Matt Abrahams

There's no fight.

There's no argument.

But if she says it's innate and I say it's innate, then we have the issue.

So understanding the prioritization and really listening to understand what's involved, you can mitigate a lot of the conflict that you're having.

I had a guest on my show.

She's a psycholinguist, and she helped me realize that filler words are not bad.

Filler words are actually helpful.

They do things for us.

They save the space.

So if I'm not done talking and I don't want others to interrupt, I say, .

There's research in the child development literature that says,

When we speak to kids, before we say a new term or give a new idea, we will often preface it with a filler word, um or uh.

We signal what's coming next is important.

And I think that's why it drives us nuts when somebody says so many filler words because we've been trained as kids that something important follows it.

And when all that follows it is another um, we get frustrated.

So the goal is not to eliminate these.

The goal is to make them not distracting.

In fact, playwrights and screenwriters will actually add filler words to make it sound human.

The best way I know to reduce filler words, especially the ones that are most annoying, and those are the ones that sit in silence.

So I'm done speaking, and then I start speaking again.