Your ability to identify and elicit the appropriate representation at the decision point in a strategy will directly determine your success at utilization. In fact, your success at being able to access appropriate decisions at the choice points in a strategy will accurately reflect how well you have paced the individual. Because you are dealing with internal processes it is evident that the more closely you pace the person's strategy the more likely you are to get the representation (and thus the outcome) desired at the decision point.
Successful pacing is irresistible. During our workshops and seminars when we call for a volunteer from the audience to demonstrate a motivation strategy, often several others in the group who happen to share the volunteer's motivation strategy will begin to perform the outcome behavior when we've finished pacing the subject. Or, observers in the audience find that they must consciously restrain themselves from carrying out the behavior because they have become so strongly motivated.
4.22 Rapport
The process of pacing, whether unconscious or deliberate, is undoubtedly at the root of many of the experiences that we label "rapport," "trust," "influence," "persuasion" and so forth. When you pace someone —by communicating from the context of their model of the world — you become synchronized with their own internal processes. It is, in one sense, an explicit means to "second guess" people or to "read their minds," because you know how they will respond to your communications. This kind of synchrony can serve to reduce greatly resistance between you and the people with whom you are communicating. The strongest form of synchrony is the continuous presentation of your communication in sequences which perfectly parallel the unconscious processes of the person you are communicating with — such communication approaches the much desired goal of irresistability.
The phenomena of rapport, trust and influence derive from our ability to observe, understand and use the strategies of those with whom we communicate. Anyone involved in working directly with others (whether parents, businessmen, educators, lawyers, therapists, scientists, government officials, etc.) will know intuitively that a large portion of your successful interactions depend on your ability to establish and maintain rapport. In fact, much of your preliminary encounters with associates each day probably centers around the initial establishment of a certain level of rapport. A knowledge of strategies and the process of pacing will greatly streamline this process for you.
In our other works we describe how the process of pacing can be extended to all aspects of communication. Matching your voice tonality and tempo, vocabulary, posture, gestures, breathing rate and other behaviors to those of the person with whom you are communicating can rapidly and effectively establish rapport with most people (although in particular cases successful pacing can require that you assume a role that is expected of you, one in which your behavior is very different from that of the person with whom you are interacting — doctor/nurse, teacher/student, parent/child, etc.) See Structure of Magic II, Patterns I and II and Changing With Families for further discussion and exercises involving these types of pacing.
Rapport, like many other aspects of neurolinguistic programming, is quite subtle but extremely powerful in its implications and effects. Rapport of some kind is essential to any type of communication. Once you believe rapport has been established through pacing, you should continually test it to make sure you are staying appropriately attuned. The best way to do that is by attempting to "lead" the person. Once you have paced the person you are communicating with and believe you have established a secure rapport, violate your pace and change your behavior — that is, attempt to lead the person you have been pacing into a different behavior. If sufficient rapport and trust have been built up you can make this transition smoothly and easily. If the person doesn't follow you, return to pacing him until you have established the necessary rapport. If the person follows your lead, it will be important that you return to pacing him periodically to keep up rapport. Your leading may be as subtle as a shift in breathing rate, eye gaze, tonality or body posture. Make certain that it is sufficiently overt that you are sure you can observe the change.
The phenomenon of leading has, of course, other important implications as well. We have discussed these at length in Patterns I and II and in The Structure of Magic II.
4.23 Flexibility in Pacing Strategies
As you begin to explore your own strategies and those of clients and acquaintances, you will discover, as you pace and utilize the various steps and decision points, that some steps will be flexible and easy to pace while others will require much greater attention to the details of the contents of the representation. Some decision criteria will require generalization of the content of the representation while others will involve complex discrimination between the content details.
Many of the difficulties people experience with their strategies result from inappropriate or ineffective tests, or decision criteria. Some people are overly flexible or general and unable to discriminate, which can lead to leaving out or failing to gather important information. Others overly discriminate, often with result of missing important information which becomes lost in a sea of irrelevant "facts" (see the Design Section of this book for a more detailed discussion).
Your ability to pace successfully, then, may involve more or less attention to content detail as you are pacing or utilizing a particular strategy. As a general rule you will find that the more you can control the details of the content of the representations that occur in the strategy, the more you can control the details of the content of the outcome of the strategy — provided that you have successfully paced the sequence of representational systems in the strategy. For instance, in the sample motivation strategy in EXERCISE B:
If you want the individual to stand on his head, you will want to make sure that a constructed visual image is made of the act at step Vc. If the image is of something else you won't get your desired outcome. If you want him to stand on his head in the bathtub, as opposed to on the lawn outside, you should also detail that in the constructed image. If you want him to wiggle his toes while he is standing on his head, you should detail that, and so forth.
If, on the other hand, you want the individual to be motivated to carry out a more general task, like studying effectively for a test or watching his diet, you will want to be less specific with the details of the image.
In fact, bear in mind that, in many cases, trying to control the content details will interfere with your pacing of the person. Often the details you attempt to provide may be incongruent with those already being generated by the person with whom you are communicating. As with all of the other procedures we present in this book, the rule of modeling elegance applies here. That is, concern yourself with the details of the content of the strategy only as much as is required to get the outcome that you are after.
Another important area of flexibility in the pacing or utilization of strategies is that of substituting internally generated representations, within a representational system, for those that are typically generated from external sources, and vice versa. Because internally and externally generated experiences within the same representational system share the same neural pathways, you can often substitute one for the other as you are pacing or utilizing a strategy. Sometimes this capacity for substitution is a natural property of the strategy, at other times it will be new for that strategy. The same substitution can also be made, of course, for constructed versus remembered experiences. There will be times, however, when this substitution cannot be made because of the structure of the strategy.