Trust through Rapport

Your ability to relate to yourself and others is very important in whatever you do. Rapport is all about creating the essence of respect, understanding and cooperation. All of this involves the use of your senses:

• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinesthic

In public speaking/presentations for you to influence, persuade and convince someone requires for you to connect with your audience using positive rapport thus establishing trust with them. Sometimes, this is not easy.

I still recall during my third year in university when I did a presentation to my classmates and the lecturers. In my eyes it was a disaster although I passed the session. What dawned on me was that we were never guided on how to present. In fact when I rewind back into my university years this essential skill was not present in our lecturers and in most of their session the entire class would simply fall asleep.

For you or I to influence, persuade and convince the most crucial thing is to establish within ourself the IKO of a Great Speaker. Thereafter you need to  relay to the audience:

• Who you are?
• What you do?
• What is the purpose of your talk?
• How it impacts (benefits) the audience? 

You need realise every action you take, word or sentence you say is dictated by the VAK representational system. The patterns of your language reflect whether you are connecting through visual, auditory, or kinesthetic means.

This pattern you use gives an insight on how you think and how your brain is sorting information. So, it necessary to know your audience has a pattern too and you need ensure you consciously utilise all of the VAK representational system to connect with the audience. Not all of them will relate to your pattern so you need to adapt.

One of the tools you could use to build positive rapport with the audience is through mirroring and matching. This includes:

• Verbal (words and sentences)
• Non-verbal (body language, gestures, emotions etc)
• Breathing
• Voice

Knowing this will allow you to connect and stay connected with your audience. Thus permitting you to create and develop a very deep positive rapport which leads to influencing, persuading and convincing the audience at an unconscious level.