How to Effectively Build Trust and Safety with Rapport

Read Time: 4 Minutes

A big thanks to the People and well-being leaders in this community for their amazing focus on supporting their organizations that have brought this work to life.

It’s a collective effort to realize wellbeing in the workplace, promote mental and emotional health for performance, and end the culture of chronic stress and burnout. #Wellbeing is the new performance 

Join us on July 5, 2023 at 12PM PT / 3PM ET for our next Workplace Wellbeing, Performance and Recovery Support for People Leaders on LinkedIn.

Key Highlights:

• Use rapport to create safety and an effective channel for communication
• Applying matching and mirroring to establish rapport
• Maintain positive states in rapport to prevent empathy burnout

The theme for this week’s community support is building rapport and feeling mentally and emotionally safe at work.

Rapport is a natural human phenomenon where we have a sense of trust and connection with someone.  It’s foundational if we want to create a sense of emotional safety when we communicate with someone.

Have you ever been apart from a close friend and caught up in a short moment as if no time has ever passed at all?  

Or met a stranger and had a conversation as if you had known them for a long time?

How about being lost in a foreign country and suddenly connecting with someone that speaks the same language as you and you instantly feel at ease with them?

Those are examples of rapport and creating a channel for communication.

It happens naturally, and very often we don’t know how it happens or don’t make the effort to establish rapport before we communicate.

As a result, communication at its best can feel very transactional, at its worse untrustworthy and we close ourselves off.

If you work with peers or if you’re a manager with direct reports, this could also mean losing the sensitivity to recognize if someone is doing well or not. 

Personally, this could also be in friendly, family, or romantic relationships.

You get that ping-pong effect of: 

“How are you doing?”

“I’m fine.” closed off kind of question and response.

There is a sense of openness, trust, and safety in having a real connection.

When it comes to establishing rapport, there is a technique in NLP called: 

Matching and mirroring.

By modeling behavior, we found that when we are in rapport with someone, we naturally begin to resemble each other. 

That’s because we’re most comfortable with those most similar to us.  

You can match and mirror body language like crossing or not crossing arms/legs, speed and tone of voice, eye contact, and verbal language patterns.

As you do that for a few minutes, you’ll naturally begin to entrain with each other, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Now, how do you know when you’re in rapport with someone?

Sometimes you can get visual cues like the face softens and shoulders might drop. You might hear something like: “feels like we’ve known each other forever”, or feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.

However, none of those are definite. 

The only surefire way to know is when you can lead and pace. You make a shift, and the other person will follow.

As an example, has someone ever yawned and you yawned too, or vice versa?

That’s a sign of rapport. 

Often it’s unconscious.

When it comes to well-being and performance, also beware of empathy burnout.  It can be a common negative side-effect of rapport.

Natural communicators are great active listeners and exhibit empathy. Having someone “feel heard” is an example of rapport, a quality of excellence in modern-day leadership.

However, as leading and pacing suggest, we also lead and pace our emotions.

That’s why if we’re active listening we can feel drained afterwards.  Often the one talking and venting is leading and pacing you with their stress-centered emotions like frustration, anger, and anxiety 

Over time, you can become an emotional support and an unintentional therapeutic dumping ground to help others emotionally regulate.

People will confide in you. 

In these cases, it’s important for you to manage your own emotional state, and hold within yourself calm and centeredness as you listen.

It takes mindfulness and practice, and tools like the NLP anchor can also help you activate and hold those zen-like emotional states.

As a win-win relationship, the other party can still feel heard while pacing with your emotional state instead of you with theirs, which is highly resourceful for everyone.

Creating emotional and psychological safety on a day-to-day can be as simple as establishing and maintaining rapport.

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. If you're still looking for personal recovery and support for your well-being, I'd recommend starting with this affordable course that's helped hundreds of people and their organizations, here.

2. If you’re struggling with a crisis of burnout and looking for an effective way to recover quickly, consider a life-transforming Burnout Retreat for your next vacation, here.

3. Build out Workplace Burnout Responsiveness and Recovery in your organization by booking a strategy call with me, here.