Communication Tricks That Surprise Even Skeptics

You win people's goodwill, attention and gratitude when you give them a chance to feel important. That, in a sentence, is the whole art of rapport — the art of building a connection. And most of these tricks are so simple that even people who swear they "can't be charmed" walk straight into them.

The foundation of rapport

It all rests on one uncomfortable truth: you have to genuinely start caring about the person in front of you, or about your audience. You have to stop worrying about what they think of you, or how you look, and start caring about what matters most to them. Everything below is just a practical way of acting on that.

• Feed the desire to feel important. The wish to feel important is why someone in your town builds a house that's noticeably bigger than everyone else's. It's why we wear expensive clothes, drive expensive cars and talk about our remarkable children. Show someone where their sense of importance comes from and you hold a powerful key to their attention. History is full of it: George Washington liked to be addressed as "His Highness," wealthy patrons funded a 1928 Antarctic expedition because peaks would be named after them, and Victor Hugo reportedly wanted all of Paris renamed in his honour.
• Remember people's names. You become far more persuasive the moment you can address someone by name. A name is enormously valuable to its owner — and the effect multiplies in front of a large audience. Imagine the impact of knowing the names of even half the hundred people in the room.
• Be grateful. If you want to come across as human — or simply be liked — your talk should contain at least one moment, even one sentence, where you express thanks. To a mentor, a partner, your family, your colleagues; it hardly matters to whom. Gratitude signals that you're not speaking down to people from on high, that you're not an egotist, and that you notice and value the people around you.
• Give something. People like gifts and they always remember them. It can be tiny and material — a pen printed with the date of the seminar. For a larger audience it can be a recommendation of a book or a film you love, which is a gift too.
• Pay a real compliment. Find a quality in the other person that's genuinely original. Appreciate and name something most people have probably overlooked. The value of a compliment is that it brings to light something the other person didn't even know about themselves.

Rapport runs on more than words

Connection is built across several channels at once, and skilled communicators play all of them deliberately:

• Language — the shared culture and vocabulary you speak in.
• Speech — your mental delivery: tempo, pace and rhythm, which differ for every person.
• Non-verbal cues — gestures, eye contact, facial expression, posture and distance.
• Acoustic cues — intonation, pauses, and even the small stumbles in between.
• Touch — handshakes, an arm on the shoulder, an embrace.
• Scent — the smell of the room and of the person, which we register without naming it.

Close the distance: aim for "one to one"

The goal in every conversation is to build a one-to-one relationship across all of those channels. You want to let the audience step a little into your private space and shrink the distance between you. Aim for the feeling that speaker and listener are simply two friends who've sat down over a coffee for a good conversation.

So where does that distance come from in the first place? It appears the moment we stop speaking the way we do in real life. What we call "business language" is really the regulated language of hierarchy. No matter how impressive or large the audience is, people want to hear complicated things in simple phrases. Plain, unadorned language and a relaxed "smart casual" presence creates the feeling, "I'm one of you."

Even Elon Musk leans on this. SpaceX is known for discouraging engineers from different departments from hiding behind field-specific jargon. When specialists can't understand each other because each speaks their own technical dialect, the result has a name — the "silo effect." To avoid it, the story goes, rocket engineers stop naming a complex assembly by its formal term in meetings and just say something like: "Listen, our rocket probably needs another leg attached here."

Rapport and "manipulation"

Manipulation? Nobody wants to be manipulated. But that word is just a harsher label for what every person, film, play and good speech is trying to do: get the audience to react the way we intended. As authors, we build a predictable mechanism that predictably moves the people watching. Without those mechanisms we couldn't create any sense of experience for an audience at all.

And it's entirely everyday. Every one of us has built up these habits. For some they work so subtly you never notice; with others you immediately sense they want something from you. We "manipulate" through attitude, manner of speech and voice. It's well established that people listen more attentively to — and trust more readily — a speaker with a lower vocal register and clear diction.

None of this works if you sound flustered, so it's worth pairing these techniques with a calmer, steadier delivery — start with communication tips for introverts if speaking up doesn't come naturally to you.

In short

Every one of these tricks comes back to the same move: turn your attention away from yourself and onto the person in front of you, then let them feel it. Do that consistently and even the skeptics warm up — usually without quite knowing why.

If you want to develop these audience-influence skills under guidance, that's exactly what we work on together. See the coaching options and start where you are.