© 2014 by Noah-Jay Michael
ISBN 9781456622565
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The information contained in this book is strictly for educational purposes. Therefore, if you wish to apply ideas contained in this book, you are taking full responsibility for your actions.
Although establishing rapport can be easy, a lot can go wrong. This chapter is about what can go wrong and why you might be having trouble establishing rapport. By learning what some of the common mistakes are, you can be aware of them and take care to avoid making these very same mistakes.
Too Many Compliments
It is natural to want to compliment your audience, to encourage them to like you and to be more receptive to listening to you. However, when you slather on the compliments thickly, they quickly sound fake and like a ploy to make them like you.
Once you do anything to arouse suspicion, you will find establishing rapport will be almost impossible. You need to be nice to the person you are talking to but you can be too nice and that comes across as fake.
You want to be believable and that means you need to avoid all appearances of being fake, which is why you cannot be too heavy handed on the compliments.
Once you start using too many compliments, or saying things that are very obviously not true, you transition from a likeable and respected person of authority and right into a shady used car dealer with a fake smile trying to sell a lemon.
Communication is ultimately about the other person receiving and understanding the message you want them to get. When you focus on being too nice, your message becomes lost and that allows the message to become lost. Your focus is on getting your message through, politely and clearly.
Trying Too Hard
Conversational hypnosis is not about coercion and sometimes, you have to realize you will not get what you want. When that happens, you need to walk away.
If you are trying to sell your point too forcibly, you will end up making the other person put up their guard because they will suspect that there is something you want from them. You need to stay even and pleasant and avoid any hint of pressure or desperation in your talk.
Once you come across as desperate, the other person’s warning bells will go off and you will lose the connection. Desperate is bad, so avoid trying so hard to get your point across that you come off as desperate.
Would you buy a product from a salesperson who was practically begging people to buy? No, of course not! You would become suspicious and pass on the product and the same principle holds true here, your desperation will make them suspicious of whatever you are selling or suggesting and they will have already made up their mind to say no.
Not Being Genuine
Remember the example of the salesperson who was just mechanically reading their sales speech and the salesperson who was enthusiastic about the product, talking about how much they love it and why?
You need to be the second person because if you are not genuinely interested or excited about what you have to say, neither will anyone else. If you are not showing genuine interest, your audience will never be able to connect with you or your message.
What happens if you are having a bad day and you have to go into a big sales pitch meeting? You put that bad day behind you and you go in there with enthusiasm, energy, and passion.
You have to be passionate about what you are talking about or selling. You want to engage and interact and people connect easier to someone who is showing emotion, and enthusiasm is contagious!
Even if you have given your speech a hundred times, you give it with as much enthusiasm for the hundred and first time as you did the first time. Your voice, your face, and your body language needs to say you care and you are passionate.
Your lack of emotion, interest, and passion can keep you from establishing rapport.
Mirroring and Matching Errors
We mentioned a few of the mistakes in the prior chapter that you can make with mirroring and matching. If you instantly copy every single action the person you are talking to makes, you will be caught and they will think you are mocking them. Do not rush to copy movements, do them slowly and naturally, and wait a while to even begin to match your body language to theirs.
Never try to mirror or match facial tics or any sort of tic or involuntary motion, which will just come off as if you are making fun of them.
Similarly, if they have a lisp, do not try to mirror and match that or any speech impediment. If they have an accent, it can be tempting to automatically fall into that same accent, and it is easy to do it without realizing you are doing it but you have to pay attention to make sure that you aren't doing that.
The above are the main errors that will either break rapport or make it hard to establish in the first place. Make sure you take care to avoid any of the above when you are speaking to people and you will find that you can make and keep rapport established easier.
It is important that you not only grab your audience’s attention but that you also create an interest for them to keep listening.
You want to create a bond, and that is what rapport is for, but once you establish rapport, you need to keep pulling in your audience so they are hooked. It is kind of clichéd but it is a good analogy so you can compare conversational hypnosis to fishing. You get the fish to pay attention to your bait but if you reel in too early, you miss the fish.
You have to do the same thing with your audience. If you reel in too early, then you lose them. You have to tantalize them with your bait, which is the early part of your speech, the part that hooks them and holds their interest before you reel them in. You can use various methods to help hook their attention, pulling them deeper into rapport.
One such tool to hook them in is to tell part of a story, but not the whole story. You never play your full hand right up front so you tell them just enough to get them interested so they want to keep listening to you.
Tell stories and give anecdotes that tell most of, but not all of, an interesting story. Leave them wanting more, so they engage you in banter and conversation. Once you have them engaged in conversation, you can easily keep pulling them in.
