Mirror, Mirror

Article Word Count 1607, average reading time 6.4 minutes.

I’m going to tell you how to use a primitive part of your brain that we don’t hear much about, even though it runs much of our lives.

It’s called the “lizard brain”, or the limbic system, and basically it runs our emotions. This deep part of our brain tells us when a situation is safe or not, and it generates fear and anger when it thinks we need it.

Most importantly, it works before we even have time to think.

But I need to back up and tell you how I learned about this.

Some years ago I took a lot of training in a branch of cognitive psychology called NLP, or neuro linguistic programming.

It deals with how humans think and behave, and how we decide what’s real and important. And why we don’t all think the same way, even though we all have the same nervous system.

I learned something important in the first weekend of my NLP training — and then forgot it until a year later when a chance remark triggered that learning — and it had a very positive effect on my business.

These trainings are sort of like Dale Carnegie or other types of communication courses where the subject is you, and the skill you learn may actually change your outlook in some way.

I don't know if you've taken any training like this but I sure hadn't.

When I started this training I was a hard-driving middle-aged engineer and the head of a manufacturing firm, and I thought that NLP might make me a better manager and give me some skills to use with my Board of Directors.

But anyway, back to that first weekend experience.

What happens in this environment is you make friends very quickly with your classmates. I think it's because you're learning how people work inside, and you're doing these exercises, and you end up sharing things you didn't expect you would during the process.

And it’s fine. You learn that people have much more in common then you ever dreamed about, and there's always a lot of laughter in the room.

Four of us in my row, two men and two women, formed kind of a little group during that first weekend. We took our breaks together and did some of our exercises together – those that needed to be done with the person sitting right next to you.

On the afternoon of the third day I was late coming back from a break, and as I entered the room I saw dozens of pairs of people sitting back to back. The chairs in the room had been rearranged during the break, and it took me a minute to find where our group had been sitting.

I saw Deanna, one of our group, sitting in a chair with another chair backed up to it. Sam, another of our friends, was standing by the empty chair and smiling at me.

"Sit down," he said.

As I walked over to them Deanna looked at me.

"We have to talk," she said with a serious look.

I have to tell you, there is no middle-aged man who can hear these words from a woman without a little chill at the back of his neck.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Just sit down, Tom," Sam said. "We need to do an exercise in communication."

"Oh. Okay, just don't rattle me like that." I sat down and I could hear Deanna chuckle behind me, but I couldn't see her.

"Okay, everyone," the Trainer said. "Here's the exercise. You are seated in pairs back to back. Without being able to see the other person I want you to have a conversation, in two parts."

I couldn't imagine what we were going to learn. This seemed a little far out to me, but whatever. I had signed up for this training with the attitude that I was going to learn what there was to learn, and would hold my judgment until the course was over.

The Trainer went on with his instructions.

"First, you will talk to each other about how much you enjoy this course. It's important that you make each other feel they are interesting and smart – like you'd do if you were talking to a new colleague and you wanted to get a positive start to your relationship. The third person is an Observer, and will just watch. I'll tell you the purpose of the exercise when it's over."

So that's what we did. There was quite a noise from dozens of conversations going on at once in this large room, but by concentrating on Deanna's voice I could maintain a pleasant conversation with her easily.

"All right, okay, you can stop now." the Trainer said after a few minutes.

"Now for the second part of the exercise I want you to disagree with each other. No insults, please, but have a conversation where you definitely do not agree with each other."

"Oh, boy," I thought to myself, "This is where I get back at Deanna for that 'we have to talk' tease."

"So," I said, "I think that the Equal Rights Amendment should be for men, not women. Women already have too many privileges in this society."

That did it. We definitely had a conversation that was FULL of disagreement.

I was relieved when the Trainer called a halt. We turned our chairs back facing him to learn what the exercise was all about.

"Now," he said, "I want to hear from the Observers. What did you notice about the postures and body language of the teams talking, when they were in agreement and in disagreement?"

I was astonished. Dozens of Observers commented, and their observations were all the same. Those of us who had been doing the talking laughed when we heard the descriptions of our behavior.

What happened, evidently, was that when we were all agreeing and being friendly with each other our body postures and gestures matched our partners, and when we were in disagreement our postures mismatched — EVEN THOUGH WE COULDN'T SEE EACH OTHER!

It's called "mirroring,” and it's a universal human phenomenon. It seems to occur at an unconscious instinctive level.

There were too many reports for us to doubt the unconscious physical effect of being in and out of rapport with each other. We began to understand how powerful these unconscious feelings were.

We also began to appreciate how awareness of these behaviors could help us to make our interactions more positive.

I mean, if we mirrored each other when we were in rapport, it made sense that it could work the other way around.

If we BEGAN an interaction by mirroring the posture or body language or speech tones of another person, we might increase his or her tendency to be in rapport with us.

Turns out that’s true, and here’s a real life dollars-and-sense example.

Okay. Now fast-forward a year.

I'm in Boston for a technical conference on biotechnology. As I go through the hotel lobby a guy sitting in the lounge waves at me.

"My Engineering VP says we have to talk."

Amazing. Here's what happened in the next two or three seconds.

First I read his nametag, and realized that he was the president of a company that I had been trying to reach during the last year.

But when we talked on the phone it was a disaster. We just did not get along at all. I thought he was a jerk, not interested in hearing what I was trying to tell him, just trying to mooch a deal from me. And we did no business.

The second and more important thing that happened was this: when I heard him say, "we have to talk" I flashed back to the NLP training room with Deanna and that silly chair exercise.

And it hit me. I realized that sitting back to back is like talking on the phone. And I had forgotten the lesson about mirroring!

Instead of answering this guy from the attitude I had because of the bad impression he had given me, I matched his tone this time.

"Well, if we have to talk we have to," I said as I took the chair he offered and noticed he was drinking beer. "But if we're gonna talk you gotta buy me a beer."

He smiled and said, "Okay, and if we get along you can buy the next one."

All of a sudden it was like we'd gone to school together. We talked about the differences in where we lived – him in Florida and me in California. We talked about our kids and our gardens and the Boston conference and eventually, about how my equipment might fit into his company’s processing plant.

Before the (two or three – maybe four) beers had been finished we had the makings of a substantial deal.

"Funny," he said as we shook hands. "I had the impression you were some kind of techie geek that I couldn't really talk to, but you're okay."

And in my mind I REALLY thanked the NLP Trainer who had taught us about the phenomena of mirroring, back in that classroom so many months earlier.

Who knows?

There are probably lots of "jerks" and "geeks" that could be friends if they knew how easy it was to create rapport.

All it might take would be to mirror each other a bit, so they could get past their differences and discover – more importantly – what they had in common.

Seeya,

Tom Hoobyar