How to Stop Saying Um: A Practical Guide to Filler Words

TrinityTalent Blog · July 2026 · 6 min read

First, the reassuring part: everyone says um. Fillers are a normal feature of unrehearsed speech, and an interviewer who hears three of them will not remember a single one. The problem starts at density — when every clause carries an "um", "like", "you know" or "sort of", the fillers stop being invisible and start doing the talking for you. The good news is that filler reduction is one of the most trainable skills in all of interview prep. Here is how it actually works.

Why fillers happen

Fillers are not a vocabulary problem; they are a timing problem. Your mouth runs slightly ahead of your brain, and when the brain needs a moment to assemble the next thought, the mouth fills the gap with sound. Two things drive it:

• Thinking out loud. If you start answering before you know your point, you are composing and performing simultaneously — and the seams between half-formed thoughts get caulked with "um".
• Fear of silence. Most people experience a two-second pause as an eternity and rush to fill it, because silence feels like losing the floor. So the filler is really a placeholder that says "still talking, don't interrupt".

Which points at the fix: you don't remove fillers by suppressing them. You remove them by replacing them with the thing they were standing in for — a pause.

The pause beats the filler, every time

Here is the asymmetry worth internalizing: a silent pause reads as thinking. A filled pause reads as struggling. Same duration, opposite signal. Speakers who seem composed and deliberate are usually not faster thinkers — they have simply made peace with two seconds of silence. In an interview, a pause before your answer is actively good: it signals that the question deserved thought and that you are answering, not reciting. Nobody has ever lost an offer to a thoughtful pause. Plenty have lost one to sounding like they were guessing.

Step 1 — awareness training (you cannot fix what you cannot hear)

The uncomfortable truth: you do not hear your own fillers. Your brain edits them out in real time, which is why people are routinely shocked by recordings of themselves. So the first step is not a drill — it is evidence.

• Record yourself answering one real interview question for two minutes on your phone. No preparation, first take.
• Listen back and tally every filler — um, uh, like, you know, sort of, basically, and your personal favorites (everyone has one or two signature fillers).
• Note where they cluster. Almost always: the first sentence, and transitions between points. That is your map.

Step 2 — the drills that actually work

• The landing drill. Answer a question and force yourself to end each sentence with a full stop and a beat of silence before the next one. Fillers love run-on sentences; periods starve them.
• The two-second rule. Before answering any question — in practice and in real conversations — take a deliberate two-second pause. You are training the pause to feel normal, because right now it feels like danger.
• Headline first. Say your one-line answer, then explain it. When you know where a sentence is going, fillers drop dramatically — most of them are the sound of not knowing your own point yet.
• One question a day. Record one two-minute answer daily and tally. Ten minutes a day for two weeks moves the needle more than a weekend of cramming, because you are retraining a reflex, not learning a fact.

What interviewers actually notice

Perspective, so you calibrate the effort correctly: interviewers do not count your ums. What registers is the overall impression — did this person sound clear and in command of their material, or scattered? A handful of fillers in an otherwise structured answer costs you nothing. A filler every few words costs you, not because of the words themselves but because of what they suggest: that you have not thought about this before, even when you have. Which is the real tragedy of heavy filler use — it makes prepared people sound unprepared. Aim for reduction, not elimination; a human with occasional ums beats a robot with none.