92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships (17 page)

Go to a stamp exhibition. Go to a chess lecture. Go ballooning. Go bird-watching. Go to a pool hall. Go kayaking. Go fly a kite! Why? Because it will give you conversational fodder for the rest of your life. From that weekend on, you’ll sound like an insider with all the hikers, stamp collectors, ballooners, birders, billiards players, kayakers, and kitists you ever meet. Just by doing their activity once.

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If you take a piece of blue litmus paper and dip it in a huge vat of acid, the tip turns pink. If you take another blue litmus paper and dip it into just one minuscule drop of acid on a glass slide, the tip turns just as pink. Compare this to participating in an activity just one time. A sampling gives you 80 percent of the conversational value. You learn the insider’s questions to ask. You start using the right terms. You’ll never be at a loss again when the subject of extracurricular interests comes up—which it always does.
Do You Speak Scuba?

I’m not a certified scuba diver. However, six years ago in Bermuda I saw a sign: “Resort Dives, $25, no Scuba experience necessary.”

In just three hours, I received the best crash course in talking with scuba divers the world offers.

First I was given a quick lesson in the pool. Then, struggling to stay erect under the weight of my oxygen tank, regulator, buoyancy compensator, and weight belt, I went clumping out to the dive boat. Sitting there on the rocking dinghy, fondling my mask and fins like worry beads, I overheard the certified divers asking each other insider questions:

“Where were you
certified
?”

“Where have you
dived
?”

“Do you prefer
wrecks
or
reefs
?”

“Ever done any
night diving
?”

“Are you into
underwater photography
?”

“Do you dive on a
computer
?”

“What’s your longest
bottom time
?”

“Did you ever get the
bends
?”

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Why the italicized words? Those are scuba lingo. I now speak scuba. To this day, whenever I meet divers, I have the right questions to ask and subjects to discuss. And the right ones to avoid. (Like how much I like seafood. That’s like telling a cat lover how much you love tender barbecued kitten.) I can now ask my new friends which of the scuba hot spots they’ve been to—Cozumel, Cayman, Cancun. Then, if I want to really show off, I ask if they’ve been to Truk Lagoon in the Far Pacific, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, or the Red Sea.

All the insider terms now roll comfortably off my tongue. Before my Scramble Therapy experience I’d be calling their beloved wrecks and reefs “sunken ships” and “coral.” Understandable words, but not scuba words. Not insider words. Upon meeting a scuba diver, I probably would have asked, “Oh scuba diving. That must be interesting. Uh, aren’t you afraid of sharks?”

Not a good way to get off on the right fin with a diver.
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 04 (143-170B) part four 8/14/03 9:18 AM Page 149

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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!

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39
How to Sound Like You

Know All About Their

Job or Hobby

Even more insidious than hobby-talk is job-speak, or “Jobbledygook.” I still harbor social nightmares of the evening I attended a party thrown by a couple who worked in computer database management. As I walked in the door, I overheard one chap saying to another, “When the domain relational calculus is restricted to safe expressions, it’s equivalent to the turple relational. . . .”

That’s all I stayed around for. I knew I wasn’t going to understand one bit or byte of conversation the rest of the evening. It made me long for the days when a mouse meant the furry little fellow who loves cheese, windows were the kind you bought drapes for, and the web was something spiders trapped flies in. I knew I was going to need some technical support if I was going to be compatible with this crowd.

I decided then and there to learn some of the opening questions database management types ask each other. Which I did. Now I can’t wait for a second chance at that crowd because I’m armed with questions like “What raid level are you using?” and

“What data warehousing product do you use?”

All you need are a few insider opening questions to get you started with any group. You ask questions, listen to the responses, and indulge in elementary on-target conversation with them for a
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moment or two about their field. (Then change the subject ASAP!

You don’t want to fake you are more knowledgeable about their field than you really are.)

It’s All in the Opening Question

A tennis player can tell immediately from just appraising your opening serve how good a player you are. Is it going to be great playing with you or a real bore? It’s the same in communicating. Just from your verbal opening serve, someone knows if it’s going to be interesting talking with you about their life or interests—or dull, dull, dull.

For example, suppose I’m introduced to someone and the first words out of her mouth are, “Oh, you’re a writer. When are you going to write the great American novel?” Yikes, I know I’m talking with someone who is unfamiliar with my world. We’ll chat, but I prefer to change the subject. And soon, my conversation partner. If, however, my new acquaintance says, “Oh you’re a writer. Do you write fiction or nonfiction?” Bingo! Now I know I’m with a person who knows about my world. Why? Because that is the first question all writers ask each other. I enjoy talking to this inquisitor because I presume she has more insights into the writing world. Even if we quickly get off the subject of writing, she has come across as a well-informed individual.

