Eliminate Filler Words When Speaking: 6 Tips

Are you polluting your words when you speak with filler words? You risk verbal smog clouds with fillers words that cloud your credibility and confidence. What’s worse? An audience struggles to see your acknowledge your expertise, hear your intelligence, and believe in your ability to communicate. You can begin to eliminate filler words by the end of the article.

To become familiar with what filler words are and where fillers words come from, you can read this article. You can also read, 'How to bring filler words to your conscious awareness'.

NOTE: For the rest of this article the word fillers mean filler words, filler sounds, and filler phrases.

6 Tips to Reduce and Eliminate Filler Words

The 6 tips listed to reduce and eliminate filler words when speaking will give you a verbal word purifier to clean up the pollution from fillers and allow you to speak with more clarity and conciseness.

1) Calm yourself

When nervous, most peoples’ attention focuses on their body’s response to anxiety instead of focusing on what words to say. Thinking and experiencing discomfort like shakes, sweating, muscle tension, and rapid heartbeat clouds your mind’s ability to produce the exact words. Reducing your nervousness reduces your fillers because a calm body and a calm mind will allow you to focus your attention on your words.

Tip to implement

 Practice deep breathing

to calm yourself. Deep breathing from your abdominal region reduces tension, lowers your blood pressure, and slows your heart rate as you circulate more oxygen through your body. The extra oxygen also allows your brain your breath which will allow you to think more clearly.

For the basics of deep breath you want to breathe from your stomach. You also want to breathe in through your nostrils. When you properly engage in deep breathing during your inhale your stomach should inflate out like a balloon blowing up. When you exhale your stomach should deflate like a balloon losing air.

To gain familiarity with deep breathing you’ll want to sit down and keep a straight posture. Place your hands on your stomach. Let the tips of your middle fingers touch. When inhaling you will feel your stomach expand and your middle fingers will no longer touch. When exhaling you will feel your stomach contract and your middle fingers will touch when you finish your exhale.

A basic deep breathing exercise is called 2-1 breathing. You want to close your mouth and breathe through your nose. Inhale for 4 seconds and exhale for 8 seconds. Vary the times based on your ability. Remember your exhale time is twice as long as your inhale time. Start off with 3 to 5 double time breaths and you will start to feel calmer.

2) Replace fillers with silence

Some people have a tendency to verbalize their thinking process with ahs and ums. Silence eliminates those fillers as you gather your next words to say. As mentioned in the previous article, fillers commonly happen when you start speaking and when you finish speaking. Instead of speaking fillers, use silence.

Tip to implement

Close your mouth

when not speaking. A closed mouth prevents fillers from slipping out.

3) Use pauses as punctuation

In writing you create punctuation in different ways such as commas, ellipses, hyphens, and periods. Punctuation provides pacing, chunking, and organizing your words. While speaking, your punctuation for pacing, chunking, and organizing your thoughts comes from your pause duration. A quick pause acts as a comma and longer a pause acts as a period. Because pauses break up the flow of your words you give yourself precious extra time to gather your thoughts. During the pause, you think and select your next words which mean you have more control of what words leave your mind and leave your mouth.

Tip to Implement

Practice the verbal timeout

Much like a coach calls a timeout when he notices something wrong on the field, give yourself a verbal timeout before you get verbally flustered. You will pause and give yourself a moment of silence before continuing to speak. The pause will give you space to gather your next words. You need to be aware of when you fillers to make use out of this tip. For example, if you know that you say fillers after you get interrupted (someone makes a comment or asks a question) then intentionally take a verbal timeout before continuing to speak.

4) Speak in shorter sentences.

Lengthy sentences means more words leaving your mouth. The more words that you say, your sentence can become wordy and held together with fillers. You can reduce fillers by speaking in shorter sentences.

Tip to Implement

Practice ‘ten words or less’ exercise

You want to first practice this exercise with friends and when the stakes are low.  Try this exercise in conversations where you can only give responses of less than 10 words.

This exercise will make you think of what you exactly want to say in the fewest words. Also by giving yourself more time to think, you will reduce the likelihood of filler slipping out. The brevity of this exercise will help train your mind to speak more succinctly.

Since you can only respond with less than 10 words, count each word you say with your fingers and thumbs. The counting of words also slows you down and forces conciseness with your responses. Yes, you feel awkward doing the exercise. You will also have a hard time keeping your replies to less than 10 words. When you’re forced to be economical with your words you will omit fillers.

For example, a friend asks ‘what did you think of the meal?’ You respond with 5 words, ‘filling portions but bland taste.’

5) Slow down your rate of speech

Sometimes when nervous or excited you will talk faster. The faster you talk can increase the chances for verbal flubs like fillers. Slowing down your rate of speech gives you more time to formulate your thoughts and select the exact words to say.

Tip to Implement

Practice pause placement signs

Place pauses between your sentences to act as verbal speed bumps. Additionally, you can give yourself some mental speaking speed limit signs. When you catch yourself speaking too fast, give yourself a mental yellow and black ‘slow down’ sign to pause, take a breath, and slow your pace down. Additionally when you make a point, say something important, or transition to a new idea, give yourself a mental ‘stop’ sign to cease speaking for a moment.

6)  Breathe more

Breathing more will help you apply the other tips like pausing, relaxing, slowing down, and speaking in shorter sentences.

Tip to implement

Breathe to give your words space

Many people focus on saying words and forget about the breathing space between words. Let your natural breaths indicate places to pause, slow down, and gather your thoughts. As mentioned with tip #2, breathe in silence.

Sit in silence as you listen and feel your breath. Pay attention to your breathing rhythm when you inhale and exhale. You might pause on an inhale, slow down on an exhale (as you run out of breath), and gather your thoughts with an inhale and an exhale.

Reduce and Eliminate Fillers

Practice these 6 tips and overtime you will reduce and eliminate fillers. You will sound more self-assured, clear, and precise with your words the next time you speak.