In this episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez sits down with Brigitta Hoeferle, a highly regarded expert in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Brigitta brings a wealth of experience, having worked with top-tier organizations like T. Harv Eker’s Peak Potentials and running her own NLP training center in Atlanta, where she trains coaches, speakers, and trainers. Originally from Germany, Brigitta’s passion for helping others communicate more effectively shines through as she shares valuable insights into creating impactful event experiences.

The conversation centers around three key themes that are essential for event leaders looking to elevate their events to the next level. First, Brigitta emphasizes the importance of building rapport with an audience using NLP. She explains that true rapport goes beyond commonality—it’s about making people feel valued, heard, and understood. This connection is the foundation of any successful event, ensuring that attendees are fully engaged and more open to the learning experience. Brigitta provides practical tips on how to connect with an audience right from the start, such as using interactive questions and paying attention to how attendees are feeling throughout the event.

Next, the discussion shifts to creating a unified and engaging event experience. Brigitta explains that building a sense of unity among attendees is crucial for boosting engagement and retention. Techniques like expert modeling, which involves setting an example for the audience to follow, and encouraging participants to share with one another, help to foster a sense of belonging. Rudy and Brigitta discuss how these strategies can transform a room of individuals into a cohesive group, making the event experience more memorable and impactful.

Finally, Brigitta highlights the significance of context over content. She uses a powerful analogy of a paper cup with holes to illustrate how a poorly constructed event framework can cause valuable information to be lost. For event leaders, it’s not just about delivering content; it’s about creating a “container” that holds the audience’s attention and allows them to absorb the material fully. Brigitta shares her approach to building this container by being fully present, scanning the room, and making sure the audience feels safe and engaged. This perspective helps event leaders understand that the environment they create is just as important as the content they deliver.

Throughout the episode, Brigitta offers a wealth of actionable insights and inspiring advice for anyone looking to improve their event-hosting skills. Whether you’re new to event planning or a seasoned pro, this episode provides the tools and mindset shifts needed to connect deeply with your audience and create events that truly resonate.

Want to connect with Brigitta?

NLP Success Laws Checklist: https://app.peakconnector.com/v2/preview/C62ZHZlhA196qgM4sL0N

Website: https://centerofnlp.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brigittahoeferle

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/brigittahoeferle

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brigittahoeferle/

If you'd like to be a guest on the High-Profit Event Show, click HERE.

Welcome to The High Profit Event Show. My name is Rudy Rodriguez, and on today's show, we have a very special guest, Brigitta, from Germany, now living in Atlanta. Welcome to the show, Ma'am.

Thank you, Rudy, for having me.

Most definitely, really excited to have you here and to connect with you and get to know more about you and your decades of experience in neuro-linguistic programming. Really remarkable to learn what you've done and how you apply it to events. A few bio points for our audience who are tuning in and wondering who you are. My understanding is that you have worked with pretty reputable organizations like T. Harv Eckerd, Peak Potentials, for a number of years as a trainer. You've also purchased your own NLP business from your mentor a few years ago, and you run your own training center in Atlanta, and you are the person that trains the trainers, so people, speakers, coaches, trainers, they come to you to get certified in their field. So you are a master on the topic of NLP, and we're really excited to hear your topic today.

Thank you. Thank you so much, and you're absolutely right. I pass on what I have learned. It is all about learn through teach.

Wonderful, and we were talking in the green room right before this episode about a situation that you experienced recently where you were at an event and you saw a person who was teaching on the subject that I think was scaling and exiting, and they were the former CEO of GE, clearly a successful individual. He knew his stuff, but what you noticed being a participant in the audience is that people weren't really being left with the value that they were looking for. They weren't engaged with the speaker. They were missing something. Even though this person clearly was successful and they knew the content, they didn't have the rapport. I'm curious to hear from your perspective, and then we can jump right in. How do you build rapport with an audience using NLP?

How do you build rapport? First of all, what is rapport? You often hear rapport is when you find commonality. I say rapport is when the other person feels valued, heard, and understood. When you are doing that one-to-one, that can already be a challenge. Now, when you're in front of the room as a trainer, a keynote speaker, an educator, a presenter, and those are all different things, but if you're any of that, then it would be beneficial that you first have your rapport strategies down one-to-one so you can then multiply them from one to many. In the room that I was in, it was a beautiful room. It was a very successful crowd, and the presenter himself, the trainer, did a great job presenting the material. It was very content-rich, and clearly he knew what he was talking about. But if you are not creating as an event trainer, as an event organizer, as someone that is putting on an event, when you are not creating the space, and I like to call it the safe space, not because it's safe due to fire marshal or energy or whatever, but it is a container that you are creating where you're holding your participants, then the content that you are bringing, the content-rich information, the knowledge that someone actually gave you money to come in and learn from you is going to go out all of the cracks in the container.

