Mastery of your voice
Public speaking, filler words and how to break the habit.
Public speaking and speeches can be difficult, especially for the audience when the speaker is a filler word fanatic. Those pesky ers and ums do much to draw focus away from the words and their meaning, breaking the connection with the audience and reducing the overall impact of the speech.
The thing is most people are only partially aware of themselves when they speak, often completely oblivious that they are dropping more fillers than a dermatologist at a botox clinic.
if you’re navigating the wild world of public speaking, trying to dazzle audiences at work, or suddenly noticing your speaking style is more fractured than a broken bone surgery — take heart — with a bit of practice, those errs, ums and ands will be history!
So, if you’re navigating the wild world of public speaking, trying to dazzle audiences at work, or suddenly noticing your speaking style is more fractured than a broken bone surgery — take heart — with a bit of practice, those errs, ums and ands will be history!
There are many components to a good speech, and improvement is very much a process of incremental growth and development.
First and foremost, wherever you are today in your speaker journey, be kind to yourself and recognise any and all progress even if it is slow, is still progress and slowly chipping away at the little things will add up to a big difference in your speaking craft over time.
Let’s begin!
If you are writing a speech, once you have written your draft, start practicing it, it’s likely when you start speaking it out loud you will quickly discover if you need to make changes, perhaps because it doesn’t flow when spoken or you just start the iterative process of refinement. With that said, I would like to suggest the following approaches that I have found to be very successful in helping people overcome the habit of using filler words, and to be honest, the use of fillers is a habit, so it can be changed with conscious awareness and attention.
Fillers are not a particularly bad thing day to day, but they can impact the audience, breaking flow and continuity when you speak, when you wish to hold people’s attention, like in that important business meeting or sales situation.
The eradication of fillers takes some conscious focus at first then becomes more natural as you become accustomed to the approach.
So why do we use filler words?
We use fillers to create mental space in order for our mind to select or decide upon the next words or sentences. There are a few causes behind this. Maybe we are winging it, the words we have prepared are not cemented into memory, or perhaps we are not entirely comfortable with what we are saying. Either because we do not feel congruent with the message or the words are unfamiliar to us ( especially when it’s a second language you are speaking ) but this is not the full story, there are other forces in play that bring about the use of fillers beyond just creating space in the mind.
It can also reflect a deep subconscious discomfort to be the focus of other people’s attention, afterall nobody really likes people staring at them expectantly, do they?
If you take the time to observe other people it is likely that in a conversation they will fill all and every space in that exchange.
It seems we have an aversion to just being silently present with other people, often scrambling to keep the conversation going without pause.
Pauses can feel awkward right? However, being comfortable with silence is a wonderful measure of your inner peace or state.
Another thing to be aware of is that our inner sense of time is often distorted. When pausing between sentences one to two seconds can feel much longer than it actually is, so we simply slide a bridging sound or word, often elongating it to aaannd, eeeerm etc to alleviate the subconscious discomfort. This is easily evidenced by recording yourself speaking and notice the duration of the pauses or simply paying attention to others.
As you start to include pauses into your spoken delivery, what internally feels like a long pause actually comes across as a “normal “ space between the words.
Write the speech out and highlight the big bits!
If you’re planning on delivering a speech, here is something for you to try. Once you have written / typed your speech draft, take a highlighter pen and highlight each sentence that you feel is either important for the audience to appreciate or where you wish to make a lasting impact. An example might be a question being posed that you wish the audience to ponder further.
In a recent Toastmaster speech given by a friend he posed the question “how do you escape from the digital prison that is your mobile phone?”
A great opening, but despite the big question he didn’t let the full weight of the question land by using a pregnant pause, and missing the opportunity to really trigger a thought in the mind of the audience.
The pause allows for the big idea or question to register in the mind of the listener. Helping the listener to follow the speaker as if the speech was a journey that they are taking together.
If you think about it, often our spoken word is a lot like music. Music without space between the notes would simply be noise and so the meaning and impact of the words we speak are enhanced and defined by the space between them as much as the words themselves.
So read through your draft speech and at the end of a highlighted sentence leave a three line space, this gap translates to a three second pause, for all other sentences, a two line space / two second pause will suffice. Seeing it as a space seems to be more effective at slowing the speaker down when practicing than just saying take a three second pause.
