Speaking confidence

Um, ah, and ano: what filler words actually cost you

“I say um constantly and I know it makes me sound unsure.”

The short answer

Fillers are not a flaw to eliminate; every fluent speaker uses them, and removing them entirely produces speech that sounds strange. What costs you is a specific subset: fillers in your first language, apologetic fillers, and clusters of three or more in a row.

The ones that cost you nothing

A single um before a difficult word is invisible. Native speakers produce roughly two to three fillers per minute of unscripted speech, and listeners do not consciously register them. If you removed every one from a recording of a fluent speaker, the result would sound clipped and slightly robotic.

So the goal is not zero. Chasing zero makes people speak in a stilted, over-monitored way that costs far more than the fillers did.

The ones that do

Three patterns are worth attention.

The first is fillers from your first language. Ano, este, eto and their equivalents mark the sentence as translated in a way that um does not, because the listener hears a switch rather than a pause. These are also the hardest to notice, since they are automatic in a way English fillers are not.

The second is the apologetic filler. Sorry, sorry, um, sorry. This converts a two-second pause into an announcement that you are struggling, and it invites the listener to start helping, which usually makes things worse.

The third is clustering. One um is invisible. Um, ah, so, like, um is heard as a person who has lost control of the sentence, even when the sentence was fine.

Replace, do not remove

The reliable move is substitution, not elimination. The pause is doing real work, so removing it leaves a hole. Replace it with something that does the same job and reads as deliberate.

Let me think for a second. That is a good question. How do I put this. Each takes the same time as three ums and sounds considered rather than lost. In an interview the difference is substantial, and it is one of the few speaking changes that produces an immediate result.

Silence works too, and is underrated. A clean one-second pause reads as confident. It only feels unbearable from the inside.

Where it actually matters

Fillers cost you almost nothing in ordinary conversation. Friends, colleagues you know, anything social: nobody is counting, and the people who love you have never once noticed.

There are three situations where the picture changes. A job interview, where you are being assessed and small signals get weighted heavily. A call centre assessment, where fluency is literally scored and clustering is one of the things scored. And any moment where you are the person delivering information others need, because hesitation there reads as uncertainty about the information rather than about the language.

So this is worth twenty minutes of attention before an interview and roughly none the rest of the time. Treating it as a permanent flaw to be corrected is a good way to become self-conscious in situations that never required it.

Why trying harder makes it worse

There is a loop here that catches people. You notice you say um. You start monitoring for it. Monitoring consumes the working memory you were using to build sentences. Sentences get harder, so you hesitate more, so you produce more fillers.

This is why people often get measurably worse immediately after being told about their filler use, and why the advice to just stop saying um is not merely useless but actively counterproductive.

Substitution avoids the loop because it replaces one automatic behaviour with another rather than asking you to suppress something in real time. You are not monitoring; you are just saying a different thing.

Try these

Reading about this changes nothing on its own, which is the whole difficulty with it.

Record ninety seconds and count

Talk about your day, then listen back and count fillers by type. Almost nobody knows which ones they use or how often, and the count is usually lower than feared and differently distributed than expected.

Swap one filler for one phrase

Choose your most frequent filler and one replacement. One substitution practised properly beats a general intention to say um less, which never survives contact with a real conversation.

Start where nobody is judging you

Ten minutes, voice only, no camera. Your partner is practising too, which is the part that makes it bearable.

Try a free session