This is the sixth episode of the Summer Series. It’s about a quiet fear I see in almost every creative I work with. The worry that we’ve already said our thing too many times, that everyone must be tired of hearing it, and that we ought to come up with something new. And why that instinct, understandable as it is, might be the very thing holding our work back.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe. You are the only person who has heard your message as often as you have.
Think about it. You’ve turned your ideas over in your own mind for months, sometimes years. So by the time you finally say one out loud, even once, in a single post or email, it already feels old and overfamiliar to you. And the moment you’ve said it once, something odd happens. You feel as though you’ve used it up. As though you’ve had your turn with that idea, and now you must go and find a new angle, a different approach, something fresh to say instead. So you move on, and go hunting for the next thing, when really, you’d only just begun.
But the person on the other end isn’t living inside your head. They’re busy, and distracted, and getting on with their own full lives. They catch a fraction of what you put out, in passing, if at all. Posts are shown to a sliver of the people who follow you. Emails go unopened. Life gets in the way. So the thing you’ve said, that feels to you like you’ve said it a hundred times, most of the people you’d love to reach have never really taken in at all.
And this is where it helps so much to turn our attention outward. Because so often, we’re looking inward, worrying how we come across, whether we’re repeating ourselves, what everyone will think. But when you look outward instead, at how noisy and full your audience’s lives are, and at how many times a person needs to come across something before it even begins to land, saying the same thing again stops feeling self-indulgent. It starts to feel like a kindness. You’re not going on about it. You’re simply making sure the people who need to hear it actually get the chance to.
Being known takes saying it again
Being known for something, truly known for it, doesn’t happen the first time you say it. Or the fifth. It happens by saying the same true thing, again and again, until it slowly, quietly becomes the thing people associate with you. Think of the brands and the people you could describe in a single line. That clarity in your mind never came from them saying something once. It came from them being patiently, consistently, wonderfully themselves, saying the same thing so many times that it finally stuck.
And repetition does something else, too. It builds trust. When you show up and say the same true thing, consistently, people slowly come to feel they know you, and know exactly what you’re about. You become the one they can point to and say, oh yes, that’s the person who does exactly that.
The same thing, a thousand ways
None of this means saying the exact same sentence over and over. That would be dull, for you and for them. It means taking your one true thing, the heart of what you do, and telling it a thousand different ways. Through a story one week. Through a client’s experience the next. Through a photograph, a question, a strong opinion, a small confession. The core stays exactly the same. It’s only the wrapping that changes. Same message, endless different doors into it. And there’s real freedom in that, because you get to be endlessly creative in how you say the thing you most want to be known for.
I know it takes a little courage. There’s a vulnerability in nailing your colours to the mast and keeping them there. That flicker of “surely I’ve said this before” can feel exposing. But that feeling is usually a sign you’re doing it right. Because the point at which you’re just starting to feel a bit bored of saying it is, more often than not, the exact point your audience is only beginning to hear it.
So find your one true thing. And then say it, and say it, and say it again. Not because you’ve run out of other things to say, but because that, quietly, is the whole of it.
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