Turning On Your Like Switch
Rapport is a fundamental NLP skill, and if you can’t get rapport with the person you’re helping — or who is helping you — everything is much, much more difficult.
I doubt you’ve been in a more difficult situation that Dr. Jack Schafer, though. He is a former Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI, and part of his job was turning foreign spies into double-agents. His life depended on his ability to establish and maintain rapport with people who could be quite hostile if things went wrong.
He wrote a book, The Like Switch, on the topic, and I highly recommend it. (I highly recommend everything he’s written, for that matter.)
Podcaster Jordan Harbinger (an excellent interviewer, by the way) pulled Dr. Schafer in for a two-part interview on the skills taught in The Like Switch. Go have a listen: