Why Repeating Yourself is a Good Thing

This week's article summary is  Why Repeating Yourself is a Good Thing.

A few years ago, I began to start most all-school meetings with a slide of Trinity’s mission. I figured framing all-school meetings with a reminder of why Trinity exists and what we believe would better focus our discussion and work—basically, how we “cherish childhood while shaping our students’ academic and character foundation.”

There have been times when I questioned if I need to continue doing this. Everyone knows our mission, right? If not the exact words, definitely its essence. 

Yet I still find myself putting the mission as the first slide in my presentations.

Well, Adam Grant (many of you read Think Again last summer) in his article below confirms my intuition: repetition is important and a great teaching technique.

When I taught 7th and 8th grade, I spent the bulk of my time on student study/organization skills and inter/intrapersonal development. (Academic content was ironically a distant third goal.) I would sometimes grow weary with all the times I had to repeat myself about how my students could organize themselves at school, in the classroom, at home. It seemed the more I repeated myself, the less impact I had on my students. 

But looking through the lens of repetition, I understand that I was providing my students with what they needed as emerging adolescents who were now expected to be independent learners as the complexity and volume of material presented was intensifying. They needed constant repetition about study and organizational skills. And almost all of them ended up being very successful students (and great people) in high school, college, and beyond.

Similarly, whenever my family—a core of about 10 people—gets together, we inevitably repeat the same family stories over and over. Over the holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, we regale one another with family stories we’ve heard over and over. While redundant, these stories in essence define the Marshall family history—what my great grandparents, grandparents, parents, siblings, kids, and now grandkids did. Even though we’ve heard these stories —now greatly exaggerated—no one ever comments when a family member says, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

So whenever frustration mounts when you find yourself repeating yourself over and over in school and at home, rest assured that repetition is an essential part of the learning process!

Joe

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In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was preparing his speech for the March on Washington. When he asked his advisors for feedback on a direction he was considering, they shot it down. “You’ve used it too many times already.”

King took their advice and scrapped his idea.

Many people have an allergic reaction to repetition. When politicians repeat their stump speeches on the campaign trail, we judge them as inauthentic. When colleagues repeat their ideas in meetings, we tune them out. When our spouses repeat their favorite stories, we doze off.

But it turns out that repeating yourself is vital to effective communication. Psychologists have long demonstrated that with repeated exposure to ideas, we start to like them more. As the saying goes, the greatest barrier to communication is the illusion that it occurred. Reinforcing a message makes it more familiar and more memorable.

Yes, it’s possible to overdo it. But current research shows that it’s better to overcommunicate and be seen as redundant than to undercommunicate and miss the mark.

Although they’re less likely to be penalized for saying too much, leaders err on the side of saying too little. In an analysis of thousands of 360 feedback assessments, leaders were over nine times more likely to be criticized for undercommunicating than overcommunicating. In an experiment, people who undercommunicated were judged as unqualified to lead because they lacked empathy. When you hesitate to repeat your ideas, you don’t just fail to get your point across—you also come across as if you don’t care.

Martin Luther King Jr. came to that realization. When he took the stage at the March on Washington, his script didn’t have the familiar lines that his advisors had discouraged. Partway through his speech, he changed his mind and decided to repeat himself. In front of 250,000 people, he left his prepared comments behind and recited the lines he’d delivered many times before.

The phrase he repeated was “I have a dream…”

If King hadn’t repeated those lines, his speech might have never changed the world.

It didn’t matter that he’d said it in other speeches on other stages. In the span of two minutes that day, he repeated “I have a dream” eight times. It became the title of his speech, and it became the refrain for a watershed in civil rights.

Great communication is like a song. It isn’t enough to hear it once. You don’t know the melody until you hear it multiple times. You don’t know the chorus by heart until you’ve repeated it many times.

If you want to be heard, it helps to spell out your idea more than once. If you want to move people, you have to say it more often. If people aren’t telling you you’re repeating yourself, you might not be communicating enough.