Tag Archives: rapport

Rich conversations

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It’s amazing how good conversations with people you love and care about can help you through a day. It reinforces that we are social beings and that we require connections to sustain us.

I am someone who appreciates my alone time. I like solitude, and I’m much more of an introvert than people might think I am. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I value and appreciate time with family and friends. Liking solitude isn’t contradictory to enjoying rich conversations. Being an introvert doesn’t mean that I don’t want to build strong connections to others, I’d just rather not do so in larger social situations. 

I have a friend who can go into any social situation, make connections with people he just met, and have a rich conversation that go well beyond discussing the weather, occupations, and general family updates. He can find common ground and start to instantly develop rapport and develop a relationship with people he barely knows in minutes. That’s not me. In a large setting, I’d rather find one person I’m comfortable with, maybe two people, and have a more intimate conversation rather than sharing things in a group. Both approaches are valid, they are just different. Both are about the same thing, which is making and maintaining connections to others.

At one point I used to have these kind of rich conversations on Twitter. I found like-minded people who I’d connect with and then we’d slide into direct messages and get to know each other. I’d go to conferences and connect to people I had never met face-to-face, and I’d feel like I already knew them. I no longer do that with social media. Now I use social media to connect to people in my life already, as a means to add one more layer of connection. My daughters get sent different things than my wife, which is different from what I share with my best friend, which is different from what I share with my uncle, and again different from things I share with my mom and sisters. In each case adding another avenue to build connections I already have. 

Then there are text messages, phone calls, FaceTime, and even Zoom. In each case I’m building up a connection to keep the conversation going with people I care about. I’m looking to develop richer connections, richer conversations… essential to maintaining my wellbeing and my bonds that sustain me when I can’t always see people in person.  

 

 

Resonance

Strum a guitar near another guitar and the second guitar’s strings start to vibrate.

Jim Rohn says that ‘you are the average of the five friends you hang around with’. This resonates with me. This resonates like the guitar.

Even these words combine to resonate as you read them, some with understanding, some with agreement, some with doubt, some with disagreement… Once read, the words resonate.

What do you do when you come across someone that doesn’t resonate? Do you pluck your own strings harder, louder, so that you drown out the sound the other is creating? Do you try to hear what they resonate with? Do you try to find a way to mutually resonate? Do you leave them be?

We can strive to resonate, or we can choose dissonance. Consensus or conflict. We can create music or noise.

I know that I want to positively resonate with others, but I also find myself seeking dissonance and distance, from those that do not resonate with me. Dissonance when others resonate with hate, and harm others. Distance to showboating, antagonists, and stupidity.

Resonance, dissonance, and distance. There is a time and place for all three… but what I seek, what fills my heart is finding ways to resonate with family, friends, and those that I can assist and support. Seeking resonance fills me with harmony and gratitude, and I’m grateful for all the wonderful people that want to resonate with me.

Rhythm and Rapport

I felt it. I mean I really felt it. A rhythmic wave resonated throughout my body. Before this moment I had enjoyed music but I never had it consume me so completely. And I was surrounded by others who felt the same way.

It was the early summer of 1992, and I was 24 years old. My uncle had introduced me to an NLP teacher, paying for me to take his course, and I loved it. NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is about harnessing communication patterns, that we all use, in more effective and powerful ways. The course I was in was very interesting because it seemed as if half the people were there to learn to be more effective and the other half seemed to be there for therapy.

The 9-day course started on a Saturday and ran daily from 8am to 4pm through the week and into the second weekend. It was the Friday morning and we were told we were in for a treat. We were taken to a small room filled with drums, shakers, tambourines, cow bells and assorted traditional music makers. The lesson was on rapport and we were going to use music to demonstrate it.

I think there were about 18 of us in this small room and we were broken up into groups of 2, 3, and 4, depending on the number of similar instruments. I don’t remember if we ended up with 5 or 6 groups. Next, each group was given a different beat to play. For instance, the cow bell players got tap-tap, tap-tap, pause, tap-tap, while a few drummers got a beat of 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2. That second example would have been the most complicated of the options with most others being quite simple.

We got counted down and everyone started playing their own beat in their groupings. As someone that doesn’t have musical training, it was good to have other people playing the same beat as me so that I could follow along and not be too distracted by the other groups. That said it was a ruckus in this small room. To put it kindly, we were making noise, horrible and loud clattering, pounding, clanging, dinging noise. It was awful.

I understood that we were supposed to build rapport and the music was somehow supposed to come together but it didn’t. There was just noise. We switched instruments and tried again. Noise. We switched beats. Noise. We switched instruments again, and I was given cow bells. More noise.

We were tired, and we were overwhelmed with the echo of instruments clamouring out of synch, and then something interesting happened. A professional dance instructor that was taking the course had a big gourd shaker in his hand, he stepped forward into the middle of our circle and connected with an older man on drums. This older gentleman that the dancer connected with was a retired music teacher. They sped up the beat slightly and I could hear their individual beats come together as if they were one pattern. The dancer with the gourd shaker was dancing to their beat and my beat fell into synch with his feet.

That was the moment it happened for me, and it was obvious that it was happening for everyone else in the room… our noise became music. But this was so much more than music, it was a wave of sound that reverberated through my body. I watched the dancer and realized that his gourd and feet were the backbone of the beat. We were all following his lead. Then I looked at the retired musician’s drum and I realized that it was him driving the beat. Then I looked at my cow bells and realized it was me that was leading the beat. Then I really understood what was happening. We were in perfect unison, we were one.

None of us were in the lead. All of us were in the lead. This was full rapport. We were all connected, all one beat, all one musical experience. We built up the sound to a full crescendo, it was all-consuming, bordering on ecstasy. There was a countdown, 3-2-1, and we all stopped playing. The instant silence was a final exclamation on an overwhelmingly beautiful experience. For the first time in my life I had felt, truly and to my core felt, the sound of music.