Eliminating/ɪ'lɪmɪnet/ Verbal/'vɝbl/ Pauses/pɔ:z/
By Steve Pavlina
One of the communication skills Toastmasters/'tostmæstɚ/ teaches is to eliminate verbal pauses when speaking, whether giving a speech, talking on the phone, or having a face-to-face conversation.
Verbal pauses are when you say um, ah, uh, you know, etc. While your brain is searching for the next words to say, your mouth keeps on going and blurts/blɝt/ out meaningless extra syllables/'sɪləbl/.
Verbal pauses also include bridge words like and, but, and so. If you say one of these words and hang on it before you actually know what you’re going to say next, it’s a bridge word.
Another form of verbal pause is the repeated word. You keep repeating your last word until you figure out what to say next, like and and and.
One of the meeting roles in Toastmasters is the Ah Counter. The person who fills this role changes every week, and his/her job is to count the verbal pauses of everyone who speaks during the meeting and then to tell each of us how we did at the end of the meeting.
This is incredibly eye-opening.
When I first started in Toastmasters, I might have 10-20 verbal pauses during a meeting. Now I’ve got it down in the 0-2 range. Some veteran/'vɛtərən/ Toastmasters members have gotten good enough that it’s rare they’ll ever have a verbal pause. But some new members are challenged to commit less than 10 verbal pauses per minute of speaking.
The simplest replacement for a verbal pause is a silent pause/pɔz/. When your brain stops feeding intelligible words to your mouth, stop talking. Don’t say um, ah, y’know, sooooo, etc. If you’re addicted to verbal pauses, this may feel uncomfortable at first, but you eventually get used to it. Remember that you don’t have to fill every minute of airtime with noise.
Verbal pauses are distracting in communication. They can make you sound less intelligent and clear. They muddle your message. Verbal pauses are simply noise, not communication. You don’t need them, and your communication will be more effective once you eliminate them.
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