Of course at this stage of your practice you’ll likely fly past your time limit, going way over but that is ok for now. The key takeaway here is slowing down your speech, and bringing awareness to the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next, between which you must NOT make any sound. No fillers, no words, simply take a long breath.
Video yourself to zero in on areas for improvement
Keep practising this, recording yourself as you speak, this will become helpful when you review your performance and start to use the recordings to centre upon the areas you’re making good progress and where you can still improve further whether that is removing filler words or playing around with other tools such as volume or intonation.
As you become more comfortable with the words and the silence, you can start to adjust the length of the pauses, shortening if need be to bring things into alignment with the time constraints. I have found that a five to seven minute time limit for a speech is not very long at all, so practice, time yourself and consider the time needed to deliver with good pacing and pauses.
Again, bring awareness to the last word spoken and the next word to be read as you practice the speech.
Remember to take a relaxed breath in the space between and simply speak the next line starting with the first word of the sentence. During the practice the slower you speak the less likely you will use a filler. The more often you practice the speech the more familiar, comfortable and congruent you will become with the words, in this relaxed state you’re less likely to have a mind that reaches for the filler and you will speak more naturally.
Getting comfy with the discomfort
The aim is to get comfortable with speaking in public, however for many it is closer to the truth that the first step is not comfort in such a situation, but simply to be ok with being uncomfortable.
When you think about it, getting nervous doesn’t help you overcome your nerves, it just adds more weight upon already burdened shoulders. Now maybe we are getting a little deep here but self-reflection and inquiry rarely leads to anything other than awareness if one can be honest with oneself and from there growth is possible.
Getting comfortable with people staring at you during the speech, whether whilst you’re speaking or momentarily silent is of course easier said than done. What I have found hugely helpful for people who succumb to nerves when speaking is by reframing how they think and feel about speaking in public.
Moving them away from seeing the speech as being a performance where you as a speaker feel you have to meet the audience’s expectations of what a good speaker is, to a sharing of something personal to you, a story or message you wish to communicate. Seemingly the same but energetically coming from different places.
Of course the type of speech you deliver is going to have an influence on this, a business speech is very different from something you might share at Toastmasters, but how you think about it and feel about it influences your performance.
To influence how you feel, it helps to set a positive frame. Your frame is how you look and feel about the activity of speaking. To do this I invite you to consider how you currently think and consequently feel about the business presentation or speech you’re planning on giving.
When you think about it, pay attention to your emotions towards it, what do you think and how does it make you feel?
Anxiety, resentment, fear, self-consciousness, shame, not being good enough, not smart enough, overwhelmed? These are just some of the responses people have shared with me from this exercise.
If it helps, jot the answers down on some paper. Whatever your answers are, they are what you think and feel in this moment, can you accept them without judging yourself?
It’s not helpful in having negative thoughts about any negative thoughts. Just see if you can accept those responses are how you feel for now, and that you also accept that they can also be changed.
Setting positive enabling Intentions
Without going into the depths of psychology, broadly speaking people tend to frame the world they interact with moment by moment through the filter of past experiences, these are largely invisible but invariably we are being influenced by a subconscious frame.
If you can trace the frame back to a sponsoring event, like for instance that time when you were six years old and had to read something out in class and choked up on the words, perhaps the other kids laughed, perhaps not but you became embarrassed to such a degree that it anchored a negative emotional frame in your subconscious to all and every future instance where you were expected to speak in front of others.
Over time that “one time” becomes a distant memory, or entirely forgotten, but thanks to a quirk of our long term ( procedural ) memory, we remember how the experience made us feel and ever forth in varying degrees unconsciously we put on an energetic overcoat of emotion taking us back to that moment as a six year old when the subconscious gets the slightest whiff of anything resembling a speaking activity. It does this to prepare the body for what’s to come. It’s part of the fight or flight response you have likely heard of.
Over time, everytime you speak, you feel those same emotions and in doing so reinforce the frame, that feeling, and it becomes a bit of a feedback loop.
The best way to overcome these subconscious frames is by starving them and seeding new enabling frames associated with the activity of speaking. In essence we stop feeding the old frame and reinforce a new positive one, one that is congruent with the outcome you actually want.
