Rapport is a kind of friendliness. When you’ve built rapport with your conversation partner you experience a closeness where you both feel comfortable, get along, mutually empathize, and work toward building trust.

Rapport is the most important element in having simple, friendly chats that avoid divisive issues and bring people together, and the same magic of friendliness it produces is indispensable for goal-directed conversations. If viewing conversations as partnerships does most of the work toward having great conversations, establishing and maintaining a friendly atmosphere improves the situation even further. The more individuals diverge in their stances, the more important it is to build and maintain rapport.

Moreover, “As this connection grows, the [person with whom you’re speaking] is less likely to be defensive and more open to suggestion.” To build rapport, ask sincere questions (that is, questions for which you’d like to find answers, as opposed to asking questions as a tactic). For strangers, movies, music, how they know mutual friends, and the like, are good topics for starting to build rapport. If you’re already familiar with someone, then spend a little time catching up: how are their kids, parents, new house, and so forth? As a general rule, depending on the context, rapport building at the beginning of a conversation takes only a few minutes. 

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If you already have rapport with someone, as you will with a friend, keeping your friendship should rank higher than winning an argument or scoring rhetorical points. Friends are more likely to listen and be more earnest in their consideration of your ideas. Far more importantly, however, they’re your friends. Nurture and even cherish the rapport you have with them instead of threatening it. This does not mean you cannot disagree with your friends. To the contrary, disagreement can make a friendship stronger, but remember that you’re friends first. Spend time enjoying the rapport- building stage before you jump into contentious issues. And don’t forget to chat with them as friends and leave goal-directed conversation out of it to focus on the friendship!
- Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay

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