So when I teach, I like to tell my clients that the context, the container, is so much more important than the content, and the content is very important. But imagine I'm holding a paper cup, and imagine I'm holding a paper cup in my left hand, and imagine I'm holding a tiny little thin screwdriver in my right hand, and I would take that screwdriver and I would put holes into my paper cup on all different areas of the cup. Then imagine I am pouring water into this paper cup. Well, what's going to happen is that water, no matter how good and nourishing it is, it's going to go out all of the holes that I poke because my container is broken. So the law that I'm teaching here is, context is more important than content. I'm not saying that you should just create a great container, a great space, to not bring any content. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you have to be able to build rapport. You have to be able to pick people up in the room where they're at and sometimes I have been into training rooms and speaking rooms in a big event where the speaker would just come on stage or in front of the room and just starts talking, just starts hitting all of his or her bullet points of what they want to talk about. But they never made an effort of checking in with the audience.

Hey, how are you guys doing? Where are you from? How many of you? How many of you is like the secret sauce of building rapport? And when you start paying attention to how Harv Eker is one of the great mentors that I've learned from many, many decades ago, Tony Robbins, a lot of great speakers use the how many of you method. You can say how many of you or who of you, however you're wording it, the importance is that you are picking people up where they're at, that you are building rapport with them, that they feel that you, that is standing in front of the room or on stage is actually interested in you. When you're interested in others, then others will be interested in you as well.

I appreciate you sharing that. The most important thing is you must build rapport and with people where they're at. I took notice that many of you is a secret sauce for rapport building. I'm curious, can you maybe expand on that a little bit or maybe some of the specific things that you know to do for an event leader to build rapport?

So the first thing is you come in front of the room. Let's just say you come on stage. We'll use the stage if you have one or not, just the front of the room. Before you say anything, you want to plan yourself. You want to be really present to what is going on in the room. What I came into an exercise with every time I go in front of a room and every time I go on stage, I check my own stuff at the door. Now that does not mean actual bags or anything. That actually means anything that's going on in my mind because we have life going on outside of being in front of a room. But when you can let your ego, check your ego at the door, let your stuff be at the door and make it about the people that are in front of you, you're going to get so much more on the back end out of your event than you can ever imagine. People that take themselves too serious or that think they're all that and they have all of this great information, but lose or not even make the effort of building rapport with the people that are in the room, they're going to hurt down the road because the people that are in the room, they already paid, that's great. They're already paid to be in the room, but then are they coming back? Who are they bringing when they're coming back? Who else are they telling? You said it earlier, Rudy, you want to have raving fans. Who are they telling? Who else are they telling them about your event or how great you are, what they have learned and what they've walked away with?

Often what people walk away with from your event is how you made them feel. How do they feel about what they learned? How do they feel that they can actually implement the information that they learned from you? Or did you just stand in front of the room and just went completely, I like to call it Hartsfield, which is our airport here in Atlanta, over their head. You just kind of went completely over their head and did not pick them up. So another law that I teach is expert modeling and expert modeling is you as an event person start paying attention to what the great people that you want to model are doing that works really, really well. Plant yourself in front of your audience. When I say plant, I don't mean with ego. I mean, plant yourself humbly with both legs on the floor and just scan the room and smile. That's the first thing that I always do when I'm in front of the room. Scan the room and smile and nod and acknowledge. If I have time, I'm actually in the room early and I shake hands with folks. Not everyone, but I fist bump, handshake. How are you doing? Acknowledging people. People want to be seen and heard and felt. Give them that opportunity to be seen, heard and felt. Then I welcome everyone. I tell them, today you're going to learn how to build rapport with your audience. And how does NLP help you build rapport with your audience? Rapport building is actually one of the original strategies of neurolinguistic programming and all of the other strategies built upon that.

So expert modeling is a big piece in that. I want to encourage you that you're looking at other experts that you can model from because when people are in the room, they also see you as the expert and then they want to model what you're doing. When you're doing it right, they're going to come back and they're going to throw their credit card at you and say, whatever it is that you have, I want it because you're doing a great job doing it. So planting yourself, being present, scanning the room, making people feel welcome and seen and heard and felt and understood. That is the most important part. Then you can start asking, how many of you, how many of you, you've heard this before, come on. How many of you are, when I'm doing an event in Atlanta, how many of you are from Atlanta? How many of you are from within the inside the perimeter? How many of you are outside the perimeter? If you see my hand motions, how many of you are on one side and the other, how many of you are on the other side? That's called tonal marking and analog marking. Those are master strategies of NLP. So you start learning by putting all of those things together in your tonality, putting things into space and really making people part of what you're about to deliver. Now they're engaged. Now they're maybe leaning forward. Sometimes when I see people getting too comfortable in their chair, I say, I have a secret for you, lean in.

