Episode #383: Removing Distractions When We Are Presenting In Japan

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a bad idea and yet so many presenters do it. I was attending an Annual General Meeting event and the organisation President gave a short talk. The content was appropriate for the occasion. The length was good, not too long and not too short, the voice strength loud enough to be easily heard, and the cadence was easy to follow. Unfortunately, he managed to slip an “um” into just about every sentence. This is a filler word to allow the brain to assemble the next words, and it is always a catastrophe for presenters.

He was a mature man, so presumably, he has always been peppering his sentences with this filler word and has now built it into a solid habit. I am not even sure he is aware he is doing it, but as the listener, it grates on you and grates every sentence. Effectively, he is opposing himself whenever he speaks. He has his message he wants to impart, and he defeats that message getting through, by creating an annoying distraction for his audience.

There is a cure for this bad habit and it just talks time, patience and discipline to break it. Pursing our lips becomes the technological intervention we need to stop using filler words. When we start a sentence, hit the first word with a little more strength than the other words, so that no filler word can intervene. We now concentrate on speaking continuously and smoothly with no breaks – again we deny filler words any entry points.

When we get to the end of the sentence, we purse our lips together, so no words can emerge and we get ready to hit the next first word in the sentence slightly harder than the other words. We just keep repeating this process.

It won’t eliminate filler words automatically or immediately, but you will find you no longer start your sentence, as a lot of people do, with “um”. The flow continuity of the sentence is important. That doesn’t mean we cannot use pauses.

The pauses need the same application I described we should use at the start of the sentence. When you get to a pause, you are effectively starting again, so purse the lips so no “ums’ can emerge and hit that next word a little harder, so no “ums” can intervene when you restart.

Keep working on this pattern and eventually you will almost entirely eliminate filler words. I know this is true, because like everyone else, I was using “ums’ and “ahs” too. Once I worked on eliminating them using this technique, life got a lot better. It is a very rare occasion today that a filler word slips into my sentences. I do a lot of training and public speaking which is not me reading stuff but coming straight out of my brain. This means there is always the problems of trying to think what I want to say and having a filler word pop up. When I look at the videos of my presentations, I can see that there are almost no filler words, so the system is working.

I was watching a video on how shoes are handmade and the cobbler had a habit of saying “you know” in almost every sentence. Technically, this is not a filler word, but it is a bad habit and again distracts the audience from our message. Not just humble cobblers get trapped with these junk expressions, which add no value to what we are saying. I was chatting with a high-powered lawyer here about how important presenting skills were for lawyers. He agreed, and he assured me he was always making an effort to speak well and differentiate himself from all the other hungry lawyers out there looking for new clients. Lo and behold, next minute he was up on stage in a panel discussion and there they were, a continuous string of “you know” combos distracting from what he was saying.

Another one is “like” which gets thrown in for no reason. It gets quite sad, when the really challenged start linking them together, “Um, well you know, like.…”. This is a lifetime of habit formation with no conscious thought going into the process of presenting in front of others. As I said, video is such a great tool. Whenever I present, I always try to video myself. I do this to drive the content out through social media but also so that I can check myself to see if I have any bad habits creaping in.

Just in case you get the impression I see myself perfect, I am working on my overuse of “so”. I have a habit of abusing this word as a bridge between chapters or sections of what I am going to say. I will finish one point then add “so” with a pause and move on to the next section. Once in a talk is okay, but more than that and it becomes a distraction I need to eliminate. I need to train myself to use a variety of expressions such as, “let’s move on”, “another key point is”, “next”, “let’s talk about”, etc. I realised I had developed this habit when I watched myself on video. I was not conscious I was using that bridge so often, so video review is always a good idea, no matter how much presenting we do.