Words Fail Me

Easily the most common technical mistake I am still apt to make while verbally communicating is to drive at a point, re-drive at the point in different words, and then ensure the death of the point with even more driving and rewording.

'Words + Words • Time' is a great recipe if you want to inspire boredom.

This 'Death of Words by Speaking' situation occurs for various reasons. We may like hearing our own voice and think we have a big bowl of important things to say. We may believe if we constantly fill the silence we will look confident and certain. And some of us think we are supposed to talk all the time when we have a listener.

Still, words lose meaning very fast when there are a lot of them. Some listeners can hang with us longer, but we all have listening limits, and the limits of listening to talk are short. Even the greatest actors in the world are ineffective at holding attention if the narrative is uninteresting.

Speaking needs constant variety to keep audience engagement, and therefore comprehension.

Variety can be achieved in many ways, from facilitated choices like orchestrating purposeful audience movement, topic-based partner or group sharing, or the use of visuals. Variety can also be heightened with presentational choices, including how we use our verbals.

Here are a few strategies that have worked for me in most situations:

1. Prepare specific phrases for certain points. I tend to dislike scripted talks, but a few prepared phrases work well to nail a point and cue me to move on.
   
2. Use periods. Many phrases are more effective when followed by a pause, resounding more loudly without a bunch of 'noise words' after them. 
3. Allow acuity to affect delivery. It is damaging to sell people on a point when they are already sold, need a different dynamic to understand, or just need more time to consider what you are saying. Constantly see and hear your audience; are they with you or do you need to change your pattern?
   
4. Appreciate that words are musical. Musical climaxes cease to be impactive when they have a bunch more music at the same volume after a peak - climaxes just become plateaus. Monitor your rhythms, paces, and volumes, and accept that every group has limits on how long they can listen to one person talk. 

Perhaps I've said too much already.

Um, Er, Like, Uh

Because of my training work in public speaking over the past twenty years, I tend to interact with a lot public speakers who have strong opinions and 'rules' about verbal communication.

Because there are always some people who give as little effort as possible to their work, I have heard my fair share of public speaking assumptions and theories stated as facts by some of these public speaking gurus.

I need to clear something up. I need to clear it up based on my life of listening, study, and open-mindedness: Fillers are OK.

"Oh no he did'n!"

"Yeah, gurl. I totally did."

Unless you are one of the masterful top 1% of verbally talented and trained public speakers, do not fret about fillers. Fillers are what bean counter minds like to tally mark about another speaker at a speech training seminar. Ever heard of majoring in the minor? If you hone in on fillers as your main coaching point, you have no idea what you are doing. Stop It.

Now, yes, I know that too much of anything can be annoying. But what constitutes overuse of a filler is based on so many factors besides one listener's opinion - factors like, um, everyone else in the room. Because there are no defined rules in the court of public speaking law, somehow the rule of speaking just defaulted into: NEVER USE A SINGLE FILLER.


But that rule is wrong. It is a 'letter of the law' rule rather than a 'spirit of the law' rule. Let me do my best to persuade you.

For most speakers, being lasik-precise with one's language distracts the speaker's focus from hitting the intended message. If played out to its robotic end, this incessant filler-focus can, as Gordon Sumner said, dehumanize yourself. Practice avoiding filler when you are in everyday conversation with your friends or in inconsequential circumstances. Game time is not the time to try new moves unless they are well-rehearsed.

Again, yes, I understand annoyance due to overuse. I am aware of this. I am aware. I am. The problem is that a lot of people with a little knowledge are a dangerous body of rule makers. "Fillers" can actually serve a linguistic purpose. They are often called "discourse markers" by linguists, because they help listeners better understand meaning within spoken communication. Read this PDF for researched and studied details.

If you are watching a video clip of a comic from a performance in front of a paying audience, chances are that he/she is in the top slice of successful comedians, because most never make it past five-minute open mic night at Chuck's. When you listen to a comedian, chances are good that you will hear fillers. Whether you like a comic's humor or not, these people engage in arguably the most difficult and elusive communication objective on the planet: get a room full of total strangers to laugh using nothing but your live communication to drive the outcome. They know what they are doing with language, purposefully and intuitively. Comedians use fillers to create comic timing, characterization, 'relatability', and to get specific reactions and subtle points across.

Fillers can be either a purposeful style or unintentional, based on social factors such as age, gender, immediate friends, or role models. And certain words become more or less prevalent in our speech depending on the social dynamic of the moment. Personally, when I am in front of a group, my fillers drop significantly because my training of mastering concise word choice increases, and my language becomes more visually descriptive. When I am more relaxed and off-the-cuff, or I am telling a funny or personal story, my language is more kinesthetic and emotion-based. In those moments I feel my way through the conversation more, so fillers pop up more often.

Uhhhhh...

Nobody except novices and the less successful or respected public speakers ever give me feedback after a public speaking event about how I need to eliminate any of my fillers, even though I virtually always use them. That is because when we have a powerful message and are able to create emotion in the speaking we do, the individual moments of individual words become unimportant to the audience.