There is a line in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that stopped me in my tracks. He is talking about the performer’s obligation to control every moment of the show, and he invokes the image of Superman. His point is that the performer is Superman — a regular person who, when called upon, demonstrates extraordinary abilities. Confident. Sure. Never uncertain.
And then the line: “Superman doesn’t hem and haw. Clark Kent does. Which one are you?”
When I first read that, I was Clark Kent. Not just on stage. In boardrooms, in conference calls, in client presentations, in conversations with friends. I was a serial filler-word offender, and I had been one for my entire adult life.
Um. Uh. So. Like. You know. Basically. I mean. Right?
They were everywhere. In every sentence. In every transition between thoughts. In every moment of hesitation, no matter how brief. My brain had decided at some point — probably in my university years — that silence was dangerous and that filling it with noise, any noise, was safer than leaving it empty.
The thing about filler words is that you rarely hear yourself using them. They operate below conscious awareness, like a tic you do not notice until someone points it out. I did not realize the extent of my problem until I recorded a consulting presentation and played it back.
I counted. In a twelve-minute talk, I said “um” or “uh” forty-seven times. That is roughly once every fifteen seconds. I was not pausing between thoughts. I was filling the space between thoughts with vocal garbage. And the cumulative effect was not neutral. It was actively undermining every point I made. I sounded uncertain. Unprepared. Like I was searching for the next word rather than delivering it.
This was not a stage problem. This was a life problem. But it became a stage problem the moment I started performing, because on stage the stakes are higher and the audience’s attention to your delivery is sharper.
Why Filler Words Destroy Performance
The mechanics are straightforward. When you say “um,” you are sending a signal to the audience. The signal says: I do not know what comes next. I am searching. I am uncertain. Give me a moment.
In normal conversation, people filter this out. They hear around the filler words because they are accustomed to them. But on stage, the audience is not having a conversation with you. They are watching a performance. And in a performance, every signal is amplified. Every “um” is not just a filler — it is a crack in your authority. A moment where the Superman image flickers and Clark Kent shows through.
Weber’s broader point is about control. Controlling every moment means that no moment is wasted, no moment sends the wrong signal, no moment breaks the spell. Filler words break the spell because they remind the audience that they are watching a person doing a job rather than experiencing something extraordinary.
There is a more subtle damage as well. Filler words steal time from pauses. And pauses are one of the most powerful tools a performer has. A pause before a reveal creates anticipation. A pause after a punchline lets the laughter develop. A pause in the middle of a sentence creates emphasis and tension.
But filler words and pauses cannot coexist. If your instinct is to fill silence with “um,” you will never have a clean pause. The “um” will rush in to fill the vacuum before the pause can do its work. So eliminating filler words is not just about removing something bad. It is about creating space for something good.
The Technique: Silence Instead of Sound
The technique itself is almost insultingly simple. When you feel the urge to say “um,” say nothing instead. Just… stop. Let the silence exist. Then continue.
That is it. Replace the filler with a beat of silence. The pause will feel enormous to you and invisible to the audience. What sounds to you like an awkward, gaping hole in your delivery sounds to the audience like a thoughtful, deliberate beat between ideas.
This is one of those things that is simple to describe and excruciating to practice. Because the urge to fill silence is not rational. It is deeply wired. It is a social reflex, a conversational habit encoded over decades. Telling yourself to “just stop saying um” is like telling yourself to stop blinking. You can do it for a few seconds through sheer willpower. Then the reflex takes over and you are right back where you started.
The exercises that actually worked for me were not about willpower. They were about rewiring the reflex itself.
Exercise One: The Recording Loop
I started recording every rehearsal, every practice run, every time I delivered anything — whether magic-related or not. I would play back the recording and mark every single filler word. Physically mark it. I used a notepad and put a tally mark for each one.
The act of tallying does something useful. It moves filler words from unconscious to conscious. You start hearing them. Not in the recording — you start hearing them in real time, as they come out of your mouth. That awareness is the first step, because you cannot fix what you cannot detect.
For the first two weeks, detection was the only goal. I was not trying to eliminate the filler words. I was just trying to notice them. The numbers were bad. In a five-minute piece, I averaged twelve to fifteen filler words. Better than my consulting presentations, probably because the material was memorized, but still terrible.
Exercise Two: The Slow-Down Method
The most effective exercise I found was to deliver material at half speed. Literally half the pace I would normally use.
