Rapport Mistake Number 1
The very first thing that people do wrong is they try and be nice to people.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you go out there and start being nasty to people or stop being nice. It’s fine to be nice, but only to the extent that it doesn’t break down your ability to share or communicate thoughts, ideas and feelings with someone else.
The trouble with being nice is that sometimes people are nice at the expense of the real communication that needs to be happening, which actually then breaks down rapport. It’s stops helping and starts becoming a barrier.
Let’s give you an example of a school teacher. A school teacher who wants to be nice to the pupils may let them get away with anything they are doing, and thereby, bit by bit, she starts losing respect, stops being able to present ideas in a way that students will listen and, at the end of the day, it starts going horribly wrong.
The same thing can be true of a client. Let’s say we have a lawyer talk to their client. There are some things the client needs to hear upfront which are not necessarily pleasant; which will not necessarily be nice. But if the lawyer does not have the courage to turn around and say, “Hey, this is how it is and you’d better sort something out”, then he’s doing his client a disservice, because he stops communicating fully.
Now, everyone has actually experienced this when they talk to someone, and maybe you have friends yourself, that you’ve been kind of – I don’t know – casually acquainted with for many years. It’s almost like there’s a social veneer that you can’t get past.
Why? Because you’re too busy being polite, too busy trying to be nice, to actually get through to the real person; and to allow the other person to see the real you as well.
So, Rule Number 1 is… Be nice only to the extent that it’s not interfering with the process of communicating feelings and ideas with the other person.
Excerpt from: The Power of Conversational Hypnosis
