Episode #119 Um, Um, Um, Er, I, Um, Ah, Um

My former colleague was a notorious “ummer” and “ahher”. “Um, I, um, would, um, like to um, say um, thank you, um, for um, this um, opportunity”. Listening to him was seriously, seriously painful. Time seemed to freeze over, as it took forever for him to get to the point, which was mostly lost due to dreadful syntax. Your brain basically goes into meltdown mode and you miss the content because you have switched off. The ability to stand before others and express oneself clearly is a basic skill that sadly, is still lacking in many people.

Rambling, mumbling, zero focus on the audience, no power of persuasion, and “I Am the Brand” suicide continue to stunt careers. This is bad enough but some people decide to take it to extremes and really wipe out their career prospects. When we ladle in constant ums and ahs to our sentences, we have a recipe for disaster on our hands.

My colleague was a world champion, winning the gold medal in this oral hesitation department. I wasn’t as bad, but I wasn’t a clean skin either. I found that it was a habit that I didn’t need and which didn’t help me as a professional. The problem for most people is they don’t know what to do about it. I found a way out of this mess. I will now share with you a guaranteed formula to end this reign of verbal terror you have potentially been raining down on audiences your entire life.

Experience tells us that off-the-cuff remarks are more likely to produce hesitancy in speech than a prepared presentation. Makes complete sense doesn’t it. It forces speakers to think on their feet, which triggers the dreaded filler words to bridge the gap between getting the brain in gear and cogent words emerging from the mouth. It seems that for those hard-core ummers and ahhers, it makes little difference whether it is a prepared piece or something spontaneous. Reading a prepared speech should be easier, because what you have to say is written down there and all you have to do is follow the lines and read it, without having to first think what it is you want to say. Even so, some people make this another form of torture for an audience, by relentlessly umming and ahhing all the time. This should be avoided at all cost. No wonder people rate public speaking higher than death in surveys about their worst fears.

These filler words like um and ah give us time to think, but why do we need them? If we know what we want to say, we should just be able to get right into it. The problem is the way we prepare for speaking in front of others. Usually, readying a presentation means working on PowerPoint slides for 99.9% of us. Herein lies the first mistake. Slaves to PowerPoint will never become effective communicators, because the focus is on the data, rather than the messenger. We know from research that how we say something is more important than what we say. Please absorb that sentence again, as I am sure for many people that sounds ridiculous, outrageous, bogus, outlandish and total rubbish.

You may think, “Surely content is king and people will pay more attention to the message than smoke and mirrors used for the presentation”. But this is not the case. When a presentation’s content and delivery are incongruent, only 7% of the message is heard and 93% is lost due to distraction, caused by how we look and sound. Professor Mehrabian’s famous study came to this conclusion and in this age of distraction, it is more true now than ever before. How we say it includes how we use our facial expression, voice modulation, eye contact, gestures, posture, pauses etc. No wonder presenters who devote 99.9% of their time to PowerPoint content, at the expense of rehearsing their delivery, are dull, dull, dull. If listeners are only getting 7% of what we are saying, that does not constitute very effective communication. PowerPoint is not a substitute for good communication — it is merely an aid.

It is not only the dreaded slide deck. The president of a firm, who at their public presentation immediately launches into a corporate video, joins the ranks of “presentation scoundrels”. This happens more often than it should. The PR or marketing department, have been coopted to rescue the big boss from actually having to speak much to their audience. Videos should never take the place of strong communication for key messages. Like PowerPoint, they are just for support, so use them sparingly and make your face the key communication tool, followed by your voice, gestures, pauses and posture as noted. Using notes, either on paper or through the mechanism of the order of the slides, is perfectly acceptable. Reading those notes is not. Especially if you insist on reading them from the screen to us and doing so with your back toward the audience.

I attended a presentation where the speaker was well dressed, well groomed, the whole package — until she proceeded to read entirely from her notes. You could hear the entire air of her credibility being sucked out of the room, the moment she started reading. If you know your stuff, unless it is incredibly detailed and technical, you can get by without having to read notes. It was obvious she had not been trained and was not knowledgeable about public speaking. Don’t be relegated to the dustbin of totally forgettable speakers like her.

We should allow our notes to spark the messages we wish to convey. Prior to delivery, practice, practice, practice! No one expects perfection, so incorrect pronunciation or pauses to consider subsequent remarks are natural and acceptable.

On top of these issues, we make things even worse when the speech delivery is so annoying and therefore distracting, because of all the ums and ahs. The use of filler words is permissible a few times in a presentation, but the higher the frequency, the tighter the hangman’s noose is being tied around the speaker’s own reputation and personal brand.

Here is the Dr. Greg Story’s rule on avoiding filler words: Practice before you deliver in front of your audience. Here is how you need to practice. Decide the first word of each sentence and hit that word hard. Allow no other noise to escape your mouth, before continuing with the next word in the sentence. Once you get to the end of that sentence, SHUT UP. It is very, very important to purse your lips together at the end of that sentence, so that no sound can escape. Keep repeating this process and there is no possibility of filler words ever being uttered. It takes hours of practice, of course, but I guarantee you this works.

I wasn’t quite in the league of the erstwhile colleague I referred to at the beginning, but I did give him a run for his money at different times. We all do these ums and ahs, because we are trying to fill the vocal vacuum, while we think. We can think in silence. We do this during pauses between the points we are making. Pauses are a natural thing and a better alternative to our ums and ahs. Like me, everyone I have taught this method to has eliminated filler words almost entirely. They followed this simple technique until it became habit — a positive habit. Pursing, pausing and practicing are the keys to success.