How to Remove Filler Words and Speak Confidently in Public
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a Head of Marketing, public speaking expert, and 2x Best Selling Author including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs communicate with impact to get noticed, grow their career, and build their business.
You do not have a filler word problem. You have a silence problem. Every "um", "uh" and "like" is your mouth refusing to let a pause exist, because somewhere along the way you learned that silence in front of an audience means you have lost. It does not. A pause is the single most powerful tool a speaker owns, and the filler is just the thing you reach for instead of using it. Fix your relationship with silence and the fillers fall away on their own.
That reframe matters, because most advice on this topic tells you to "stop saying um" as if awareness alone flips a switch. It does not work like that. You cannot delete a reflex. You can only give it something better to do. This article gives you the replacement move, the reason fillers show up in the first place, and a way to practise that does not quietly wreck your confidence while you do it.
What Filler Words Really Are (and Why "Just Stop" Fails)
A filler word is a sound your brain uses to hold the floor while it catches up. "Um", "uh", "like", "so", "you know", "basically", "right?" at the end of every sentence. They are placeholders. Your mind has run ahead of your mouth, or a pause has opened up that you have not learned to sit in, and the filler rushes in to cover the gap.
That is the part most people miss. Fillers are not a habit you picked up like biting your nails. They are a symptom of something underneath: you are thinking and speaking at the same time, at speed, and the filler is the seam showing. This is why "just stop saying um" never works. You are treating the noise, not the cause. Tell someone to stop and they become hyper aware of every filler, tense up, speak faster to get through it, and produce more of them. The instruction backfires.
The odd filler is completely fine, by the way. One "um" in a paragraph is human and nobody notices. The problem is volume. When they turn up in sentence after sentence, they stop being invisible and start doing real damage:
They pull the audience off your point and onto your delivery.
They soften the authority of what you are saying, because a stream of hesitations reads as uncertainty even when you know your material cold.
They make your key messages harder to remember, because the signal is buried in noise.
So the goal is not zero fillers. The goal is control. You want the pause to become your default gap filler instead of the "um". Here is how you get there.
Step 1: Replace the Filler with a Pause
This is the whole game, so I am putting it first. Every other step supports this one.
When you feel a filler coming, do nothing. Close your mouth. Let one to two seconds of silence sit there, then say your next point. That silence is the pause, and it does three jobs at once. It gives your brain time to load the next sentence, so you do not need the filler. It gives the audience a beat to absorb what you just said. And it reads, to the room, as control. A speaker who pauses looks like they are in charge of the pace. A speaker who says "um" looks like the pace is in charge of them.
The catch is that the pause feels far longer to you than it does to the audience. Inside your head, two seconds of silence feels like the room has noticed you have frozen. It has not. To everyone listening, that pause barely registers, or it registers as confidence. This gap between how it feels and how it lands is exactly why so many speakers refuse to pause and reach for the filler instead. You have to trust the maths: the silence that terrifies you is almost invisible to them.
Practise this away from any audience first. Read something aloud and every time you would normally rush into the next sentence, stop for a full beat instead. It will feel unnatural. Do it anyway. You are training your reflex to reach for silence rather than sound, and that rewiring takes reps.
Step 2: Slow Down, Because Speed Is the Real Trigger
Speaking too fast is the single biggest cause of filler words. When you rush, your mouth outruns your brain, and the moment your brain falls behind it plugs the gap with whatever is nearest, which is an "um". Speed does not make you sound more confident or more prepared. It makes you sound nervous, and it manufactures the exact fillers you are trying to remove.
Why do we speed up? Usually nerves. When adrenaline hits, the instinct is to get it over with, so the pace climbs without you noticing. This is where a bit of physiology helps. Before you speak, try box breathing: breathe in for four, hold for four, out for six. If nerves spike mid sentence, a shorter version works: in for two, hold for two, out for two, which is really just a deliberate six second pause dressed up as breathing. It slows your heart rate, which slows your pace, which gives your brain room to keep up, which starves the filler of its trigger. Nerves themselves are not the enemy here. They are your body preparing you to perform. You just do not want them setting your speaking speed.
