Your arrow marks should match up with the positions on the eye- accessing cues (shown in the earlier Figure 6-1, in the ‘Acknowledging the Importance of the Eyes’ section), so that they move to top, centre, or
The telltale signs of a liar
How well do you think you can spot a liar? You may believe that you’re totally clued up and can see instinctively when someone’s fibbing, but numerous scientific studies over the last 30 years show that most people can only guess when someone is telling little white lies. Indeed, people can even be duped by the most outra- geous untruths.
Years of research by Paul Ekman, world- respected for his studies of emotions, reveal that the secret lies hidden in our micro-expres- sions. Some 42 different muscles move in a person’s face to create thousands of different micro-expressions. These expressions change all the time in all sorts of subtle ways. So subtle, in fact, that if you can discover how to focus and catch these superfast movements, you have all the information you need to spot the liars.
The trouble is that with so many possibilities, any human being has difficulty registering the
discrepancies that show a false emotion – a lie. Even the latest generation of machines can’t read these expressions right all the time. So who can accurately pick out the naughty tricksters? Ekman’s research rates the star performers as members of the US Secret Service, prison inmates, and a Tibetan Buddhist monk.
You would expect Secret Service agents to be highly trained to spot dangerous suspects, and prisoners live in an environment of people experienced in crime and deception, and they need to distinguish who to trust in order to sur- vive. Meanwhile, Ekman’s Buddhist subject had none of these life experiences, but had spent thousands of hours meditating, and appeared to have the sensitivity to read other people’s emo- tions very accurately from their fleeting facial expressions.
lower positions, and to the left or the right. When you’ve recorded your friend’s eye movements, see whether their eyes go to the position that you expect based on the eye-accessing cue pattern outlined in Table 6-2 (in the earlier section ‘Acknowledging the Importance of the Eyes’).
Figure 6-2:
The Eye Movements Game sheet.
1. What does the Queen of England look like on TV?
2. What do you see when you wake up in the morning?
3. Picture a pink elephant.
4. A circle fills a triangle; how many shapes are there?
5. Remember the sound of a car horn.
6. What are the first words you said today?
7. Imagine Donald Duck saying your name and address.
8. What do you say to yourself when you've made a silly mistake?
9. How hot do you like the water when you take a shower?
10. What is the sensation of crumbs of food in your bed?
Eye Movements Game
Making the VAK System Work for You
When you become aware of the VAK dimensions (which we describe in the earlier section ‘Filtering reality’), life becomes more interesting. Here are some ideas on how you can pull this technique out of your new toolkit and use it to your advantage:
✓ Influencing a business meeting, training session, or presentation.
Remember that when you speak to a room full of people they all have a preference for how they take in information and you don’t know what that is. Unfortunately, people don’t have a label on their foreheads to inform you about what they want to know and how they want to receive it – give me the picture, tell me the words, share your feelings about this subject. So, you need to ensure that you connect with each and every person in the room by presenting your ideas with a variety of media.
Vary your presenting style and aids to help the visuals see the informa- tion with pictures, the auditories to hear it loud and clear, and the kin- aesthetics to experience it with feeling.
✓ Making home projects fun for all. Recognise that each family member has a different way of thinking about a major project. Perhaps you want to extend the house, redecorate a room, or redesign the garden. Not everybody wants to spend hours talking it through, with discussions that stretch late into the night. Your partner may want to pore over the drawings, whereas your children are motivated by the chance to get stuck in and get their hands dirty with paint or earth.
✓ Developing your goals so that they’re more real for yourself. When you set goals in your personal or professional life, they come alive if you use all your senses effectively. Think of what the goals look, sound, and feel like when you’ve achieved them and at every step along the way. NLPers get proficient at imagining all the fine details of their future experiences – you may hear the phrase ‘putting up a movie screen’ to describe how people can create their own dream. Therefore, if you want to motivate someone (or yourself) to push out of their comfort zones, help them to explore what things may look like when the task is com- plete and the hard work done.
