The more I study coaching, the more I listen to instructors and students in teleclasses, the more convinced I am that building rapport with your clients is the single most powerful factor in creating a truly positive, beneficial coaching relationship with your client.
The ability to mirror, match, and pace your client’s mental, emotional, physical and spiritual states creates enormous potential to enter into their world for a while and earn their trust.
It allows our client to experience being and feeling validated by someone who is like minded, who understands and appreciates them for who they are, with no criticisms or judgments.
This helps us as coaches to gain their participation and cooperation in then helping to support and lead them to take the actions they desire to move forwards to achieving their goals.
In a sense, building rapport creates a separate field of like-minded energy outside of both coach and client, a safe space where they can come together as one mind for a while and freely exchange their unique gifts, the unique views and meanings they place on the patterns of experiences that shape their lives, their knowledge and understandings.
To me, rapport seems to create the possibility of dropping our ego filters for a while so that we can merge into a higher awareness and understanding and share this with one another safely. Both parties are able to give and receive and come away with more.
