Sarah Jones, in her TED talk,  gives a great demonstration on switching identities. When held a (funny) mirror, we get a chance to reflect (that’s what a mirror helps to do, right?) on what we do in real life.

Mostly we switch identities without consciously controlling it. When the cop stops us, we might go into the little-innocent-boy identity, or when the kid is annoying too much, we play the big nasty bully. Sarah Jones reminded me that this switching of identities can indeed be controlled. I had an early experience with this when a well-known show host and comedian went over a map of Germany and gave a weather report for all the different areas in the appropriate dialect for the area – and there are quite a few for such a small country.

This impressed me so much that I was able to mimic some of the dialects and mannerisms. By doing this for myself, I learned that I had to become a person from that area, and then it was actually very simple to be credible. I did not get all the dialect-specific words right and probably missed some of the nuances of the dialects, but as long as I was a person from that area, it worked.

Sarah Jones is definitely a master at that – here she is…