What can one pace? Most of us seek to establish commonality via content. We will talk to someone and make a connection through the people we know, the schools we have attended, the books we have read, the places we have lived, the experiences we’ve had, etc. And that is absolutely fine. Content-based rapport is useful in social settings where we have the luxury of time to explore these matters.

However, there are many other aspects of the human “be-ing” (again misspelling deliberate) that we can pace. I offer you a list of possible aspects below, which I hope to explore in more detail in future entries.

1. Non-Verbal Behaviours

This denotes our physiology and tonality. I have explored pacing physiology in June 2012 and the impact of tonality on communication in August 2013.

2. Representational Systems

NLP posits that we take in information through five channels and process it via six modalities. These are referred to as representational systems. The representational systems can be paced.

3. Values and Beliefs

Put simply, values are what we hold as important to us. We may have different sets of values for different contexts in our lives, or they may be fairly homogenous. For each of these values, there will be beliefs related to those values. These can be paced.

4. Meta-Programs

These are sometimes referred to as personality preferences and I have done an initial exploration of how these personality preferences interact to produce conflict in October 2017. Meta-Programs are the content-free filters through which we view the world. A common example used is “whether the glass is half full or half empty”. Both answers are correct. They are just different when seen through different filters. Therefore, pacing how someone sees the world is yet another way to build rapport.

5. Metaphors

Humans are meaning-making and there is some suggestion that the human brain works associatively and metaphorically. These metaphors are far more than figures of speech, they represent how interpret the world and affect the narrative through which we interact with it. Deep rapport can be built one’s metaphorical world was paced.

6. Linguistic Patterns

Finally, the linguistic patterns we have can be paced. This may be in the form of fillers that we use or certain turns of phrases or a particular linguistic structure.

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