Quick Coaching Tools – Rapport

Rapport is about matching and synchronising with your coachee to achieve the greatest level of understanding and success.

Rapport

Rapport is one of my Quick Coaching Tools. They are exactly what the title suggests. Short snippets of coaching tips, tools and ideas for you to use on a just-in-time basis. Use them as an update and to refresh your coaching practice and professionalism. You could call it coaching in a hurry!

What & Why

A Coaches ability to build rapport with their Coachee is vital. This ability comes from a genuine desire to help people, which, like honest intention, is integral to coaching. Building rapport should be easy in coaching because the Coaches only focus is the Coachee. When a Coach decides to support someone in this way it naturally accelerates the rapport-building process.

How

Here are practical things you can do to build rapport:

  • Focus on being genuinely interested in the Coachee. Be curious and discover what interests you about them. Discover their beliefs, opinions and experiences.
  • Suspend your own judgment – focus on what they are saying rather than your interpretation of it.
  • Be inquisitive – not just the purposeful questions you use in the coaching process, but questions about the Coachee and how they feel.
  • Suppress your internal conversation. If you become distracted, focus your attention on what the Coachee is doing, thinking or feeling.
  • Practice matching their behaviour. This is a very powerful form of rapport building.

Further Reading: ‘Techniques – Building Trust and Rapport’ in the Coaches Toolkit (for Blog subscribers)

Author: Trevor Sherman

Trevor Sherman: Author, Blogger and Coach. What do I do? I develop leadership training material and personal learning modules. I am the owner and operator of this Blog. I coach senior executives for their development and role transition. I am based in Northamptonshire UK and operate globally - in person and through technology.

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