In general your going to allow a delay between your movement and theirs. A terrific delay time is 3 seconds. Think about it. Someone reaches up to their mouth and you just reach up to your mouth about 3 seconds later. Then they put their hand back behind their head a little bit, and you put your hand behind your head a little bit later.

I'm just going along with him as he moves. As he moves I move - only later. And I'm not following him exactly, but I'm following him every time. So there is consistency to what I'm doing.

Here's the key - You can allow up to a half a minute delay but then start to zero it out. Meaning that as that person moves you're going to move closer and closer to when they move until pretty soon - he makes a move and you move right along with him. He makes another move and you move right along with him. But it 's okay to allow a lengthy delay to begin with.

Now if you're not going to have a long interaction with a person, you don't want a lengthy delay. You don't have time. So part of this will be judged by the context that you're in. If you only have a short interaction with them, you better get on it! Don't allow much of a delay because you aren't going to be there long enough to be able to to gain the rapport that you want.

So delay but close the gap!

To practice this: find someone to practice on/with and set your intention to pace their movements - use mirroring and as the persuader allow a lag, the lag can be anywhere up to 30 seconds. You can start with a 3 second lag and then zero it out over the next minute. So if the person I am pacing is sitting in a certain way and rocking a bit, I would wait 3 seconds and then I would rock and then wait a little less and rock with them again, and then pretty soon as he rocks I'm going to rock.

I want you to be seeing with your peripheral vision. Take into account the whole person. See with your peripheral vision, because that's where the most amount of information will come from. Oh and do all this while enjoying your conversation with them!

A lag time - then zero out the lag; use your peripheral vision; and enjoy talking with them.

Your unconscious mind is to really get this! You can simultaneously take a fly on the wall position to watch it being done, to evaluate is it being done right and how can you do it better. You will see how to fine tune it for the next time you do it. The goal is to observe it in action in a way that it's being done so you can pick up how it's working and then be more effective with it yourself.

You can do this in 3 minute chunks and then get feedback from the meta fly on the wall position and then do it again incorporating the learning from the meta position.

Mirroring and Matching

Mirroring is: If I stand and look in a mirror, that person I'm looking at is going to be doing what I'm doing. Mirroring is simply - if I move my right hand, you're going to move your... left hand. If I scratch with my left arm, you scratch with your right arm.

Matching is: If I raise my left hand, you raise your left hand. You match the movements with your same hand. In general you want to mirror - not match. Mirroring will build deeper and stronger rapport.

Distinction between mirroring and matching

I make a distinction here because I hear it all the time from people saying, "I was mirroring and matching." They may have misunderstood their training and thus they are confused when they get results and when they don't get results. So my intention is to make sure there is no confusion here. so that if you have always referred to it this way, I want you to know what these things are so you can start to take control of your own behavior and you can get the results that you're really looking to get. You will find yourself, with enough time practicing and enough experience, that you become aware of yourself automatically mirroring another person. Obviously this can be a distraction for you, but what I suggest you do is become impressed! So in other words if you find yourself pacing someone like that - you go, "Cool!" I'm doing really well. That is a command and affirmation to your unconscious mind. You tell your unconscious "Yes! We're doing good on this one. I like this." And your unconscious goes "Woo Hoo! I'm doing a good job!" And it does even more for you. Physical mirroring is lower on the scale of techniques that work. it's necessary, you've got to understand it, you've got to be able to do it, but it's actually lower in effectiveness. A higher technique is the energy that's generated from your thoughts. You can set the physical behavior aside and just pace with words and energy. ?