CONNECTING WITH THE READER

“Seek first to understand,

then to be understood.”

(Steven Covey)

Steven Covey

It's always fascinating to see in how many different ways writers can create a dynamic relationship with someone whom they cannot see or hear and become able, as I said in my last post, to earn the right to invite him to a new journey. As John Lavalle - President of the Society for Neuro-Linguistic Programming - says: “you must earn the right to influence.”

We read a book, maybe written hundreds of years ago, and it seems that it is talking about us, plunging into our deepest fears and nurturing our fanciest dreams, we have the feeling that the author knows us even better than we know ourselves.

How can somebody be able to create such an effect? How can the writers give us the feeling that we know each other so well even if we never met?

One thing that great communicators know is that before you communicate your message to an audience or an individual make sure that you have demonstrated that you understand them.

When someone shows us that they understand our world we have a feeling of closeness with this

Mirroring

persons and it naturally creates what is called "rapport" and it is a feeling continually sought after by humans (there may be a few exceptions, :-). It is easily observed that when two or more people are in rapport the tend to assume a similar body posture or to use the same gestures and speak with a similar speed and with a close to their voice tone. Conversely, if you want to get into rapport with someone you can gently mirror their behavior and synchronize with their speed of expression. It's a normal phenomenon, called pacing or mirroring, which good communicators can easily put in practice with a wide variety of different people. 

People are more willing to listen and follow the advice of those who have first paced or mirrored them because in this way they have demonstrated that they have seen and heard them thus letting them enter into their own world for a while. So the basic advice is to propose your own reality or vision, to “guide” as we say technically, only after having created rapport and having earned the right to guide somebody into a different realm of perception. Bandler and Grinder, the founders of Neurolinguistic Programming, write in Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. : “Meeting a client at his model of the world, pacing that model and then leading it into new territory is one of Erickson's consistent strategies which make his work easier both for himself and for his client.”

The same thing happens with great writers. That is, before telling their own truth, their own model of the world to the readers they first seek to develop rapport with them. If you think about it for a moment the challenge is really huge, because writers don’t have the reader in front of them and can’t mirror behaviors, and moreover they don’t have at their disposal all the variety of body language and changes in voice tone to enrich their own page with features that would create rapport with the reader.

There are many ways of creating rapport with the readers and in this blog I would like to introduce mainly three of them: one is to tell or describe something that is already part of the experience of the readers, of their model of the world, the second is to pace the presumable experience of the reader while he is reading, and the third is to use a language so flexible and artfully vague, almost devoid of specific content, such as to ensure that different readers can complete and expand what they read with their own experience thus having the feeling that what they read was written specifically for them.

All three methods were also patterns used by Milton Erickson to bring its clients in a state of hypnotic suggestion which is very similar to the state that the writer often wants to create in the reader. This is a natural phenomenon necessary because the trance state allows us to experience the suspension of disbelief. In the words of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 

Coleridge in 1795.

“[...] to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” 

In this state of heightened awareness the reader is more open towards new realities, or to new perception angles of the same reality, that may be different from the ordinary world they experience in their mind and heart. The skill to learn is to become able to create it in a purposeful way instead of trusting it to happen randomly.

In the next few posts we enter into the heart of the matter and begin with the first method, the most simple and traditional.

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