PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Mohsin F Butt TI - Approaches to building rapport with patients AID - 10.7861/clinmed.2021-0264 DP - 2021 Oct 12 TA - Clinical Medicine PG - clinmed.2021-0264 4099 - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/early/2021/10/11/clinmed.2021-0264.short 4100 - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/early/2021/10/11/clinmed.2021-0264.full AB - In this article, I detail my rapport-building trial and error exercise and outline why addressing a patient's occupation at the beginning of a consultation worked during my history taking. Context permitting, addressing occupation can be useful when setting the tone and rhythm of a conversation, helping to focus explanations on the back of a patient's everyday experiences, and allowing a history-taker to address a patient's ideas, concerns and expectations more comfortably. Broaching occupation can also be a useful way to extrapolate information about disease risk factors and baseline understanding from the start. Whatever the rapport-building technique used, self-awareness seems to be a critical skill in this exercise, and an approach used with one patient may not necessarily be useful with another.