'A baby squeals with delight, for example, and the mother affirms that delight by giving the baby a gentle shake, cooing, or matching the pitch of her voice to the baby's squeal. Or a baby shakes his rattle, and she gives him a quick shimmy in response.'

This process, called attunement by Stern, is thought to give the baby a feeling of emotional connection and reassurance, and differs from just imitation:

'If you just imitate a baby, that only shows you know what he did, not how he felt. To let him know you sense how he feels, you have to play back his inner feelings in another way. Then the baby knows he is understood.’

The key here seems to be responding to a given action, through matching the emotion as well as the physiological movement. The timing of the mother's actions (each response following the baby's action immediately) is crucial in establishing reassurance and connection; a sequence of shakes, coos or looks unrelated to specific actions by the infant would not work as well, however closely they matched in tone and physiology.

As a powerful presenter, leader or executive you must demonstrate similar action-specific responses to your audience or team, these are crucial to establishing a feeling of equal comfort in adult interactions. You will achieve this by responding to their energy and physiological movements, breathing rhythms and voice tone, speed and pitch response during your presentation. When you are in tune with your audience, you play back to them the action-specific responses that let them know, that you know how they are feeling. You then express the energetic mood transference through your words, and deep subliminal trust is then achieved.

Because great rapport opens up the 'responsive channels' in human interaction, this then allows the free transference of subliminal communication to occur. For example, if I like you… you will know that energetically long before I speak, and the opposite is also true. Unconscious (or intuitive) communication is the transfer of information unconsciously between humans. Research has shown that our conscious attention can attend to 5 – 9 items simultaneously. All other information is then processed by the unconscious mind, and unconscious communication causes changes in mood and emotion at the level where the dance of subliminal persuasion begins.

Let us consider the statement ‘that our conscious attention can attend to 5-9 items simultaneously.’ Your audience will be paying attention to you as you walk onto the stage or into the room, and as they do so they are taking in massive amounts of information about your posture, movement and gestures. Be aware in the next thirty seconds each member of your audience has surpassed their capacity to retain conscious attention upon you.