And then everyone leans in. So I'm modeling my body language for them to lean in. It's all about expert modeling. When I see that the majority of the room is starting to drift, I'll do a pattern interrupt. I'll say, everyone, please get on your feet and everyone stands up. If people are not standing up or they're not following what you are saying, that is immediate confirmation that you have no rapport. When people are not, when you say, all right, everyone, please take out a pen and a paper and start taking notes and people are not doing it, that is a confirmation that you need to do a better job in building rapport. So how do you do that? You can put them in an exercise. You can say, all right, from the last five things that I shared with you, what's one thing that really stands out? Take a minute and write that down right now. Then I have writing music and then people are writing out, Oh, I really like what she said about expert modeling. Let me write that down. So what does that do? That anchors in what I said five minutes ago. It gives them an opportunity to reconnect with me and the things that I taught and it gives them an opportunity to actually capture it. Then I say, okay, one minute's up. Thank you so much. I always thank them. When I give a command, you wanna thank them. Now, turn to your partner to the left or turn to your partner to the right or turn to your partner to the back, however you wanna do it and share with them within 10 seconds what you have learned.

What was that one thing that you wrote down? Then you wanna make sure that you keep your time and then after 10 seconds, you can say, thank your partner, give them a high five and let's come back and continue. Maybe you wanna do a group share. If you have time, you can do a group share of one to two people that wanna share what they have learned and then you thank them and then you move on to the next topic that you wanna teach. Now you have recreated a foundation of rapport because you gave people the opportunity to think about what it is that I have taught? Ooh, and by the way, she did that. She's probably gonna do that again. So I might as well pay attention because I really wanna get something out of it because I paid for this event. So I wanna walk away with a lot of value and information. So that is the confirmation of rapport, the expert modeling, the creating a great container versus then just having great information.

That's wonderful. I've taken a page of notes here as you were speaking. To model what you were sharing here, my takeaway is ultimately how do they feel? Are they connected? Do they feel like there's trust and there's rapport or did we just go over their heads and is there disconnection or disassociation? And modeling begins from the moment that you take the stage, right. As being on the stage, you are the expert and taking the time to pause, connect, poll them, ask them where they're from, getting them to raise their hands and engage before attempting to just jump right into the content. I like that specific sites that you share. Hey, if you feel like you're losing them, you can lean in, do exercises. One specific thing that I've actually found myself doing in many conferences now, I understand the NLP association with it, pausing, turning to the partner next to them, sharing one quick thing, 10 seconds, and then coming back. It actually builds rapport with the speaker and it creates engagement with the speaker and as well as reinforces their learning. So that was great, great insight.

It connects people in the room too because often the person that's sitting, beside you or behind you is not connected to you.

So now we're creating rapport within the group, which ultimately increases the rapport of the entire event or the entire experience.

Exactly. Think about how, if you would create a net by just adding strings from the stage to the one person in the front of the room, and then they're talking to the person next to them. So there's another string and they're talking to the person behind them. Suddenly you have that network, you have a net that is throughout the participants and they're starting to form a unity rather than just being individual scattered here and there. You're part of that one individual. You wanna create a unity. When you have unity, it feels, the feeling is of belonging and people wanna belong.

People wanna belong. I like that, that's a good takeaway for me here too. I appreciate you speaking on this topic. I recently did a speaker training myself called Engage From Your Stage with Scott DeMoulin and he shared a syntax with us and basically 40% of a talk is designed to build trust and rapport with the audience. So you gave some very tangible, specific ways that you go about doing it that I think will be very helpful to reinforce for our listeners. It's the simple things like dribbling the basketball and shooting a layup and a free throw but if you can't do it, you can't do anything else.

That's right. That's absolutely it. You gotta know, and that's why the context is so important. You gotta know how to do it and not just what to do or what to say.

Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure our listeners are probably curious at this point of like, hey, how can I learn more about NLP and how I can use NLP to continue to build rapport? What's the best way for our listeners to learn more and continue their education on this particular topic? I think you have a resource for them, don't you?

I do. I brought a gift and I already shared a few topics or a few items from that gift. I have the success loss checklist. So get the success loss checklist. They're called NLP success loss. And Rudy, I think you're going to share the link in the show notes. So I shared some of those laws already with you. There's a whole list for you to check off or to check in. If something's not working, just go back to that list. I first and foremost developed that list for myself many years ago. I now share it with you so you can go back and check in, use it, be reminded of this talk and then have many more of these laws for you to use and implement and when people have a question, it's very simple. Just Centerofnlp.com is where they can find more information. I made a note of that Centerofnlp.com.

We'll be sure to include that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for this great interview. And before we go and wrap up here, do you have any final comments or closing thoughts for our audience?

Yes, if you are not getting the results that you desire, it has nothing to do with anything more than the communication that you have. That's another one of the laws. So you want to check in, is your desire to have a specific result, a great event, an incredible revenue stream, are you getting that? And if you're not getting that yet, check in with your communication with your own communication inwards and with the communication outwards to your team, to your staff, and most importantly to your participants, to the clients that you're working with, and then fine tune that and NLP helps with that.

Excellent, thank you so much again for those final tips. Appreciate you very much. And for our listeners, definitely go download the free resource and check her out if you want to learn more about NLP. I know I'm definitely much more curious now than I ever have been for Nlp. So thank you for sharing this with me.

Yeah, thanks Rudy. Thanks for having me.