Hello again friends. I'm Alex Lyon you're about to do lesson 6 of 7 in this mini-
course. You're almost finished. I'm really happy for you. If you haven't yet subscribed to the
channel, now is the time to do so. Make sure you visit the homepage for the
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the course. Let's jump right in.
In our last lesson, we looked at pauses. In this,
lesson 6, we'll look at avoiding fillers. Concise tip number six is to avoid
fillers. I call it a concise tip because certainly avoiding fillers is going to
make you more concise. It will also add a lot to your clarity and to your
confident sound. Fillers drag out and muddle messages for listeners and fillers
make you sound very unsure of what you're saying. Here are some common fillers.
Right, sort of, kind of, something like that. As well as um, uh, you know, so, and.
I know some people that count ums and uhs during presentations. But it's not just
annoying. It also really goes to your credibility.
There's some research on powerless vs powerful speech and when listeners in
research situations were shown videos of speakers who use lots of fillers they
thought they were very unconfident or powerless in their speech. They'd give the
same speakers a clean script so they would not use any fillers and the listeners in
the research situation thought wow they really know what they're talking about.
They're very confident. So you can sound confident just by getting rid of your
fillers. It's a really important issue to get after. Strategy one is to identify
your filler habits. These are habits.
Most people have specific fillers that they use over and over again. I use "kind
of," I used to use that. I also use "so" and I'm working on that one but I still use
it from time to time. You want to listen to yourself and pinpoint your specific habits.
Listen to recorded presentations, for example, or you might even ask a trusted
friend. Hey, do I use any fillers do I say you know or anything like that? And even
if they don't have an answer for you on the spot, they'll be able to listen to you
as you move forward. Strategy two is to replace fillers with pauses. I talked about
this in an earlier lesson how awesome pauses can sound in the right place.
Some people call fillers "vocalized pauses." In other words, we should be
pausing but we're filling it in with an utterance that doesn't need to be there.
Pauses give you time to think but they also make you sound more confident.
Here we have an earlier example with fillers put in there where pauses should be and
you'll notice how tentative and how unsure it sounds. So, we have a few items
to cover today and uh and we'll look at our social media campaign and uh we'll look at uh
our overall growth and uh Erin will take you know suggestions about changes to
the uh website. If I were to come to your meeting and speak like this you would
notice instantly that I had lots of fillers. And I have seen people who are
supposed to be in leadership positions doing this and listeners, in fact, did
mention, wow, they said um and uh a lot. This matters to people. What we want to
do is add pauses in those places where we normally use fillers. And we would say the
word "pause" or "period" in our head like we mentioned in a previous lesson. Pauses
restore that clear, confident sound that we're going for. And you'll notice that
there are some pauses in the middle here but they still sound better than the fillers.
So if we were to look at this example ultimately our goal would be to get rid
of the fillers that are in the middle of the sentences and only use the pauses
that punctuate our communication in a desired fashion. We want to avoid fillers.
Our takeaway strategies are to identify your specific filler habits. You don't do them all.
You just do some and if you isolate your specific habits you're going to have a much
easier time solving that problem. And then replace those fillers with actual
pauses. Step one is to practice saying "pause" in your head instead of using fillers.
Up next, we're going to work on confident nonverbals. That will be our last lesson
and it will
superimpose and thread through all the other things we've talked about a really
nice way.