How to Stop Saying Um and Uh: The Pause Is the Fix

The three things that decide whether you can stop saying um and uh: (1) accept that fillers are a signal, not a habit — your brain is buying time. (2) Replace the filler with deliberate silence; pauses do the same job without the cost. (3) Record yourself and count. You can’t reduce what you don’t measure. Most people halve their filler rate in 3 weeks. Drill below.

If you have ever heard yourself on a recording — and counted 14 ums in 90 seconds — you have already done the most painful and most useful exercise in this whole article. After 24 years of training working professionals in Singapore, I can tell you the difference between confident-sounding speakers and nervous-sounding speakers is rarely word choice. It is the gap between words — and what fills it.

Here is a useful way to think about it. Filler words are like dropped pennies on a hardwood floor. One penny is unnoticeable. Twenty pennies in two minutes are loud — even if individually each penny was tiny. The skill isn’t picking up the pennies one by one. It is not dropping them in the first place — by giving your mouth somewhere else to go in the silent moment. This article gives you that somewhere.

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1. Why we say um (it’s a signal, not a flaw)

Fillers are not sloppy speech. They are a normal cognitive process. When your brain needs 0.5 to 2 seconds to find the next word, your mouth has two options:

1. Stay silent — the brain finds the word; you continue.
2. Vocalise — um, uh, sort of, you know — to hold the floor while you think.

Most people default to option 2 because in casual conversation, silence can be misread as “I’m done speaking, you can take the floor.” The filler is a turn-holding device. In monologue settings — presentations, Q&A, interviews — there is no one waiting to take your turn, so the filler has no purpose. But the habit is automatic.

Three implications:

• You can’t suppress the cognitive gap. It will happen. The brain needs the time.
• You can change what fills it. Silence works as well as um and reads as composed instead of nervous.
• The fix is conditioning, not willpower. You don’t try not to say um. You build a different default for the gap.

The same physiological-first thinking drives public speaking confidence — the body responds before the mind, and fixes work better at the body level.

2. The pause is the fix

A deliberate pause does the same job as a filler — buying you time to think — but reads completely differently to the audience.

Reads as	Sounds like
Confident, composed	A 1-2 second silence with steady breathing
Nervous, unprepared	A 1-2 second “um” in the same gap

Same gap. Different filler. The audience’s read of your competence shifts entirely on which one they hear.

The good news: you don’t need to add anything new. Silence is the lowest-effort replacement available. The work is getting comfortable with the silence — most people who um are people who feel silence is awkward. It usually isn’t, except in your head.

3. The 4 categories of filler word

Knowing the categories helps you spot your own pattern:

Category	Examples	Most common context
Vocal fillers	um, uh, ah, er	Pre-thought; brain searching for next word
Verbal fillers	like, you know, basically, sort of, kind of	Casual conversational habit
Throat-clearers	”so…”, “I mean…”, “obviously…”	Stalling at the start of sentences
Apologetics	”I might be wrong but…”, “this is just my view…”, “sorry to interrupt…”	Hedging — often signals lower confidence than intended

Most professionals have one or two dominant categories, not all four. Identifying yours is half the work. The recording drill in section 4 surfaces them.

4. The recording-and-counting drill

The single most effective filler-reduction drill. Three steps:

1. Record yourself for 3-5 minutes speaking on a topic you know well — talking about a recent project, explaining a process, describing your role. Phone voice memo is fine.
2. Listen back with a notepad. Count every filler. Use tally marks for each category.
3. Note the moments where they cluster. Beginnings of sentences? Transitions between points? When asked an unexpected question?

Most professionals are surprised by their count. A typical first recording produces 15-30 fillers in 5 minutes — 3-6 per minute. Aware of it, the same person typically reduces to 5-8 in 5 minutes within 3 weeks of practice.

The pattern of where fillers cluster matters as much as the count. Most fillers cluster at three predictable moments: starting a sentence, transitioning between ideas, and answering a question whose answer you haven’t fully formed. Fixing those three moments fixes most of the count.

5. The 3-week um-reduction protocol

A staged practice routine that compounds.

