I was talking to a colleague yesterday about the public speaking courses he went through while he was employed at a big multinational corporation. He said that everyone at the manager level and above attended a course I would describe as prescriptive: Do this and don’t do that, and you’ll be a “good public speaker.”
One focus of this course was the dreaded “filler words.” The practice in that methodology was to count a speaker’s “um”s and “uh”s, in order to reflect back to them what could be an unconscious habit.
After a couple of years of management attending this course, my colleague said, a routine developed following most presentations. The speaker would finish their talk. Shortly afterward, several colleagues would come up, bits of paper in hand, to let them know how many filler words they had used.
The unspoken philosophy here is that, once you whittle the number of filler words down to zero, presto! Now you’re a good public speaker. Of course, that’s a false promise. Measuring the filler words is just that–a measurement. It cannot capture the quality and impact of the talk, and the idea that those are equated has done more harm than good.
These self-appointed Um-Counters were so caught up in “helping” the speaker that they missed the point of the talk. And in turn, the speaker may get self-conscious about the filler words to the extent that they fail to connect to the audience.
If you really want to help a speaker, listen for their intention. How do they make you feel? What does their talk make you want to do? If you are genuinely too distracted by their filler words to be able to concentrate on their message, ask them what their intention is. What is the “why” of their talk?
Getting clear on the “why” is instrumental in addressing the how. Stop counting “um”s, and ask why the “um” might be there, instead.
