EP #90 The Dance of Communication: A deep dive into Matching, Pacing, and Leading

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It seems you can lead the horse to water and it will drink!  You need patience! Patience is what is necessary to influence and persuade: taking people's maps into new territories.

Matching, pacing, and leading are foundational concepts in NLP, crucial for establishing rapport, understanding another person’s model of the world, and guiding them towards desired outcomes. It’s an important part of many NLP methods and processes, and can often be the key skill to making those processes effective. It’s also a very effective stand-alone tool for enhancing our own communication ability. BUT most people think of the mechanics of MPL, rather than MPL as an art.

MPL is a critical and basic skill that communication is based on. No one is going anywhere if you aren't good at matching and pacing.

Key Points:

·       Matching, Pacing, and Leading work together

·       If you lead too quickly or too strongly, you can lose rapport and will need to reestablish it through matching and pacing.

·       You can match, pace, and lead someone in a brief interaction or over a series of longer interactions.

·       You can apply these concepts with your friends and family, work relationships, sales interactions, consulting work, presentations, coaching, therapy, etc.

·       Doing this successfully can reduce resistance to new ideas and perspectives, increase choice, and help us and others get what we want more easily.

The podcast also describes an exercise to help strengthen your skills. 

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