✓ Helping children to learn better. Thank goodness education has changed dramatically since we were at school, and teachers now recog- nise that pupils learn in different ways. As parents and/or teachers, you need to support children to understand how they learn at their best – and appreciate that the method may be different to the way you were taught or prefer to learn. Visual learners benefit from pictures, wall displays, and diagrams. Auditory learners need to hear what they’re learning – through discussions, lectures, and music. Kinaesthetic
learners benefit from practical sessions and role playing: they prefer a ‘hands-on’ approach. Teachers of groups of pupils need to provide a multi-sensory approach that caters for all styles. Children may be labelled as ‘slow’ when in fact the dominant teaching style doesn’t fit with their preferred way of learning. All these principles apply to adult learners, too.
✓ Increasing the impact of the written word. When you put pen to paper and words to screen – from a job description, to customer proposal, charity letter, product advertisement, or article for your local commu- nity newsletter – you need to broaden your vocabulary to cover all the representational systems. To appeal to every reader, select words that include all three dimensions.
✓ Connecting with clients and colleagues on the phone. Nowadays more and more business happens on the phone and through email rather than face-to-face. You may never get to meet some of your clients or colleagues. Keep a pad by the phone and make a note of the kind of lan- guage they use – can you hear visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic language?
As you listen, and then reply, phrase your sentences to match their preference.
Focus on one sense a day
While reading this chapter, you may have become more curious about yourself and those with whom you spend time – how you and they think and experience life. To enhance your skills further, you can explore your senses in different ways, for example, picking a sense theme for each day.
Perhaps you can make today an olfactory day, when you pay attention to every fragrance, smell, and aroma. Or a visual day, when you
switch off the music and focus on the sights, shapes, and pictures – really see what’s around you. A touch day can be fun, when you feel the surrounding textures or get in touch with your feelings at regular points in the day.
If you’re a creature of habit who takes the dog for a walk every morning or drives the same route every day, notice what changes for you when you pay attention to just one sense at a time.
Creating Rapport
In This Chapter
▶ Getting people to listen to you in challenging situations
▶ Handling difficult people
▶ Improving your ability to say ‘no’
▶ Increasing your options in how you respond
▶ Gaining insights into other people’s experience
Rapport sits at the heart of NLP as a central pillar, or essential ingredi- ent, which leads to successful communication between two individu- als or groups of people. Rapport is a mutually respectful way of being with others and a way of doing business at all times. You don’t need to like people to build rapport with them. Also, rapport isn’t a technique that you turn on and off at will, but something that should flow constantly between people.
Rapport is like money: you realise that you have a problem only when you don’t have enough of it. The first rule of communication is to establish rap- port before expecting anyone to listen to you. And this rule applies to every- body and in every situation, whether you’re a teacher, pupil, spouse, friend, waitress, taxi-driver, coach, doctor, therapist, or business executive.
Don’t kid yourself that you can pull rapport instantly out of the bag for a particular meeting, conversation or problem-solving session. True rapport is based on an instinctive sense of trust and integrity. This chapter helps you to spot situations when you do (and don’t) have rapport with another person.
We share some special NLP tools and ideas to enable you to build rapport and encourage you to do so with people where it may prove valuable for you.
Knowing Why Rapport Is Important
The word rapport derives from the French verb rapporter, translated as ‘to return or bring back’. The English dictionary definition is ‘a sympathetic relationship or understanding’: rapport is about making a two-way connec- tion. You know that you’ve made such a connection when you experience a genuine sense of trust and respect with another person, when you engage comfortably with someone no matter how different the two of you are, and when you know that you’re listening and being listened to.
Although you may want to spend your time with people who are just like you, the world is full of a huge variety of different types of people to meet, all with special skills, opinions, and backgrounds. Rapport is the key to success and influence in both your personal and professional life, because it’s about appreciating and working with differences. Rapport makes getting things done much easier and allows you to provide good customer service to others and enjoy being on the receiving end of it, too. Ultimately, rapport preserves your time, money, and energy. What a great stress-free way to live!
Recognising rapport when you see it
You can’t take a magic pill to acquire rapport instantly; it’s something you develop intuitively. So, in order for you to understand how you personally build rapport and what’s important to you in different relationships, carry out the following steps:
1. Think for a moment about someone with whom you have rapport.
What signals do you send out to that person and receive back that allow you to know that you’re on the same wavelength? How do you create and maintain your rapport?
2. Think for a moment about someone with whom you don’t have rap- port, but would like to.
What signals do you send out to that person and receive back that allow you to know that you’re not on the same wavelength? What gets in the way of creating and maintaining rapport with that person?