Things That Make You go Um...

Who can remember THAT song from circa 1990 by the C+C Music Factory? I do! Anyway, to the topic on hand - Recently in a meeting with a mentee, I was talking to him about effective communication and the part disfluency can play to derail dialogue. I went on to explain, then thought this might make a useful little blog. So here it is.

I have interjection issues when I talk. What are they? Interjections serves as a pause in the middle of a sentence as one gathers their thoughts but wants to maintain the listener’s attention. Interjections like “you know” and “okay” and “so” and “erm” and “literally” and “basically” and “right” and “yeah, no” (which is it?!) and a horde of others filler words are an often unwitting characteristic of our own oration. However, such fillers - or “word parasites” as Russians call them - have marginal grammatical or lexical value. But they have increasingly become a normal part of the modern conversation and are very common.

A few years back I read an article on disfluency, discourse markers and discourse particles. After this read, I made a concerted effort to avoid the fillers I tended to use. I listened to myself through recordings and became more conscious to the words I deployed verbally. I also asked a few colleagues to conduct ‘filler counts’ on me. I learned that I was unconscious to these fillers until I heard myself talk. I’m a classic “erm” and “sooo” kind of guy. 

Fillers are normal, but can be overused, making the speaker sound nervous or unprepared or too conversational. Someone who overachieves with fillers can create an incoherence and lose credibility with the audience. They can distract. That’s when it’s a bad thing. For example, a few years back I came across the filler word “super” from a former leader that I worked with. This double superlative repetition took my focus away as I would instead tally (bean count) how many times this person said the word. ‘Super cool’ or ‘super fun’ or ‘super successful’ or ‘ super excited’ or ‘super efficient’ . The average person speaks at 150-200 words a minute and this person averaged 7 “super” interjections a minute.

Armed with this knowledge, I realized that the best way to avoid using filler words was to pause instead. Breathe, maybe. If you are not speaking, but thinking - don’t “erm”. I said to myself. Being aware and adopting a pause was so tricky at first. I felt like my new found silence pauses were sinister and creepy. They weren’t, just new to me. Over-focusing on nullifying those pesky fillers took my focus away from my actual content. That was not good. Slowing down my speedy dialogue helped me to think more about my words and at first this was also tough but helpful to find more natural (silent) pauses to think. That silence which is often so easy at other parts of the day was so hard to find as I fended off my propensity to fill it with noise (fillers). I have got better. Practice helps and being aware is the first step. I’m not perfect and it bugs me when I still overuse fillers. But it’s okay. 

Remember you are in command of the message you want to deliver. In order to make a positive impact, know your audience and focus on the key points of your speech, be confident, you’ve got this. For those that just rather do .. something else – here’s the song by C+C Music Factory.

The postings on this site are my own and don’t represent SC Johnson & Son, Inc.’s positions, strategies or opinions