Bio-Programming – Influence – Rapport
by pre., Friday, December 11th, 2009.Last week we pointed out that that effective persuasion is directed primarily at the emotions of the people that you may be trying to influence. The important thing is to make those people feel good about your desired course of action. The task isn’t to prove the logical necessity of your desired outcome, nor even it’s likelihood to produce a mutually beneficial outcome. The task is to build associative networks in their brains which will generate positive emotions when pondering your desired outcome, and perhaps negative ones when pondering the alternatives.
Luckily, assuming your intentions are honest, all that’s really needed to do this is to tell the truth, and more importantly to tell it in an emotionally evocative way.
Rapport
Before you can really effectively emotionally influence another human being, you need to connect with them on an emotional level, to build rapport. If you wish to lead someone towards your way of thinking, first you must go and meet them at their own position in order to take them through the steps that lead them to yours. A big bonus of doing that is that, in order to build rapport, you need to first understand their position, their emotional responses to the issue at hand. This is useful because you may not be right, and understanding someone else’s position could let them influence you, helping you to correct any errors in your own judgement.
This is key. If you wish to influence someone, you must be prepared to be influenced by them in return. Prepared to reach a compromise, to accept a solution which satisfies both of your desires, makes you both feel good. And why wouldn’t you? To wish otherwise isn’t to influence, it’s to control. To take away the freedom of another. Nobody will, or should, cooperate with someone who wishes to take away their freedom.
Your aim is to build a relationship of understanding, harmony, to put your mind where their mind is, to synch your thoughts and emotions. Not necessarily to agree, but certainly to understand each other’s point of view. Only when you have reached this common ground will you be able to lead from there towards the areas in which you both agree, the areas in which your influence will be helpful.
How do you build this mutual understanding?
Obviously you need to listen carefully, and to watch and allow yourself to respond to the emotional cues in their body language. To strive to understand their position, their way of seeing the world. To see, and indeed inhabit, their echo of the universe, their model of the world.
Mirroring
When two people start to build that rapport, that syncing of their emotional states, they mimic each other. Their body language, their gestures, even their blink and breathing rates, begin to match.
Some have suggested that simply consciously copying another will help to convince them that you have reached this rapport, but of course if it’s a deliberate ploy, a sham, then the rapport can’t be genuine. Being aware of how much you are mirroring your conversational partner’s body language will be a useful cue to how well you’re doing at achieving genuine rapport, but moving your body in the same pattern as your partner isn’t enough, you need to move your brain in synch with them too. To vicariously experience the emotions which led them move in that way, to feel along side them. Pulling the same faces as them is not enough, you need to feel the same emotions as them and allow that to subconsciously direct your face just as their emotions are subconsciously directing theirs.
Practice
Once again, the only way to really gain this skill is to practice it, often. Yes, pay attention to how your bodies are moving, the expression on your faces, the closeness of your movements, but see this not as the goal itself but only as an indicator of how well your emotional responses are matching. The goal, during your meeting of minds, is to allow your minds to meet, not just to pretend that you’re doing so.
You will attempt to practice this to some degree in your sleep, in lucid dreams, but this will only really build the associations which will remind you to do so in waking life. The minds of dream-people are automatically synced to yours, they are produced by your mind, to learn the skill in waking life it will need to be practised in waking life. You’ll learn to pay closer attention to these issues, which should help you improve.
Leading the way
Once you have established rapport with someone, truly synced your minds and are living inside a kind of mutual echo of the universe, responding emotionally in the same way that they are, you’ll need to start to copy the associative networks that lead you to believe your course of action is the right one over into their head.
Obviously to do this all you need to do is to speak the truth, to point out the emotional connections which are in your map that lead you to believe that your preferred course of action is the best one. When your minds are synchronised, when you are both living in a shared echo, a mutual emotional map of the universe, these emotional connections should be shared by whoever you’re trying to convince.
Your use of language will be important here, you’ll need to use emotionally evocative words, describe in detail the relevent issues which prompt emotional responses in you, and describe those emotions in grand, eloquent, lucid terms too.
The aim now is to activate and build neural connections between those issues and the emotions which you genuinely feel. To ensure that every time those issues come up in future, those you have influenced will feel the same way that you do about them. Repetition works. Vivid and visual imagery helps. Your conversation shouldn’t be explicitly trying to force anyone into believing the same as you, but associating the issues with the same emotional responses as you, yourself, have. If you are in rapport, their connections between those issues and your emotions will be reinforced. Repetition works. Don’t be afraid to re-state this connection, using different and ever more descriptive language. Try to actually feel those emotions yourself, so that the rapport you have built will encourage your partner to feel those same emotions themselves. Let the emotions show in your face, in your posture, in your language, feel them in your heart.
Don’t expect to win someone over in a single conversation. These emotional associations can take time to grow. They will grow when your partner dreams, after your conversation. They will grow over time. Repetition works. They will grow as you boost those associations over time, over multiple encounters. Persuasion can be a slow process. It takes time.
The aim of persuasion isn’t to get your way, completely, totally, 100% of the time. The aim is to grow closer together. If positions are entrenched, it’s to find an acceptable compromise. You should want to be influenced as much as you influence. To find a solution which makes everyone satisfied. Emotionally happy. The best solution isn’t always the one you first advocate, and you should certainly be prepared to seek out new solutions. You want to align you aims, your desires, more than you want to impose your will.
Argument
These are the methods which will actually win you favour, which will actually convince and persuade. However the format of your conversation, the protocol under which it proceeds, especially if your two positions start out very opposed, will likely be that of an argument. Not a shouting-match, not a fight, but a debate. Next week we’ll discuss how this protocol is structured, how it’s arranged, how it’s constructed. A good argument is beneficial to all parties in that debate.