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An Exercise In Rapport: Trying On Someone Else's Skin
You've heard the saying; you can't know someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes. This is a technique on how to gain rapport by jumping into another person, stepping in, sliding in, moving in, being in that person, figuratively walking a mile in their shoes. Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
You’ve heard the saying; you can’t know someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. This is a technique on how to gain rapport by jumping into another person, stepping in, sliding in, moving in, being in that person, figuratively walking a mile in their shoes. Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
We are going to learn to climb into the skin of our prospects, experience them, their affluence, their decision making mechanisms, their emotional states-so that we can better give them what they need and get what we need.
Our unconscious mind is a goal-seeking mechanism, and it’s a pattern recognition device that is incredibly brilliant and it can immediately pick up characteristics of others so that when we step into them, it already has formulated what we’re going to be experiencing.
How are we going to do this? The way I do it is I just look at you and jump in. I imagine in my mind that I am now you looking at me. It’s that simple. When I look at you, my unconscious, knowing that I’m going to step inside you, can very quickly build a pattern of who and what you are, such that when I step inside you, it already has constructed what’s going to happen. Once I’m inside you, I’m modeling you, or mirroring you so completely and so powerfully that the results can be startling both for you and for the person that this is being done with.
You might ask, is this real? I don’t know and frankly, I don’t care. It’s a mental construct that I create in my mind. I make up that I am in your body looking out at the world through your eyes.
This is one of the fastest ways of gaining rapport I have ever seen or used and specifically when we’re working with the affluent, if say, we are not as wealthy as we expect we will be yet, this is a really powerful simulation.
If we assume that there is a finite number of patterns that exist, and if we chunk up a little bit, go to a bigger level, we can say, for example, there are twelve astrological signs. There are seven major personality types, depending on the system that you’re working with. There are all sorts of different classification systems that will seek to limit the number of possible combinations.
This is a construct. We are constructing an image. Will it be accurate? Not exactly, but that’s okay, because if we’re in front of them, and we’re hearing them and we’re seeing them, and if they’re moving, we keep changing our construct until it’s identical to what they are, so for every minute, every second that goes by, ours gets better, and more complete and more powerful, and we’re locking right in to that person.
Stepping inside your client, you’ll want to leave yourself behind. Look through their eyes. Once you are inside, you have moved along the process of rapport so completely that they will identify with all of your behaviors because you are mirroring them.
Try making this more tangible by “feeling” what their clothes feel like or if the person is of the opposite gender, feel what that feels like and maybe take on a few of those characteristics.
What are their physical characteristics? How does it feel to have those characteristics? Notice when you step into the other person, where you feel the connection to them. Do you feel the connection in your stomach, in your feet, in your hands, in your chest, in your head? Where do you feel the connection? By asking yourself these questions you’ll deepen the rapport.
Before trying this, here’s something to keep in mind: if the person’s sick, if they have something considerably wrong with them, if you know that they’re not a particularly good person or they are someone you just don’t like, you might not choose to use this level of rapport, because you may not be able to shake it all the way off.
This is a powerful exercise and even if you’re not tremendously in touch with “energy”, you can still use this to your advantage in persuasion.