How are you with building rapport? 

Rapport meaning – a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other’s feelings or ideas and communicate well.

How are you promoting effective relationship building within your business or personal relationships? 

Today, we will bring key aspects of building rapport to the forefront to help you understand these skills.

Everything done in any business involves people. 

People skills are a non-negotiable skill-set you need if you expect any level of success in any field.

Many people may have good social skills naturally, while others are targeting to improve their skills. 

So what are the key characteristics of people who build rapport well? 

Let’s dig in…

People Skills

One of the initial building blocks to obtain is people skills.

Easier said than done – this is a journey. People skills, effectively, allows you to grow a relationship no matter the purpose of the relationship. 

In any successful relationship, trust is a huge factor.

People establish how they will deal with you whether they can establish trust or not. 

Trust is earned and can take time. Dependent on your ability to understand people and people’s character traits, this can help you acknowledge effective people skills.

When applied well, these skills may resonate with the person you are communicating with. 

Knowing a person’s communication style can help you flex your own communication style when your goal is to create a better connection.

Communicating well with someone, shows you care. Caring is an aspect of showing your intent for the relationship. 

Although caring is an aspect of intent, there still remains an importance of you showing what your intent is for a person overall.

Having a good conversation is a building block to success building, but is only entry level. Let’s stay on track. We will discuss success building later…

People will determine pretty quickly if your intent is positive or negative. 

In order to learn character traits and communication styles, you must understand yourself first. 

What better way to learn how and why people prefer a communication style than to learn your own. 

– A great lesson in obtaining this can either be learned in this book – Versatile Selling by Wilson Learning Library or by this exercise by the Effectiveness Institute Behavior Style SELF Report.  I recommend anyone practice this who wants to improve their ability to build rapport with people.

Positivity

In all interactions people have learned to survive with their own reasoning and practices that have shown them favor in various environments.

This survival tactic, does not mean it is healthy or that it is best practice. It just means, this is how a person has learned to adapt their words and actions to their environment. 

Survival tactics are carried wherever we go, no matter the atmosphere. Many carry these survival skills, and alter them slightly in each atmosphere, in order to cope with the environment necessary.

Some find high levels of success naturally and others may struggle (or not know they are struggling).

However, what people naturally gravitate towards is positivity. 

1. Extending an expression of positive reflection to someone is an example. 
2. Acknowledging the positive traits of someone prior to acknowledging their negative traits is another example. 

Unfortunately, negative aspects of everyday life and personal experiences are highly discussed by the masses because usually negative things stay ‘top of mind’. 

The focus on these easy to discuss negatives, are individual “grains” of toxicity. Because these single doses are small, people disregard it’s power of negativity over them.

Before you know it, there are tens, hundreds, and thousands of toxic “grains” of negativity around you that you are consuming if you are not careful. 

This is why the introduction of something genuinely positive can be a bit of relief for many. The ability to avoid all the common surroundings of negativity and acknowledge positive, usually is an attractive skill. 

In any relationship, people will appreciate the great things you see in them or that you introduce them to. Many times people are not aware of their positive traits.

Again, because people always are so open to tell others about their negative traits. A person that can deliver a message of positive reflection is a much stronger person than those that deliver the opposite.

Delivering a positive message takes more thought, care, approach, intent and people skills. People that can deliver a positive message have achieved growth were many haven’t.

A person who leads with positive will always attract more positive engagement. Use this skill in your interactions and you will see an improvement in your ability to build effective relationships. 

– A good source for learning these secret skills is captured well here in this book or this movie The Secret.

Engagement

A huge proponent of an effective relationship is your ability to bring value.

How you present value, and why it would make sense for the relationship, is an expectation from anyone you interact with. 

All relationships have a purpose and the core of that relationship involves displaying how you can bring value to each other.

Your professionalism and business acumen is displayed here.

High level engagement happens when goals are aligned and action plans are set. 

– Self awareness is key for you to understand, in order to deliver high value, while connecting effectively with someone. 

Some call it and ability to ‘read the room’ or to ‘read people’.

Reading the room is a metaphoric representation of you understanding what people desire, based upon verbal and non-verbal communication.

In seeing this, you in-turn, deliver what the room is seeking. 

In order to read people well, you must know yourself well enough so that you can alter your delivery in an instant.

A planned delivery can instantly be altered and cause reason for impromptu change. However, you can only deliver this impromptu skill if capable. 

Speaking in front of people will start your education on this topic. Acknowledging the ability to speak to groups of people, is the next step after being able to communicate well on an individual level. 

In the group setting, you will speak to many people, while also carrying the same objective of high level engagement. Focus first on person-to-person engagement before you begin group level engagement. 

If you do not know yourself well enough, you will not deliver. Building rapport involves you understanding yourself and others.

This knowledge along with bringing your own expertise, enables you to create high level engagement. This engagement allows rapport to grow.

Being Genuine

Have you ever been serviced by someone who could care less if your interaction with them meant anything? 

They’re role was to provide a service to you, but they may have been careless to how that product or service served you in the moment. I’m sure you have. 

Now, have you been serviced by someone that was great at what they did and was highly passionate about ensuring you were happy with a product or service?

I mean they were really good!? Okay…some have and some haven’t. 

If you have, you were able to notice the persons genuine desire to ensure your experience was memorable whether they could help you or not.

They also were very knowledgeable and helpful at the same time. Case and point…

Here lies the difference between someone who is great at what they do (with great people skills) and someone who is not. 

– The advanced person is extending a positive-highly engaged interaction with you and they truly care about your experience. 

This ability that this person has, was not something they were born with. It is something they learned to perform by knowing themselves well enough to confidently deliver high level service, with high level engagement, to support making the customer happy. 

Not because they were forced to do it from their boss, but because they truly care about your happiness and the interaction. 

Being genuine is not an act, and people know which category you fall under. 

Now many of you may not feel the ability to perform this way because you may not love what you do.

Even if this is the case, if you love people as well as providing a great experience, your focus will be to deliver a positive experience.

Your ability to show genuine, caring characteristics will support you building rapport naturally.

Conclusion

The focus of today’s lesson is highly dependent on your ability to understand people and to understand yourself. 

Your journey will begin as you acknowledge and extend efforts in self-improvement or personal development.

These skills are necessary on the individual level and can truly resonate with many people around you. 

People will be attracted to your ability to prove your skill-set while also caring about others. These are skill-sets of future or current leaders.

I hope today was enlightening in creating a level of progress for you.

Thanks for joining us today faithful readers – future leaders. 

Love ya and keep striving for growth! 

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Please comment your experience in personal development and building rapport.