Technique #38 Scramble Therapy

Once a month, scramble your life. Do something you'd

never dream of doing. Participate in a sport, go to an

exhibition, hear a lecture on something totally out of

your experience. You get 80 percent of the right lingo

and insider questions from just one exposure.Think about it! Suppose at a dinner party, the table conversation turns to scuba diving. If you, too, had done your one-timeonly dive, you'd ask your diving dinner companion if he likes night

diving or whether he prefers diving on wrecks or reefs. (He'll never

148 How to Talk to Anyone

Technique #38

Scramble Therapy

Once a month, scramble your life. Do something you'd

never dream of doing. Participate in a sport, go to an

exhibition, hear a lecture on something totally out of

your experience. You get 80 percent of the right lingo

and insider questions from just one exposure.

04 (143-170B) part four 8/14/03 9:18 AM Page 148

believe it when you tell him the deepest water you've ever submerged yourself in is your own bathtub.)

Then you turn to the bungee jumper seated on your left and

ask him, "Do you prefer chest-waist jumps or ankle jumps?" If the

conversation then changes to tennis, or martial arts, or chess, or

coin collecting, or even bird-watching, you can keep up and keep

the conversation going. What a guy! What a gal!