Rapport Building is an essential element in professional relationship creation. Rapport is a dance of mutual responsiveness. It is the ability to relate to others in a way that creates a climate of trust and understanding. The purpose of rapport is to establish a feeling of comfort and commonality between people. Rapport provides the capability to see each other’s point of view, to be on the same wavelength, and be able to appreciate other people’s feelings and perspectives. Rapport develops from responding to someone utilizing the power of words (7%), voice tone (38%) and physiology (55%). This means, 93% is non-verbal. Purposeful rapport building demonstrates the high art of communication.
The reason is, communication distinguishes between visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and audio-digital preferences. These preferences express themselves in the way a person is speaking, e.g., While “I can see what you mean” rather clearly indicates a person with a visual preference, a person saying “I can hear what you say” reveals more of an auditory preference. Knowing this preference in a conversation helps a lot to build rapport.
Watching eye patterns during a conversation is also meaningful because eye patterns reveal mental processes non-verbally. For example, after some calibration, one can identify if the other person is recalling information or rather constructing a piece of information when answering a question.
