commands and suggestions. Here’s a short, bulleted list of the basics of rapid rapport:
• No one likes ‘prefect’ people.
• Authenticity is one of the most socially attractive behaviors you can exhibit.
• Making others feel interesting creates automatic rapport.
• Listening and commenting on what you hear from subjects shows you’re paying attention.
• When you are nervous or insecure, your ‘chords’ are all vibrating (activating) the same frequency in the subject.
• The only information a subject has to judge you by is what you provide. Your authority and authenticity are only limited by your display of the techniques.
• Tilting your head while listening to detailed parts of a subject’s story will help to convey interest and curiosity.
• If a subject shows signs of timidity or insecurity, remove it by asking them questions about topics they are very confident about and getting them back into their mental comfort zone until they no longer show nonverbal signs of timidity.
• Never criticize or complain. Your efforts to create rapport may be tremendous, but as a master, you must never show that anything has challenged you. You must make it all look easy.
If you’re wrong or have made a mistake, admit it immediately and openly without attempting to justify your error.
We sincerely hope you enjoyed this.
Love,
EBL
*Credit for finding a mistake one here to Erik Kreitzmann. Thanks!