If you want to go deeper on this, the mechanics of pauses, pacing and timing are worth studying on their own, because pace control is the foundation everything else on this page sits on.
Step 3: Get Clear Before You Try to Get Fluent
Here is a cause of fillers that almost nobody names: you are not clear enough on what you are saying. When your own thinking is muddy, your sentences wander, you lose the thread mid clause, and every place you lose it becomes an "um" while you grope for where you were going.
The fix is upstream of delivery. Get clear on your point before you open your mouth. My test for this is simple: if you cannot deliver your main point in one sentence, you are not clear enough yourself, and no amount of pause training will fix a message you have not pinned down. Structure does the heavy lifting here. If you build your material as a Nano Speech, open, body, close, with the body being one clear point backed by a story or a fact, you give yourself a spine to follow. You always know what comes next, so there is far less for the fillers to fill.
This is also where "clear beats clever" earns its keep. When speakers try to sound impressive, they overload sentences, chase a bigger vocabulary, and add caveats they do not need. All of that creates gaps, and gaps get filled with fillers. Strip the sentence back to the plain version and you remove the hesitation along with the clutter. A confused audience is a lost audience, and an over complicated sentence confuses you first.
Step 4: Aim Your Attention at the Audience, Not Yourself
A huge share of fillers come from self focus. The moment your internal monologue is running "how do I look, do I sound nervous, was that um obvious" you are spending processing power on yourself instead of on your message, and the split attention shows up as hesitation. Ironically, worrying about fillers produces more of them.
The redirect is to point your attention outward. Before you speak, get specific about what the audience really needs from you. What do they want to walk away knowing? What problem are they hoping you will solve? When your focus is on serving them, your delivery organises itself around a purpose, and purposeful speech has far fewer gaps than anxious speech. It is not about you. It is about them, and knowing that takes the spotlight off your own performance.
Reading the room in real time helps too. When you learn to read your audience and adjust as you go, you are engaged with them rather than trapped in your own head, and an engaged speaker does not have the spare bandwidth to monitor every "um". The self consciousness that fuels fillers simply has nowhere to live.
Step 5: Build Awareness in Low Pressure Settings First
You cannot control what you have not noticed, so awareness is real and it matters. But how you build that awareness is where a lot of advice quietly sabotages people.
The safe way to start is in everyday, low pressure conversation. Ordering a coffee, asking for directions, answering a question in a small meeting. These are real speaking reps with almost no stakes, which means you are relaxed enough to notice your fillers without panicking about them, and relaxed enough to bank a small win. That banked win matters more than it sounds, because confidence is success remembered. Every low pressure rep where you caught a filler and paused instead becomes a memory you can draw on when the stakes are higher.
A Word of Caution on Recording Yourself
The usual advice is to record yourself and watch it back, and I want to push back on that, because timing is everything. Recording yourself is genuinely useful, but it can backfire badly while you are still building confidence. When you watch yourself back too early, you notice every flaw at once, the fillers, the fidgeting, the voice you did not know you had, and the pile up dents your confidence far more than it helps your delivery. That is a fast track into a loop where one imperfect moment feeds the next round of nerves.
If you do choose to record, wait until you are already reasonably confident, and then look at one thing and one thing only: the filler words. Ignore your posture, ignore your voice, ignore everything else on the tape. You are gathering one specific piece of data, not staging a full performance review of yourself. Used that narrowly, and only once you are steady enough to handle it, recording can sharpen your awareness. Used too early and too broadly, it just hands your inner critic more ammunition. I have written more on why recording yourself often backfires if you want the full argument.
Step 6: Aim for Control, Not Perfection
Even the best speakers drop the occasional filler, and that is the point. The goal was never a flawless, filler free recording. The goal is a speaker who is in control of their pace, clear on their message, and comfortable letting silence sit. A stray "um" inside that does no harm at all. It makes you sound human rather than rehearsed to the point of sounding like a machine.