Week	Focus	Daily practice
Week 1	Awareness	Record yourself once. Count fillers. Don’t try to fix yet.
Week 2	The pause	In low-stakes conversations, deliberately pause where you’d usually um. 5 minutes a day.
Week 3	Stake-shift	Apply in 1 medium-stakes setting (team meeting, presentation rehearsal). Re-record.

Three weeks. 5-10 minutes a day. Most professionals see a 50-70% reduction in filler rate. The remaining fillers are usually the ones that don’t matter — small um’s in casual exchanges that signal warmth.

The same drill-then-deploy logic from building soft skills generally applies — small daily practice beats occasional intense sessions.

6. The deliberate pause — when and how to use it

Once you’ve replaced fillers with silence as a default, the next move is using pauses deliberately — for emphasis, recall, and rhythm.

Three pause uses worth practising:

The pre-emphasis pause. A 1-2 second silence before an important point. “The single biggest finding from the last 18 months… [pause] …is that we’ve been measuring the wrong thing.” The pause primes the audience to listen.

The post-emphasis pause. A 2-3 second silence after a punchline or key number. Lets the audience absorb. Most speakers ruin great lines by talking through them.

The thinking pause. A genuine 1-2 second silence when asked a question. “Let me think about that for a second.” Rare and disarming. Replaces the “um, well, I think…” that most people default to.

The most-watched TED talks use all three. The same techniques drive handling Q&A after a presentation — composure under pressure is largely about pause discipline.

A pattern from the training room. I once worked with a senior leader at an MNC who insisted she had “no problem” with fillers. We recorded 6 minutes of her speaking on a familiar topic. The count was 47 — almost 8 per minute. She was visibly shocked. We didn’t drill her hard; we just got her to do the same recording every Friday for 4 weeks. By week 4 the count was 14. After 24 years of training, the same pattern: filler reduction is almost entirely an awareness problem. Once people hear themselves, the body adjusts faster than any conscious intervention.

7. Pause length — 1, 2, or 3 seconds

A practical guide for calibrating pauses:

Length	Effect	Use for
1 second	Reads as natural, almost invisible	Default replacement for fillers
2 seconds	Reads as composed, deliberate	Before emphasis points
3 seconds	Reads as a power pause	After punchlines, key numbers, or major reveals
4-5 seconds	Reads as theatrical	Only after a major emotional or factual reveal
6+ seconds	Reads as confused	Avoid unless you’ve fully blanked

Most speakers under-estimate how long their pauses are. A 2-second pause feels like 5 to the speaker; the audience reads it as natural. Trust the silence; it’s almost certainly shorter than it feels.

8. When fillers are actually fine

Not every um needs to be eliminated. Three contexts where fillers are functional or even helpful:

1. Casual conversation. Too-perfect speech sounds stilted and over-rehearsed. A few ums in a coffee chat signal warmth and presence.
2. Genuine thinking. A single um while you genuinely reach for a complex thought is more honest than scripted-sounding fluency.
3. Showing humility. Occasional “sort of” or “I think” in a high-status setting reads as inviting input rather than steamrolling.

The problem isn’t fillers per se. It’s concentration. Five ums spread across a 30-minute meeting are invisible. Fifteen ums in a 4-minute Q&A answer signal the opposite of confidence. Aim for low concentration in high-stakes moments, not zero fillers across all speech.

The natural sequence: record → count → identify clusters → practise the pause in low-stakes conversations → deploy in medium-stakes → calibrate pause length deliberately → accept some fillers in casual settings.

The same drill-then-deploy logic works for filler reduction as for public speaking confidence — small reps, deliberate practice, weekly recording. Three weeks reshapes a habit that has built up over a career. Most professionals never bother. The few who do sound noticeably different in meetings within 8 weeks.

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I hope you find one drill in this article that fits your week. Pick the smallest one — recording yourself for 3 minutes once — and try it. That is enough. The rest builds from there.

If you want a structured course where a trainer records you and coaches the pause technique with live feedback, Communicate with Confidence (WSQ) is the 2-day course version of this article. SkillsFuture credit eligible. For formal presentations specifically, Delivering Impactful Business Presentations (WSQ) is the natural pairing.

Hero and in-body images via Pexels.