Matching The Behavior

Matching at the behaviour level means matching another person's movements while maintaining your own identity and integrity.

There are three important elements to matching on the behavioral level: Body language, voice tone and language.

1) Body Language. You can gain rapport by matching:

• Breathing pattern


• Posture


• Gestures


• Eye contact

2) Voice tone. You can match:

• Speed of speech


• Volume of speech


• Rhythm of speech


• Characteristic sounds (e.g. coughs, sighs and hesitations)

3) Language. You can match:

• Key words and phrases chat designate values (for example when you summarize to check for agreement)


• Words that show how a person is thinking. These are called predicates. They show chat a person may be visualizing, hearing mental sounds or voices, or paying attention to feelings.

Non-verbal matching is far more powerful than verbal agreement.

Adopt a posture that is similar but not exactly the same. Give the same amount of eye contact as the other person, though, because this is what they feel comfortable with. Lots of eye contact is not necessarily a good thing!