Last year, during an NLP introduction training, I learned about representational systems and how people give signals at different levels, such as in body posture, eye movement, as well the use of predicates.

At that time, with my linguistic background, I was especially interested in predicates and I started studying everything there was to study about predicates. I searched for opinion articles on the internet, took several sentences from it, identified the used predicates and then tried to write the same sentences in other representational systems, I created Excel sheets full of rep. system-specific vocabulary and so on…

Even though it helped me understand a lot about predicates, I did not learn how to recognize them in actual conversations. The studying stopped for a while and nothing had changed.

“If what you do doesn’t work, try something else! “

Now, a year later, I have consciously experienced and practiced with different levels of rapport in the past weeks and I am confident enough to shift my focus to sensory acuity, still with the aim to improve my skills in building rapport.

My approach is the same as I did with learning to create rapport: first of all, collect and study available material (books, YouTube etc.) and second, when I think I have sufficient knowledge (conscious incompetence), I start practicing.

Like last year, I started with predicates. This time, rather than knowing learning all rep. system-specific vocabulary, my goal is to recognize at least the most obvious predicates in actual conversations. And this time, I have been more successful.

TV shows were the easiest to practice with, because you don’t have to think about any reply. I focused on one or a few people and just tried to recognize visual, auditory and kinestetic words. It didn’t take long before I started to recognize the predicates and was able to make guesses about preferred rep. systems, which lead to the next step: listen for predicates in actual conversations. And although my attention sometimes shifts completely to the contents of the conversation, I started to recognize the predicates and even was able in a few conversations to match the predicates. I noticed that speaking in the same representational system really creates rapport.

Based on these experiences, I can conclude that I am on the right track for improving my rapport-building skills. Therefore, next week my goal is to also recognize representational systems based on non-verbal signals.