If the old frame makes you feel anxious and embarrassed we need to create one that makes you feel confident and energised. We do this by setting an intention for the outcome we want, and for this we will use a visualisation technique.
This works in the same way you have been unconsciously reinforcing the unwanted frame. Through repetition we start to make new neural connections between thoughts and emotions.
This visualisation only takes a minute or two, but requires you to repeat it frequently. Remember you may have been reinforcing the old unhelpful frame for years so be patient.
Visualisation
Decide what a good outcome feels like.
Sit down somewhere quiet and close your eyes. Picture in your mind’s eye with all the colour and texture of your imagination the ( future) time you delivered your presentation flawlessly. Imagine you just finished delivering the speech and you are looking over the faces of the audience, imagine what the absolute best outcome you could wish for would look and feel like.
Hear the applause, see the smiling faces, reflect on how you delivered the words like a champion, that everything flowed effortlessly.
Try to imagine the room you’ll be in, how you will be dressed, paint the best picture you can imagine, but picture it as if you just finished the speech, and with this imagining try to feel that sense of joy, elation and happiness that all your efforts have paid off, that you gave the performance of your career, how would that feel, Like a rockstar right?
We are creating the association of the speech and the possessive emotions, and it’s the strong emotional connection we are really trying to get at. In fact the feeling of confidence, joy or whatever emotion you wish to experience is the important part of the practice.
If you are unable to imagine the joy, confidence and elation of such a delivery then look to your past, any time when you experienced such a feeling, see if you can reconnect with that emotion and then from that feeling visualise the post speech moments.
Hold in mind this image with the emotion for one to two minutes if you can. Do this at the very least every day as the last thing you focus on before sleeping ( it will percolate throughout your subconscious during sleep ) and the very first thing upon waking. Repeat this little visualisation as often as you like or are able to in between. The more you do it the more you feed the new frame and starve the old. Remember you may have been feeding the old frame for years so I say again be patient with yourself.
Of course, this is in conjunction with lots and lots of practice delivering the speech but the idea here is positive reinforcement of the outcome you wish to bring forth out of all the potential outcomes.
The basic rule: if you do not set an enabling intention you will revert back to the past programming of your subconscious mind and that will deliver the experience you always get. If you would like to understand more about this, I go into this subject of intention setting much more deeply in my book The Conscious Sale, the power of State,Intention & Belief.
Okay let’s get back to the power of the pause!
The great thing about overcoming unwanted fillers is you can practice adding the silent pause in all and every interaction you have with people.
Bring your attention to your conversations and exchanges. I invite you to try this for yourself in the very next conversation you have. When speaking with someone, take a moment before replying. Slow down your response, allow a space to be there even if you’re crystal clear on what it is you wish to say next. Simply pause after the other has spoken. This might feel a little strange at first but stick with it.
This practice has another advantage, it communicates to the other person that you are actually listening to them rather than just waiting for your turn to speak.
Incidentally another excellent consequence of dropping filler words and sounds, speaking slower and more deliberately changes how people perceive you. You will notice you hold people’s attention far more easily, can be seen as more authoritative in what you say and your ability to be persuasive will increase.
When practicing your speech
I have found the best results from practicing a speech standing up when you are reading out loud. In fact I strongly encourage you to practice as much as possible to approach the practice as if you are actually delivering to an audience on speech night, complete with body movement and hand gestures as this will entrain the subconscious.
Doing so is effective for anchoring a physical mental and emotional connection to the delivery much in the same way the visualisation was creating the initial connection, the physical practice reinforces the intention. As such that your mind recognizes the practice pattern when you come to deliver the actual speech, as you become more comfortable practicing the speech the subconscious pattern will connect the relaxed state of being, with the performance and start to trigger a different pattern response to the one you might have previously experienced such as shortness of breath. Hot flushes or nervousness.
Public speaking is an iterative process, so be patient with yourself as you might be with a small child. Recognise that you are seeking to undo what you might have been subconsciously reinforcing for years and if you can realise that all your frames, thoughts and feelings of limitation or fear are entirely created by you, so you are able to rewrite those frames to lift you up.
Have fun with the journey, take your time and simply take a long slow breath before speaking,and you will overcome those pesky filler words.
Namaste
