Pacing and leading are closely related to the concept of rapport. Pacing involves ‘matching’ someone for a while (going at their pace) until you have gained enough rapport that when you slowly start to change what you are doing (leading) the individual will follow.
Pacing and leading depend on the quality of rapport that you have build up. If you go too fast or move too abruptly you will break rapport. (When that happens you will need to ‘go back’ and pace them again.)
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of ‘leading’, as if it is manipulative or controlling. But you will not be able to create rapport, to enter into that relationship with someone, if you doing it with an intention to control: remember rapport is a two-way street, a relationship between people, and that by pacing someone (in order to lead) you are in effect joining someone else’s reality, their map of the world. You can only do this effectively by respecting their model of the world (another of the presuppositions of NLP).
A really simple way to think about pacing and leading (and again I am grateful to Joseph O’Connor for the metaphor) is to imagine that you are walking alongside someone. If you are walking too fast they will have to hurry to keep up, too slow and they’ll feel like they’re dawdling. Either way they’re the ones who are having to make the effort.
If you want to change someone’s speed the first thing you need to do is walk alongside them at their pace for a while. That is you matching what they are doing (in terms of speed, physiology and so on) but a deeper level you are signalling respect for their model of the world, and a willingness to enter into it.
Then, once you have rapport, change your pace to one that suits you better and they will be more likely to speed up or slow down… in a totally natural way.
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Writing with rapport: courting your reader
I was talking recently about ways that we can write to create rapport with our readers, and, in the longer term to build a relationship of trust. This is linked to the concept of pacing and leading - starting ‘where
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