Japanese people can overcome the fear of speaking up through one skill.
And that skill takes just 2 seconds to execute. And it doesn’t have to be done well to work.
This is not clickbait. This is the distillation of 25 years of experience working in Japan. I don’t know of any research that has tested this specific claim, so I want to be clear: this is a professional judgment formed over 25 years of working in Japan.
I have no desire to “change” or westernize people. I only work with Japanese business people in global companies, where survival depends on being able to engage in pretty lively, assertive discussions.
There are a lot of theories, activities, exercises used to help Japanese people overcome their fear of speaking. And they all work to a certain extent … in training. Each of these is genuinely useful, I have no objection to whatever approach feels helpful.
But there is a bottleneck skill. One skill hidden at the bottom. The presence or absence of this skill changes everything.
But for many Japanese professionals I work with, this skill carries such strong negative meaning that you cannot make people practice it. It’s a very sensitive topic. You can invite them to practice, but they have to voluntarily work on this.
So what is this controversial, absolutely pivotal skill?
Interrupting.
Interrupting an active speaker carries severe negative emotions for many of my clients. But I also know unless they get over this hump, all the assertive training on the planet will not help them survive real global meetings.
But … can’t you be assertive without interrupting? Sure. But here’s the problem: you cannot get better at speaking if you don’t speak.
You can speak badly and learn from what happens. But if you don’t speak, you get no experience to learn from. Interrupting matters because it gets you across that line. Once you’re speaking, even badly, learning can begin.
Speaking up won’t happen if a person is not capable of interrupting. In the back of their mind, if their internal algorithm says “interruption is horribly rude .. never interrupt”, they will default to waiting until the playing field becomes perfectly still for several long seconds before opening their mouth to speak.
And those moments of absolute certainty – certainty that there is no possible way you could even accidentally interrupt someone who is about to speak – are hard to predict.
But when they practice interrupting and recovering after poor interruptions, the fear of relationship destruction starts to drain away. They realize that interruptions can be useful, necessary, clumsy, and no one dies.
Once that fear loosens, they can access everything else they have learned about speaking up.
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