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When you spend time thinking about what it takes to reach a deal with the other side of the table no matter what negotiation styles or negotiating techniques are being used, something becomes clear very quickly. If the other side is not comfortable dealing with you, if they don’t trust what you tell them, then it’s going to take a much longer time to reach a deal with them. What this all boils down to for you is that you are going to have to find some way to reach rapport with the other side of the table during your next negotiation.

What Is Rapport?

If you are going to want to reach a level of rapport with the other side of the table, then you are first going to need to know just exactly what “rapport” is. I think that we’ve all heard this term before, but that does not mean that we know what it means.

I like to define rapport as being something that is above and beyond simple trust. The other side of the table has to trust you before you can start to try to develop a sense of rapport with them. Rapport really comes down to both sides of the table having a level of mutual respect for each other.

In fact, it goes just a bit beyond this. You both have to actually like each other. Yes, you are engaged in a business negotiation; however, you are going to have to like the other side enough to be willing to make changes to the deal that is being discussed for your friend on the other side as the negotiations move along.

How Can You Reach Rapport With The Other Side?

Knowing what rapport is can be an important first step. However, now that you know what it is, you’re going to have to figure out how you can establish it with the other side of the table. To make this happen you are going to have to engage in some serious “out of the box” style thinking.

Building a foundation of respect and friendship with the other side of the table is going to require you to spend time with them outside of the negotiations. You are going to have to identify something that they like to do and then you are going to have to do it with them.

By doing this, you’ll have the opportunity to engage in the small talk that friends have with each other. You’ll both share small details of your lives and what you want to achieve. No, this probably won’t have anything to do with the negotiations that you are going to be engaged in, but it will help both of you to better understand where you are coming from.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

As negotiators, our goal is to get the best deal as quickly as possible from our next principled negotiation. In order to make this happen, we need to build a sense of rapport with the other side so that we can more easily work with them and we can both quickly make progress towards a deal that we can live with.

Rapport is something that is built on a foundation of trust that we already have with the other side. Having rapport with the other side means that we actually like them, they are our friends. To make this happen we need to invest time in building this type of relationship outside of the negotiations.

I suspect that like most negotiators, there are not enough hours in the day for you to get everything that you have to get done, done. Working on developing rapport with the other side might just seem like too much work. However, it can pay off with such great benefits that the extra time and effort that it requires is well worth the effort. Give it a try and you just might be surprised.

Regardless, if your goal is to make a sale or educate. You don’t want to fall prey to the mistakes that many presenters make — loading us down with piles and piles of information and communication hodgepodge. Excellent presentations are designed to anchor in the key points that are relevant for influencing the listeners to take some kind of action.

When you make a presentation to a committee, corporate board of directors or presenting an all day seminar, your aim is to accomplish two very important goals. First, it is crucial that your audience walk away with a “Top of the Mind” memorable experience. Second, you want to influence your audience to take an immediate or future action. Every, presentation should have an outcome and action steps for your audience to take.

For us to accomplish those two goals we need to help the audience focus-in on our presentation so that we touch and communicate with the head and heart of our audience. Effectively, we want to mesmerize, hold their attention and filter out any outside distractions that would compete with our presentation and desired outcome.

We are visual beings by nature. Our eyes, being the most powerful information conduit to the brain, are always in motion feeding us images and disrupting our thought processes. People have limited attention spans and information processing capabilities. Therefore, we as presenters need to simplify the communications to hold attention for influencing the thinking of our audience.

I use a very powerful communication technique that anyone can apply with their very next presentation to accomplish extraordinary results. Your presentation and visuals will communicate faster, clearer, better and be more congruent — eliminating the communication hodgepodge that so many presenters use.

First, reduce all you visuals to pictures and either eliminate words and numbers altogether or reduce them to three or less per visual. Visuals should be used as anchors to support your key points that you want your audience to remember.

Second, your visuals must be associated in some ridiculous and/or illogical way for transferring key points and word phases for your audience to remember and retain your information.

A simple example is: You are giving a financial report showing an increase in earnings for your division. You could use a rising balloon lifting a building block, showing the percentage of increase stenciled in the block, giving your audience and image of growth and profits. Visuals that are your typical bar charts, graphs, and lines of words are boring and have a lesser impact connecting with your audience. Whereas, ridiculous and/or illogical visuals add retention, entertainment, and can illustrate with greater impact the benefits, not just facts and figures of your presentation.

Third, support your key points and visuals with a story.

Here’s how it works:

In delivering a presentation, recently to a group of sales people, one of my key points was that we have to understand our customers buying strategies and buying incentives for us to influence them to make a purchase from us. The visual that I used (now visualize this in your mind) was a man peering over a chessboard with his chin snuggled on his tightly clutched hands with a very pensive look in his eyes. The picture was stretched and elongated to exaggerate the image to influence the inner thinking process that our customers go though in their decision-making.

I then illustrated the point with a story of how one of my clients went about uncovering his clients’ strategies, buying incentives and how this same presentation process helped him get the sales and acquire a major key account for his company. Most importantly during the story I explained how my client was able to fine out what would create a win situation for his client. That gave way, for transitioning, to the next key point and slide in the presentation.

The visual was dynamic in that it supported the key points and anchored the story in the mind of the audience. The story used was linked back to the visual and was congruent with the key points.

This presentation process reinforces your points and makes them easy to understand. You can take any subject from a ten-minute annual report presentation to an all-day training session and use this approach of structuring your presentations. When you substitute lines of words, boring bar charts and graphs, with key points, supportive stories anchored with ridiculous visuals, you make it easy for your audience to assimilate, focus, remember and become engage and mesmerized with your material.

Are you stuck in a rut, or are you stuck in the past?

Give that question some serious thought for a few moments.

Living in the past will keep you feeling powerless and stuck in a rut. The past is the past for a very good reason, you have to go “past” it to get to your future. If you continue to live in the past and beat yourself up over what “might” have been, then you my friend are doing yourself a huge injustice.

Living in the past only helps to keep you feeling powerless and at the mercy of the gods.

You must learn by past mistakes, see what you did wrong and what you can do better next time and use that information to direct your future to what you want it to be.

You can take no action in the past, the events of the past have happened and they cannot be changed.

Living in the past leaves you powerless.

Living in the present and planning for the future will ramp up your personal power.

Taking action and making decisions can be scary at times, but what is your other alternative?

You have to move with the times, time and tide waits for no man. If you want to get yourself unstuck and start designing your future then you need to leave the past where it is, live in the present, and make plans for the future. There is simply no other way to get yourself unstuck.

Action and decision making are the tools that will enable you to get yourself unstuck.

You don’t even have to be sure to be heading in the right direction, if you find yourself off your chosen course then you simply readjust and get yourself back on track.

You must move forward to get yourself out of your rut.

You must set yourself some goals.

You must have a destination mapped out and a plan of how you are going to get there.

You simply break the task down into bite size, manageable chunks and deal with one chunk at a time.

Once you have dealt with the first manageable chunk, you simply move onto the second chunk.

Getting out of your rut and into your groove is not as difficult as most people would have you believe.

Believe in yourself and you will see that blaming your past won’t help you in the present.