Use Your Body to Help You Reach People

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Use Your Body to Help You Reach People Posted: 16 Feb 2016 02:15 AM PST You want to educate your fellow non-Muslims about Islam. Excellent. Bravo. And sometimes you have a difficult time getting the message across. They seem to turn against you. They want to reject your message. You lose rapport. It can sometimes be upsetting. People who also need to gain rapport so that they can influence others (therapists) have discovered many intelligent ways to gain rapport and prevent losing it. One of those ways is by using your body. I want you to try an experiment today and tomorrow. You'll be talking with many people in the next two days. Try this: Every time you're talking to someone, notice how they're positioning their body, and make your body's position similar to theirs. You don't have to match it perfectly, although they probably wouldn't notice if you did. But if the person's head is tilted slightly, tilt yours slightly. If the person has all his weight on one leg and the other one slightly bent, do the same. Notice how he has positioned his arms and hands. Make yours somewhat similar. Notice his posture. Make yours similar. This is one of many ways to gain and keep rapport with someone. We'll be covering other ways in the next few weeks. But for now, just concentrate on your body, and see what happens. What will happen is that people will respond to you better. They will feel closer to you without knowing why. And oddly enough, you will feel closer to them. Over the next couple of days, concentrate on this. If you keep it up, it will begin to come naturally. At that point, you will have increased your ability to influence people. If we want to reach people, if we want them to listen to us, if we want our message to penetrate, gaining rapport is a skill worth learning. And using your body is a good place to start. When you can influence people using methods such as the one above or the one in our last article, it's like playing three dimensional chess with someone who is only playing two dimensional chess. They have no idea what you're doing and they have no idea why you are so persuasive. Read more about that here: Influencing People Who Live in a 2D World With 3D Techniques.