Here is why this works. Most filler words happen at transition points — when you finish one thought and begin another. The “um” fills the gap between thoughts. If you slow down your delivery, you stretch out each thought and give your brain more time to prepare the next one. The gap between thoughts becomes smaller relative to the pace, and the urge to fill it diminishes.
I practiced this in hotel rooms. Late at night, speaking at half speed to an empty room, delivering my pieces at a glacial pace that would have put any real audience to sleep. But the goal was not performance. The goal was retraining. At half speed, I could feel the transition points approaching. I could feel the urge to say “um” rising. And I could consciously choose silence instead.
Once I could deliver at half speed without filler words, I gradually increased the pace. Three-quarter speed. Near-normal speed. Full speed. At each level, I would stay until the filler count dropped to zero before moving to the next.
This took about a month of daily practice. Not dedicated sessions — I would work on it during my normal rehearsal time, just with the added focus on the filler-word component.
Exercise Three: The Penalty Game
This one I borrowed from a speaking coach I worked with briefly in Vienna. The rule was: every time you say a filler word, you have to stop, go back to the beginning of the sentence, and say it again without the filler.
This is maddening. In the early stages, I would restart the same sentence four or five times before getting through it cleanly. The frustration is the point. The penalty creates a negative association with the filler word, and over time your brain starts avoiding them preemptively rather than dealing with the penalty after the fact.
What Changed
The change was not instant, and it was not linear. I went through a phase where, having become hypersensitive to filler words, I overcorrected and eliminated all pauses — not just the fillers but the legitimate, intentional pauses that give delivery its shape. I sounded robotic. Clipped. Like a machine gun of sentences with no breathing room.
I had to recalibrate. The goal was not to eliminate all pauses. The goal was to eliminate unconscious noise and replace it with intentional silence. The difference between a pause and a filler word is not duration or placement. It is intention. A pause is silence you chose. A filler is noise your anxiety chose for you.
Once I understood that distinction, the pieces fell into place. I started placing pauses deliberately — before reveals, after jokes, at transition points between ideas. These pauses served the performance. They created rhythm, emphasis, and breathing room for the audience to process what they had just heard.
The practical difference was measurable. A piece that used to contain twelve filler words per five minutes dropped to one or two. And those remaining few would show up only under stress — when something unexpected happened, when I lost my place for a moment, when a volunteer did something I had not anticipated.
Even those stress-related fillers are diminishing. Not because I have developed superhuman control, but because the new habit is overwriting the old one. The reflex is changing. The default is becoming silence rather than noise.
The Consulting Crossover
Here is something I did not expect. The filler-word work I did for my magic performances transformed my consulting presentations. Clients started commenting on it. Not on the absence of filler words — nobody notices what is not there. But on the quality of delivery. “You sounded really confident.” “That was very clear.” “You clearly knew your material.”
These were things people had never said about my presentations before. The content had not changed. My expertise had not changed. What changed was that I stopped signaling uncertainty fifty times per presentation. I stopped sounding like I was searching for words. I started sounding like I knew exactly what I wanted to say and was choosing when to say it.
The pause does something specific to perception. When you pause before answering a question, you sound thoughtful. When you say “um” before answering, you sound stumped. The silence conveys consideration. The filler conveys confusion. Same delay. Completely different impression.
The Ongoing Battle
I want to be honest about this: filler words are not a problem you solve once. They are a habit you manage continuously. Under stress, under fatigue, under the pressure of a new venue or a difficult audience, they come back. My awareness catches most of them now, but not all.
The real value is not in achieving zero filler words. It is in shifting the ratio. Replacing most of the noise with silence. Creating a delivery where pauses are features, not bugs. Where the audience hears deliberation, not hesitation.
Weber’s Superman analogy is not about being superhuman. It is about not showing the seams. Superman does not hem and haw because Superman does not need to. His powers flow from him effortlessly. The performer’s job is to make the words flow with that same apparent ease — even when, underneath the surface, you are working harder than the audience will ever know.
The trick to sounding thoughtful instead of lost is this: trust the silence. Trust that the audience will not abandon you during a one-second pause. Trust that the space between your sentences is not a vacuum that needs filling but a canvas that gives your words room to breathe.
Replace the “um” with a beat. The beat says: I am thinking. The “um” says: I am lost.
The audience can tell the difference. Every time.