I came across a thread last week: some kickass entrepreneur women all grimacing at their use of filler words when they talk. They’re producing podcasts or listening back to their video content and hating on their vocal tics—from “right?” to “like” to “does this make sense?” to too much “I love that.”
One wrote of hers, “I’m working on it!”
Another, “I can’t stand it anymore but I also can’t stop it from happening!”
Another, “Ugh I drive myself crazy.”
Plus a whole lot of 🫣 🙄 😬 and 🤦♀️.
So behold:
A post that ISN’T on filler words.
Nope. Not on how to count your ums or “like”s. Not even on power pauses.
No, it’s a post on what to do INSTEAD so the filler words are of ZERO CONSEQUENCE, my love. Like truly madly deeply beside the fucking point.
First of all: do you hear mine? I uh before every important thing I say here. I use “like” too, like frequently.
In fact… if we’re getting technical for a sec, it’s aaaaaalmost like my uhs are somehow essential to my brain’s process of thought-gathering in real time.
Indeed: linguists will tell you fillers are useful both for us AND for our listeners:
Nonverbal cues, including stress on key words alongside the use of gaze and gesture, assist us when speaking or understanding others. Verbal cues such as “discourse markers” (for example, “okay”, “so”, “um”, “uh”) also accomplish important work in interaction.
Listeners conventionally associate ums and uhs with broken speech (called “dysfluency” in studies of communication) when speakers self-repair by interrupting themselves to self-correct. They might do this to more clearly express themselves or to conduct a word search.
This is according to Anna Filipi, a professor of applied linguistics at Monach University, in Australia. She goes on to say:
Yet research suggests ums and uhs also serve a range of other functions in conversation. We know that where they occur in talk, and how they are articulated, contribute to meaning.
In extended speech, like a public presentation or speech, such markings are important for the listening audience so they can follow the meaning of what is being said. The uhs work like bullet points.
Y’ALL THE UHS WORK LIKE BULLET POINTS.
TLDR: WHAT IF FILLERS ARE ACTUALLY NOT-PROBLEMS????
I know, me yelling this lovingly in your direction isn’t necessarily gonna work.
The cultural story, the “convention,” is they’re a sign that we’re not ready for prime time and it’s a hard story to let go of. Especially because: a lot of folks in prime time use fewer ums and uhs than we do when we’re first starting out.
So this is what I’m really here to say:
What if our favorite speakers use fewer ums and likes than we do (sometimes) NOT because they’ve analyzed their filler words and eliminated them like zits…
But because they did the inner work to love themselves and their ideas so hard they showed up without needing to self-repair so much.
Oprah, in an interview in her 30’s, talks about catching the wily impulse to be “interested in impressing people instead of doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”
She speaks of a pivotal, tiny tiny moment she fucked up on camera in her early days and what happened next—as she calls it, “the first real moment I ever had.”
About how she was “pretending to be someone I was not” until she figured out how to love herself enough to be that person. “Be yourself is really what I learned to do.”
The truth is:
We um and uh and “like” less when we give ourselves radical permission to love exactly who we are and practice it over time. THAT’S the work.
Not the easy cop-out of counting our ums.
You cannot police yourself into love; you can only love yourself into love.
And, as Oprah puts it in the video below, “thoughts are the greatest vehicle to change, power, and success in the world.”
Thoughts like:
Thank GOD I’m here to help these folks rather than I hope I don’t fuck up
Or
I trust that the sounds that come out of my mouth are the right ones rather than dysfluency dysfluency dysfluency
Pathologizing our communication is a story that doesn’t belong to us, to our tender spirits, to our legacy work. Like racism, it distracts us from what we’re here to do.
Bask in Oprah’s guidance here. Literally I came across this today and was like OMG IT’S PERMISSION TO SPEAK FROM THE VAULT—ITS BEEN HERE ALL ALONG.
Just watch the first 5-and-a-half minutes, if that’s all you’ve got:
So I ask, when you notice yourself worrying about your (ehem we’re all linguists now) discourse markers:
What are you supposed to be doing?
I’m betting the answer has a lot more to do with love out loud, with care and calling and connection, than it does with 🤦♀️.
Love and more of it,
Samara
PS. Check out all the details on upcoming HOW TO SHOW UP Live Zooms.
Join us (upgrade if you haven’t yet) and get practical help on how to DO the whole loving instead of policing thing. Next one’s THIS FRIDAY, JUNE 7TH. At 10am PT 🎉
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