One of the most painful things to listen to in podcasting is a steady stream of “ums” and “ahs” interjected into an otherwise intelligent thought. I do it in my own speech more than I’d like to. I’ve heard some cases where a person collecting his thoughts said “um” no less than 20 times in a 15 second stretch.
Audio editing tools with built in artificial intelligence can help fix your “ums” during editing, but it’s hard to reconstruct the flow of a sentence if it happens to much. Spending the time editing out the “ums” also isn’t much fun, because AI still doesn’t catch everything.
I went through a separate phase where I would find myself adding other unnecessary words when speaking during interviews and had to very consciously focus on not doing it. Ultimately the best solution to eliminating vocal tics like saying “um” or adding in extra words is to consciously practice speaking without using these fillers.
Tactically, how do you stop saying “um”?
Here’s what worked for me:
I started recording myself speaking with other people (with their permission) during general conversations. Then I would play those conversations back and pay attention to the moments when I was adding these extraneous words.
After making note of a few of these, I consciously practiced just remaining silent when I was searching for the next words to say, instead of adding “um” as a filler for the brief silence. Over time, with practice, it started to feel natural not to fill the silences with anything and “um” was no longer part of my vocabulary.
You can practice this on your own by using the voice recorder built into your phone or by sitting in front of your podcast rig and trying to record something extemporaneous about a topic you are familiar with.
After a few sessions, you’ll definitely notice fewer of these vocal tics, which will translate into cleaner recordings of podcasts as well as improving your speech capability for in person meetings.
Just know you’re not alone in trying to avoid this. If you listen to other speakers who have clear pauses in their speech, you can bet some of them worked at removing “um” or “you know” or some other vocal tic from their speech pattern.
