Mindfulness starts with becoming familiar with your filler words
What are filler words?
You probably like know what um filler words are right?
They are the words you use to make up for thinking time. They are also referred to as discourse markers or hesitation forms. We defer to filler words as we pause to collect our thoughts during conversations. They’re quasi-prepositions that join thought fragments together in everyday language. Filler words may occur as translation glitches in vernacular language for those speaking a second language. They could also reflect the cultural tone of the speaker’s social class.
They could be simple words like, um, so, er, like; or adverbs like, actually, basically, literally (also literarily), technically; or short phrases like as in, you get, you know; or long phrases like, you know wha’m sayin’.
While many consider the use of filler words poor communication, some academics believe it could mean that a speaker is being extra conscious of how a listener receives what they’re saying. In diplomatic speech or where politeness plays an important role, speakers are more likely to use filler words as they search for politically or culturally correct words or tones.
Regardless of its definition, origin, or intent, one characteristic of filler words is that their speakers are mostly unaware that they use these words as often as they do. And when these words become a recurring motif, it is a distraction and it is somewhat seen as a detractor from the quality of the speaker’s conversational ability.
What has this got to do with mindfulness?
Mindfulness per the Oxford Dictionary is the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something. At the psychosocial level, it is the awareness of one’s actions, their impact on others, and the subconscious influences driving one’s emotions.
The practice of mindfulness forces you to pause and ask:
Why do I feel pain, joy, or sorrow in the moment? Why am I sad, lonely, angry, excited, or frustrated?
And if my feeling is a shared experience with the rest of humanity, how can I better acknowledge my feelings or the feelings of others when they are sad, lonely, angry, excited, or frustrated? Those who practice mindfulness believe that it increases one’s tendency to show empathy and be more curious, kinder, and less judgmental of oneself and others.
Perspective
With filler words, what sounds like seamless speech to us sounds different to others.
What we hear:
“It’s not that hard. I’ve tried it a couple of times and it works perfectly fine. You’ll get a hang of it once you start. Trust me.”
What others hear:
“Technically, it’s not … er … that hard. I mean I’ve basically tried it like a couple of times and it works … believe me … perfectly fine. You’ll kinda like get a hang of it once you start … you know …. Trust me.
The issue is that we are mostly unaware of these interjectors as with the words ‘the’ and ‘of’ in text forms. Our eyes skim over them on a page because we see them so many times that our brain skips them altogether to save RAM. Yet, there’s no shortfall in our understanding of what is being read.
Our emotions, actions, and what others perceive as our habits or behaviors follow this same pattern. Many of us are not fully aware of our actions or the motivations behind them. We just know that we are who we are, or that we do whatever it is that we do but it takes extra effort to say this is why we act the way we do or why we should act differently. Our instinctive tendency is to justify our actions from the perspective of self. The person who becomes irritable when hungry; angry when impatient; or deceptive when cornered may see their respective actions as normal given the circumstances. They may be unaware of their irritability, anger, or deception or the impact it has on others who experience it. While others see, the subject may be blind to it.
Awareness
Speech coaches advise using a voice recorder or soliciting the help of an audience to increase a speaker’s awareness of their filler words. The idea is that listening to yourself as others would listen to you or getting feedback from a listener gives you a different frame of reference. It is amazing what the eyes can see, or the ears can hear when you change the frame of reference. Out of the blue, the ums and ers jump out at you, and you are stymied by how many you knows you’ve squeezed into one sentence.
Mindfulness brings our attention to the things we don’t normally see because they are buried so deep into our habits that they are practically invisible. The self-awareness that the practice of mindfulness teaches helps us to see and experience ourselves as the world sees and experiences us. It helps us understand the triggers that drive our instinctive response to life and gives us a starting point for first, identifying those triggers and being more conscious when we see their now familiar signs.
At the nexus of mindfulness and speech, this practice of keen and consistent self-awareness can teach us to hear ourselves as others hear us; to the point where we don’t need a voice recorder or an audience to help us to sieve the chaff from our conversations.
Personal Thoughts
For a practice I stumbled upon in a conversation with my mentor, and by reading Eckhart Tolle’s Practicing the Power of Now, mindfulness has helped me to live more fully. I don’t necessarily embrace the dogmas attached to it or some of the deeper East-Asian spiritual practices associated with it, but as a practical concept, I appreciate the role mindfulness plays in making me a better person. Not only has it helped me speak and write better, but it has also helped me see some of my flaws and work on them. It also helped me negotiate my relationships better by being kinder to myself and extending that kindness to others. For me, mindfulness is a lifelong journey of being a better person than I was yesterday and I invite you to pay just a little more attention to your words, thoughts, and feelings today without judgment or justification. You just might get to meet the real you and reach through to the awesomeness that lies behind the veil of unconscious habits.