Back in the 1980s when I was a graduate student teaching my first class, I asked a friend to come watch me teach.

She said I did a good job, but I said "um" and "ahh" too much.

Ouch!

Not sure why that criticism still stings 30-some years later, but it does.

One of the most annoying aspects of my own speaking style is my tendency to fill every pause and silence with some sound, normally "um" or "ahh".

I've done it for a long time, and it's been a hard habit to break.

Maybe you do it too.

It's actually not a bad habit in conversation, where any silence risks being interpreted as the end of your turn. If you want to hold onto the floor (i.e., your turn at talk), you can fill silences with sound.

But when you are giving a speech or presentation, it's a habit that makes you look and sound less professional.

I was just re-reading Max Atkinson's great book on public speaking, "Lend Me Your Ears," when I came across a simple exercise that can help you eliminate bad vocal habits like this one.

Stop Saying “Um” and “Ahh”

One of the aspects of my own communication style that I like the least is my tendency to fill silences with "um" or "ahh". If you look at my old videos and even if you listened to me on this video, if I'm not careful I will say "um" or "ahh" when I'm trying to think of the next thing to say.

This is okay in ordinary conversation. In fact, if we don't fill the silences with a sound like "um" or "ahh" in ordinary conversation, other people will think we're done with our turn at talk and they'll take a turn at talk.

I may have developed this habit in order to maintain my turn at talk, but in public speaking or lecturing or any other style that's not ordinary conversation, "um" or "ahh" sound unprofessional. They are disfluencies. They make us seem like we don't know exactly what we're doing. They don't make us look good.

So I've always wanted to eliminate them. I was reading a book recently called Lend Me Your Ears by Max Atkinson. It's a great book about public speaking, and in it Atkinson suggests a simple exercise to improve your fluency and eliminate these "um" or "ahh".

The exercise is this. He says, set a timer for one minute, take your phone camera and make a video of yourself speaking extemporaneously, off the cuff, for one minute and see if you can not say "um" or "ahh" even once.

So that's the challenge. Speak for one minute without a single "um" or "ahh". I'm going to try to do it right here, and then I'm going to ask you to send in your own attempts to do this. I'm going to use my phone. I'll put a timer on the screen also, so let's give this a try.

That was harder than it looked, even though I know that topic really dead cold. I don't think I said "um" or "ahh" for a whole minute. It took all my energy not to say "um" or "ahh". In fact, I was distracted by the need not to say "um" or "ahh".

I guess over time, if I kept doing this exercise I would get better. I was very conscious every time I needed to collect my thoughts and think of the next thing to say to be silent rather than to fill that silence with "um" or "ahh", so I recommend that you try this.

Please take out your phone and set a timer and see if you can speak for one minute uninterrupted without saying "um" or "ahh", and then post those videos to your own YouTube channel or email them to me via @bruceathowcommunicationworks.com, and I'll take a look at them. If you don't mind, I'll even put them up on another video and we can look at them if you give me your permission to do so.

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