Filler Words and Credibility: Why Nobody Remembers the Brilliant Speaker

Filler Words and Credibility: Why Nobody Remembers the Brilliant Speaker

A few years ago I gave a talk I thought was perfect. Eighty people, a topic I know inside out, long applause at the end. I walked out floating.

A woman was waiting for me by the door, programme in hand.

"Agustín, I loved it. Especially the bit where you said, um… you know… that thing at the start, right?"

And I'm standing there thinking: the thing at the start?

She couldn't remember it. Not one idea. Not one sentence. She remembered the energy and nothing else.

That night, in the hotel room, I did what I always do when something stings: I turned the problem into a number. I played the recording back with a notebook beside me and counted. Thirty-eight o sea — the Spanish cousin of "I mean" — in eleven minutes. Nineteen tag questions. And a little throat-clearing noise every single time I switched ideas, like a man knocking before he walks into someone else's room.

I didn't have a content problem. I had a noise problem.

What fillers take from you (and what they don't)

Before we go on, let's get rid of the statistical scaremongering. You've probably read somewhere that every "um" costs you 47% of your authority. Nobody has measured that. And if it were true, two fillers would leave you at 28% of yourself and four would turn you into a ghost on stage. Invented numbers are noise too.

Here's what I do see, and I've been watching it for over a decade in classrooms, on stages and in boardrooms.

Fillers don't take away your intelligence. They don't take away your preparation. They don't take away your drive.

They take three smaller and far more expensive things: your emphasis, your pause and your memorability.

And without memorability there's no decision. Nobody signs off a budget because of how they felt in the room. They sign it off because of what they can repeat to someone else in a corridor tomorrow. If your one important sentence arrives wrapped in three "I means", your one important sentence never leaves the room.

That's when I learned that speaking well isn't about adding. It's about removing.

The mechanism: you're driving with the handbrake on

Fillers almost never come from ignorance. They come from panic about losing your turn to speak.

Your head runs half a second ahead of your mouth. In that half second you have to pick the next word, and while you're picking it, it occurs to you that somebody might jump in. So you make a noise to hold your place. Like the guy putting his towel on the sun lounger at seven in the morning.

That noise is the handbrake. The car still moves, sure, but it smells of burning and you arrive late everywhere.

Hold your turn with your eyes, not with your throat. The more you fear silence, the more noise you make; the more noise you make, the less each of your words weighs.

Mistake #1: Covering the silence

The usual suspects: "um", "uh", "er", "so… yeah…".

They mean nothing. They're the sound of an engine in neutral. They show up in two places above all: at the start of a new idea, and right after an uncomfortable question.

The prescription: close your mouth and count to one. One full second of silence.

The mechanism: the listener's ear reads silence as a decision and "um" as a search. Same sentence, same information — ownership changes depending on what you put in the gap.

Mistake #2: Thinking out loud

This is where the big ones live: "like", "I mean", "sort of", "kind of", "basically", "you know what I mean".

These aren't sounds, they're rewrites. You say something, you're not quite convinced, and you say it again in different words in front of the person who is evaluating you. You're showing the draft and the final version at the same time.

The prescription: write the first sentence of every block, word for word. Only the first.

The mechanism: nearly all your rewrites land on openings, because that's when you still don't know how you're going to say it. Lock the opening and the rest comes out clean behind it, like a train that has already found its track.

"Hang on, Agustín — what if I go blank in the middle of the pause?"

You'll go blank either way, but silently. And a silent blank doesn't show: it looks like you're thinking. Which is exactly what you're doing.

Mistake #3: Asking for permission

"Right?", "you know?", "yeah?", "does that make sense?", "if that makes sense".

This family is the most expensive of all, and almost nobody hears it in themselves. It took me years. Hanging a "right?" on the end of every sentence is asking the room to countersign your idea before you've defended it.

The prescription: swap the question for two seconds of eye contact with one single person.

The mechanism: leading means giving certainty, not requesting it. The look gets you what you were actually after — proof that they're with you — without handing over the authority of the sentence.

And the one almost nobody spots: Mistake #4: Softening your own recommendation

"I think maybe we could perhaps look at possibly exploring…"

That's six cushions in eleven words. This isn't a filler of sound, it's a filler of commitment. And in a leadership meeting it does more damage than twenty "ums", because an "um" gets in the way while this one contradicts you.

The prescription: one sentence per meeting that begins with "My recommendation is".

The mechanism: the board isn't asking you for an opinion, it's asking you for a direction. You can qualify all you like afterwards. A caveat behind the recommendation reads as rigour; in front of it, it reads as fear.

The threshold I work with

There is no international standard for fillers per minute. If someone tells you the C-suite benchmark is 0.8%, ask them for the study. They won't show it to you.

What I do have is my own measuring stick, built from a lot of hours listening to other people's recordings with a notebook beside me. I'll lend it to you with the homemade label still on it:

• One or two a minute: invisible. You sound like a human being.
• Three or four: audible. They're still listening to you.
• Five or more: the room stops hearing WHAT you say and starts hearing how you say it.

That border — the moment the how eats the what — is the only one I care about. It isn't science. It's judgement. Use it as a thermometer, never as a verdict.

Five steps to clean up your voice

1. Measure before you have an opinion. Nobody knows their own count. I thought I said three o sea. I said thirty-eight.
2. Pick ONE. The most frequent one. Hunting five at once doesn't work: you go mute and come back worse.
3. Replace it with a one-second pause. Don't delete it — swap it. The brain doesn't erase habits, it substitutes them.
4. Armour your openings. First sentence of every block, written and rehearsed. That's where the noise piles up.
5. Rehearse tired. Eleven at night, after the gym, in a hurry. Fillers come back under stress, and on board day you will be under stress.

One honest warning: I still say o sea when I get excited. The difference is that now I hear it while it's coming out of my mouth. That's half the battle won.

Your task today, before ten tonight

Pick up your phone. Record two minutes on whatever you're preparing this week. Two, not ten.

Play it back with a notebook and make a mark for every filler. Add them up. Divide by two.

That number is your starting line. It isn't a grade, it isn't a verdict, it isn't your worth as a professional. It's a number, and numbers move.

Do it again on Friday with another two minutes. If it dropped by one, you already know how this works.

Close

You have the content. You have the experience. You have the voice.

The only thing in surplus is the noise.

Silence isn't a hole to fill. It's an underline.

The choice is yours and nobody else's. You can spend another twenty years saying "um" and wondering why your ideas don't weigh what they're worth — or you can start counting tonight with a two-euro notebook.

If you'd rather a machine did the counting, record two minutes on Mi.Coach and see which minute they cluster in.

Speak less. Say more. And make this a better world.

Dr. Agustín Rosa Author of Cállate: Los Errores del Orador · Founder of Mi.Coach