Ever wondered how to get rid of the habit of fillers? They clutter up your communication and demonstrate all too noticeably just how nervous you are feeling.
While people often comment negatively on presenters who use too many fillers, we use them in lots of other situations and they generally have a negative impact.Fillers sometimes serve a useful function in casual speech, but in more formal communication they are a dead giveaway of nervousness.
To eradicate your fillers, you have to know to acknowledge that you are a filler sinner. A presentation is a good opportunity to work on the problem because it involves a finite time during which you can focus on them. The next time you present, get a brave person to count the number of fillers and let you know the total. Next time, aim to reduce the number, get the countback and repeat the dose until you are reformed!
Ellen Finklestein’s excellent PowerPoint newsletter had a good tip last week that got me thinking about this common problem. She suggest you tape your prepared speech, then go through and mark every filler on your notes. Then re-tape, cutting as many out as you can. Keep doing this until you have removed them all.
Once you have achieved filler awareness, a positive cure is to simply take a breath each time you feel a filler coming on. The technique turns the negative of a filler into valuable pause. Most presenters can enhance their communication by increasing the number and length of their pauses. So at the very least you will gain a more dramatic effect.
Good luck with this. It really pays to …um work.. on this problem, because basically it like matters?
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