Progress here is gradual, not a switch you flip, so treat it as a habit you are building rep by rep. Mark the small wins. A presentation with noticeably fewer fillers than the last one is a real result, and every one of those reinforces the habit and the confidence underneath it. If you want a framework for that steady, one improvement at a time approach, getting one percent better every day is exactly the mindset that turns filler control from a stressful project into an automatic skill.
Actionable Takeaways
Redirect the reflex. You cannot delete "um". You can give your brain a pause to reach for instead. Practise sitting in one to two seconds of silence until it stops feeling dangerous.
Slow your pace and breathe. Speed is the trigger. Box breathing before you start, and a shorter version mid panic, keeps your mouth from outrunning your brain.
Get clear, then get calm, then record if you must. Pin your point down to one sentence, focus on the audience, practise in low stakes settings, and only reach for the camera once you are already confident, looking at the fillers alone.
Frequently Asked Questions About Filler Words in Public Speaking
Are filler words always bad?
No, and holding onto that protects your delivery. A single "um" or "like" is human and can make you sound more relatable than a speaker who is unnervingly polished. Fillers only cause damage in volume, when they appear in sentence after sentence and start reading as nerves. Chasing zero fillers is its own trap, because the hyper vigilance it takes to monitor every word pulls your focus off the audience and tends to create more of them. Aim for control, not eradication.
Why do I use so many filler words?
Because your mind is running faster than your mouth and the filler covers the gap while it catches up. The most common accelerant is speed, since a fast pace guarantees your brain falls behind. Underneath that sit two other causes people rarely name: not being clear enough on your own point, so your sentences wander and stall, and focusing on yourself rather than the audience, which splits your attention. Fix the clarity and the focus and a lot of the fillers disappear before you even work on the pause.
Should I record myself to catch my filler words?
Only with care, and only once you are already fairly confident. Recording is a sharp awareness tool, but watching yourself back too early usually backfires, because you notice every flaw at once and the pile up knocks your confidence more than it improves your speaking. If you do record, isolate one variable: watch for the fillers and deliberately ignore your posture, voice and everything else. Until you are steady enough to watch without spiralling, build awareness through low pressure real conversations instead.
What should I do in the moment when I feel a filler coming?
Close your mouth and let a pause happen. That is the single move. One to two seconds of silence gives your brain time to load the next sentence, so the filler has no job to do, and it reads to the room as control rather than hesitation. The silence always feels longer to you than to the audience, so trust that what feels like an awkward gap barely registers with them. If nerves are spiking, add a quiet exhale to slow yourself before you continue.
Do filler words affect how competent I seem?
Yes, more than most speakers realise, which is why this is worth the effort. A steady stream of fillers reads as uncertainty even when you know your material perfectly, because the audience judges confidence partly on delivery, not just content. The good news is the reverse holds too: a speaker who pauses calmly instead of filling every gap comes across as more authoritative than the words alone would earn. Controlling fillers is one of the fastest ways to raise how competent you seem without changing a single thing about what you say.
TL;DR: How to Remove Filler Words in Public Speaking
Filler words are not a vocabulary fault. They are the sound your brain reaches for to avoid a pause when it needs a moment to think. Remove the fear of the pause and you remove the filler.
Replace, do not delete. Swap every "um" for a deliberate one to two second pause. You cannot stop a reflex, only redirect it.
Slow down first. Speed is the biggest trigger. When your mouth outruns your brain, it fills the gap with noise. A slower pace buys thinking time.
Get clear before you get fluent. If you cannot say your main point in one sentence, you are not clear enough yet, and unclear thinking is where fillers breed. Clear beats clever.
Aim at the audience, not yourself. Self focus ("how do I sound?") is a filler engine. Audience focus ("what do they need?") quietly switches it off.
Practise in low pressure, and hold off on recording until you are already confident. Watching yourself back too early does more damage than good.
More From Liam Sandford
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