Building Trust in Tough Times
I’ve been asked a number of times, “Silvia, how do I maintain trust with someone when we are in a difficult conversation about _________” fill in the blank with: performance, layoffs, budget, etc.
First, you need to ask yourself are you building trust or as we coaches call it, rapport, with this individual from the start? How do you know if you are in rapport? Think of a time when you have been in great rapport with someone. What made that time so easy?
Chances are you were doing the following:
- Physically matching and mirroring their posture and movements
- Matching the tone and tempo of their speech patterns
- Using the same representational systems in dialogue (e.g visual, auditory or kinesthetic)
How does this translate to conversation in tough times? To start, you should make every effort to do all 3 things bulleted above. This doesn’t imply you should be mimicking them, if you are you may just confound the situation. The most important thing is to match the key words they are using, especially those that are of their representational system.
For example, if someone tells me:
“I’m feeling really bad about the layoffs”
My response might be:
“What specifically are you feeling bad about?”or “I’m feeling bad as well.”
The key is to match their experience verbally and non verbally. The more you do this, the more you will gain and keep trust with the individual. Know that it might be awkward at first and therefore I suggest you practice these techniques with someone you trust. The more you practice, the more natural it will be for you and for the recipient.
Tags: layoffs, nlp, performance, rapport, tough times, trust
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