Repeating a simple message can move people to take action
Your message doesn’t always have to be sensational. Frequency and repetition are more critical.
When I was working with multinational colleagues in Hong Kong, one thing I learnt was that you need to repeat your messages to move people.
I was born and grew up in Japan, and it was the first time for me to work with non-Japanese people communicating with non-Japanese languages, mainly in Cantonese and English and occasionally in Mandarin.
Sometimes my colleagues didn’t understand what I wanted them to do because of the language barrier. Other times we had misunderstandings because of the difference in our background: the things I took for granted were not what they took for granted. Or, they just didn’t want to follow my instructions.
My boss, who was the only Japanese person in the company at that time, said to me that all I needed to do was to repeat my messages over and over. “It is like a competition of being patient. If you lose your patience, you will lose the game.”
I hadn’t had any experience as a manager before and I didn’t have any tactics to organise people either. What I could do was to repeat my messages to them until they understood the concept. After a couple of years, I realised that it worked.
Another thing I learnt was that being consistent is essential as well. You should not change the contents of your messages often. Your policy shouldn’t sway. Otherwise, you just confuse people.
I spent nearly ten years in Hong Kong, working for the same company. What I learnt during that period is still useful in my life as a writer and a creator.
I am writing in English on Medium, but I also write in Japanese which is my mother tongue. Because I think Medium is a great platform for writers, novelists, and poets, I hope to build up my Japanese audience here too. However, it is not straightforward. Unfortunately, it is not a perfectly suitable platform yet for the Japanese language, and their curation system doesn’t work with the stories written in Japanese either. For some reasons like those, there are not many Japanese users here.
I want more Japanese people to write on Medium, simply because I love writing here and I want to write more in Japanese. If we have more Japanese writers, we will have more stories in Japanese. As a result, we can get more Japanese readers.
I started thinking about what I can do in order to get more Japanese writers on Medium. One night, I had an inspiration to establish a new publication for Japanese readers.
I created a publication specific to the stories written in Japanese. Next, I needed to find Japanese writers who could join it. I sent messages on Twitter asking bloggers and writers to join my publication, while I approached the existing independent Japanese writers on Medium. Now I have a few writers who write there and the publication is getting more and more followers.
What I am doing is sending messages again and again. It is not always necessary to be a sensational or intense message. I believe, more importantly, that you need to repeat your simple words. Repeating the same messages might look stupid. However, it can be more efficient to say the same thing stupidly rather than a dramatic slogan which is sent only once.
My first experience of working with multicultural people was exciting and life-changing. I liked my colleagues, even though some of them might have thought that I was annoying because I was always telling them the same things.
They occasionally rejected me and my ideas, but I still tried to explain to them over and over, anyway. It might have been that I could be calm and patient because it was not my mother tongue. I had to be logical, especially when I spoke the non-native language, but it would be another story.
Repeating and consistency is the key to success. You will never lose the game unless you give up. People are not so complicated. If you want to move them or change their minds, you just need to keep sending your messages patiently until you meet the target.
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