Matching a Student’...

This Month’s Behaviour Management Strategy Dec 09

This is the second of three really powerful ways of building rapport with students.  Last month I talked about hot buttons and how repeating back exactly what people say can build rapport very quickly. 

This month’s strategy is about how matching a student’s breathing can have massive impact, for example it can calm students on the autistic spectrum who are distressed. 

Some time ago Bamboozle worked with Jacob*, a lad with autism who was very distressed when he arrived at the beginning of the day.  He was unwilling or unable to join us in the circle, kept rushing away and then back and climbing boisterously over Caroline*, his carer, while making loud vocal noises that seemed to indicate  a deep level of emotional discomfort.  Caroline assured us that this was how he usually behaved and that her wish for the day was for us to enable him to stay in the theatre for longer than an hour.  Usually when attending any activity during the holidays he would become too upset or she would become too embarrassed by the noises he made and the disruption he caused that she felt they had to leave after a very short time.

After using several strategies to seek to calm him and encourage him to join in, I realised that I was not making any kind of contact with him at all.  If anything my attempts at encouraging him were making him more distressed.  The problem was that I was in no kind of rapport with him and I realised that until I could create some sort of rapport I had little chance of influencing his behaviour.   

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) talks about everyone having a particular map of the world and if we want to communicate effectively with someone we need to use their map not ours.  One of the things we have learnt about working with autistic children is that we have more success when we go and meet them in their own world, on their map, rather than expect them to be able to adapt to ours. 

So with Jacob I began to match his behaviour particularly focussing on copying his erratic breathing.  When he flapped his arms – I flapped my arms, when he made vocal whining sounds – I made whining sounds, when he sat on the floor – I did the same, and so on.  Occasionally I had to stop matching his breathing to prevent myself from hyper-ventilating.   Gradually over a period of an hour and a half he became calmer, more settled than Caroline had ever seen him in an unfamiliar situation.  In the afternoon he became able to join in and take turns in what we were doing.

Matching Jacob had such a powerful effect on my ability to build rapport with him and enable him to join in because it operates at an unconscious level.  Now Jacob was demonstrating an extreme level of behaviour.  But matching behaviour has a profound effect on our ability to build rapport and communicate in more everyday situations – like meeting new people. 

When I talk to people about using matching some are concerned that they will be spotted.  My experience is that people rarely notice that you are matching them on a conscious level.  I was recently running a training course on matching body language and behaviours and I spend several minutes matching a woman’s gestures and posture in a very obvious way – crossing and uncrossing legs, inclination of head, arm gestures and so on.  Neither she nor anyone else noticed a thing – even though what we were discussing was just that!

*  As always names have been changed.