You should do this the entire time you are talking because it ensures your audience does not lose interest. What you are doing is helping to build up expectation because they will expect you to fill in the missing information at some point; and you will, just not all at once. This is a valuable tool to help grab and keep interest.
The goal is to make the person you are talking ask you questions, to get that back and forth flow of the conversation going and to keep it going. An example of this would be along the lines of “This reminds me of the time I was attending a conference. It was several states away, so I flew. Well, my friend, Murphy’s Law, decided to show up and to say that it was an interest day is an understatement! To make a long story short, I did make the conference, barely.”
The audience knows that something happened, but not what. If they want to know the details, they have to ask you and chances are, they will! That is how you can leave out information to pull in your audience because you are engaging our natural curiosity. When they are curious, they begin to ask questions.
Why is it so important to get them to start asking questions?
For one, if they are asking questions, that means you are not trying to rush or pressure them for whatever you want because you are taking the time to answer their questions and in fact, you are encouraging them. You are giving them time and space to think about what you are saying, and ask you about it.
When a salesperson is trying to rush you into a decision, you become wary, right? Anyone would. When they see you are not pressuring them, and engaging them in an actual conversation instead of just giving them a sales pitch, they will immediately trust you more.
Once you have their trust, you can easily influence them. Influence is only possible with trust and that is why all of the conversational hypnosis tools in this book involve making people feel comfortable and getting them to trust you.
Trust is how you help hold that connection with someone. You would not be taking the time to answer questions if you had something to hide or a hidden agenda, so they start to trust you more simply because you are taking time to speak to them. They will not even notice that you are engineering the conversation to encourage them to ask the questions in the first place.
Here is another example of how to leave out information to help grab their attention and pull them in, helping to engage them in conversation.
In this example, I will show you how to link your goal with your hook statement. Let us say that you are selling a health supplement that helps boost the immune system. You can say, “There is a village in South America, near the rainforest and the people who live there rarely sick. Colds, the flu, and other common illnesses occur less frequently there than in the surrounding cities. Wouldn’t it be great if you could be sick less, too?”
In our example, when questioned, the speaker will go onto explain that a common plant in the area, which is used in their cooking, is actually the reason their immune system is so strong and that same plant is in your health supplements.
Can you see how you can use these conversational hypnosis hooks to grab your audience’s attention and pull it in, making them want more, and ultimately, leading them into doing what you are guiding them into doing? It is a simple, yet effective conversational tool.
As humans, our curiosity is piqued when we know we have part of the information but not all of it. In the above example, the speaker left out the name of the city and the cause of the village’s increased resistance to common illnesses. People listening will be naturally curious about this and will want to know more.
Who does not want to be healthier? If it works for that village, it must work for others. You are carefully generating interest that helps lead them to your goal. This low-pressure approach will always work better than a hard sell approach, every single time.
You need to have your radar on and alert when you are using conversational hypnosis because you have to be able to quickly see the signals and clues your audience is putting off so you can change your tactics, if need be, to make what you are saying more effective. If you ignore the signals the person you are talking to is giving off, you are ignoring the chance to help fortify your connection with them if it is weakening.
Here is an example that has two salespersons, both selling televisions. One sees a customer come over and begins to explain the features on the largest TV. The customer glances at the price tag and shakes their head slightly but the salesperson continues trying to extol the benefits and features of that TV. In the end, the customer leaves the store.
The second customer comes and looks at the same TV but the second salesperson comes over to help them. When highlighting some of the TV’s best features, the salesperson sees that the customer looks at the price tag and makes a face and instead of continuing to talk about that TV, he shows the customer another TV, with the same features, but a lower price and he gets the sale.
By ignoring the first customer’s body language, the first salesperson lost the sale. You have to be an active listener as well as keep your body language radar on and on high. You are looking for verbal and physical clues that they are either agreeing or disagreeing with you when you are talking. Once you hone your radar and see the clues they are giving you about what they are thinking or feeling as a reaction to what you are saying, you can easily adjust your sails, so to speak, to steer the conversation back in the direction you want.
Excellent communicators always seem to be able to anticipate the needs of their audience. They are not psychic, they are just using their signal radar to read their audience and respond instantly to the clues and signs they are seeing. That is what you need to do.
It is so easy to just zone out when you are talking and not pay attention to whom you are talking to but you cannot do that. You have to be listening for verbal cues and watching for visual ones the entire time you are talking.
People give off signals all the time. You know most of them, you just tend to not relate them to what you are saying when you see them but you need to start paying attention and to relate them to your talk. Their tone, words, and body language all need to be constantly monitored because those are what your radar is going to be focused on.