Every job, every sport, every interest has insider opening questions that everybody in the same field asks—and its dumb outsider questions that they never ask each other. When an astronaut meets another astronaut, he asks, “What missions have you been on?” (Never “How do you go to the bathroom up there?”) A dentist asks another dentist, “Are you in general practice or do you have a specialty?” (Never “Heard any good pain jokes lately?”) The good news is beginning Jobbledygook is an easy language. You don’t need to master buzzwords, only a few opening questions 04 (143-170B) part four 8/14/03 9:18 AM Page 152

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to make you sound like an insider. Then—here’s the fun part—

when you tell them you’re not connected to their field, they’re all the more impressed. “What a knowledgeable person!” they say to themselves.

“Help! Everybody There Will Be

an Artist”

It’s not hard to harvest good Jobbledygook. Let’s say you’ve been invited to a gallery opening where you’ll be meeting many artists. If you don’t speak artist, go through your Rolodex to see if you have an artist friend or two.

Aha, you found one. Well, sort of. Your friend Sally attended art school. You call her up and ask, “Sally, I know this sounds silly but I’ve been invited to an event where I’m bound to be talking with a lot of artists. Could you give me a few good questions to ask?” Sally might find your query a tad unusual, but your diligence should impress her.

Maybe she’ll say, “Well, ask artists what medium they work in.”

“Medium?” you ask.

“Sure,” she’ll tell you. “That’s the insider’s way to ask if they work with acrylics, oil, charcoal, pen, and so forth.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t ask artists to describe their work,” she warns. “They feel theirs is a visual medium that can’t be described.”

“Oh.”

“And don’t ask them if their work is in a gallery.”

“Oh?”

“That could be a sore point. Instead ask ‘Is there anyplace I might see your work?’ They’ll love that because, even if they’re not represented by a gallery, they can invite you to their studio to possibly buy their work.”

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Technique #39

Le arn a Lit tle Jobble dygook

Big winners speak Jobbledygook as a second language.

What is Jobbledygook? It’s the language of other

professions.

Why speak it? It makes you sound like an insider.

How do you learn it? You’ll find no Jobbledygook

cassettes in the language section of your bookstore, but the lingo is easy to pick up. Simply ask a friend who

speaks the lingo of the crowd you’ll be with to teach

you a few opening questions. The words are few and

the rewards are manifold.

That’s all you need to get started—two good opening art questions and a warning against the most-asked dumb outsider question.

Let’s say you’ve given a great opening serve with the right question on their job. You’ve slammed a swift ball dead center into their conversational court. Happily, thinking they’re with an ace player, they answer your question. Then they put a little spin on the ball and send it lobbing right back into your court and it’s time for a follow-up question. Whoops, what to do now?

If you don’t want to come out of the bluffer’s closet just yet, you must master the next technique, “Baring Their Hot Button.”

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40
How to Bare Their Hot

Button (Elementary

Doc-Talk)

My friend John, a physician, recently married a charming Japanese woman, Yamika. John told me the first time they were invited to a party to meet many of John’s colleagues, Yamika was panicstricken. She wanted to make a good impression, yet she was tense about talking to American doctors. John was the only one she’d ever met, and during their romance they didn’t spend a whole lot of time discussing medicine.

John told her, “Don’t worry about it, Yami. They all ask each other the same old questions. When you meet them, just ask,

‘What’s your specialty’ and ‘Are you affiliated with a hospital?’

“Then, to get into deeper conversation,” he continued, “throw out questions like ‘How’s your relationship with your hospital?’ or

‘How’s the current medical environment affecting you?’ These are hot issues with doctors because everything’s changing in health care.”

John said Yamika delivered the lines verbatim. She circulated the party asking the various doctors’ specialties and inquiring about their affiliations and relationships with their hospitals. As a result, she was the hit of the party. Many of John’s colleagues later congratulated him on having found such a charming and insightful woman.
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Getting the Real Grabber

It’s not just doctors. Every profession has concerns that are all the buzz within the industry. The rest of the world, however, knows little about these fixations. For example, independent booksellers constantly complain that big superstore chains are taking over the industry. Accountants lie awake nights worrying about liability insurance for faulty audits. And dentists grind their teeth over OSHA and EPA regulations. Oh, us writers, too. We’re always bellyaching about magazines not paying us for electronic rights to our precious words.

Suppose some hapless soul were unlucky enough to find himself in a party of writers. Making conversation with these folks (who seldom know what they think until they see what they say) is no easy task for one who is accustomed to communicating in the spoken word. However, if before the party the nonwriter had called just one writer acquaintance and asked about the burning issues, he’d have had hot conversation with the wordsmiths all evening. I call the technique “Baring Their Hot Button.”

Technique #40

Baring Their Hot But ton

Before jumping blindly into a bevy of bookbinders or a

drove of dentists, find out what the hot issues are in

their fields. Every industry has burning concerns the

outside world knows little about. Ask your informant to bare the industry buzz. Then, to heat the conversation

up, push those buttons.

Back to the art show you’re about to attend. You can’t let Sally hang up yet. She’s given you the two best opening questions for 04 (143-170B) part four 8/14/03 9:18 AM Page 156

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artists. But don’t let her go until you get the real conversational grabber. Ask her the hottest issues going on in the art world. She might think a minute and then say, “Well, there’s always art prices.”