How to stop saying 'um': a 7-day practice plan

By the Dictalus team · Published July 12, 2026

Here is the whole trick: when you feel a filler coming, close your mouth and pause instead. That's it. The silence feels endless to you and reads as control to everyone else. The rest of this page is how to train that swap in seven days, out loud, a minute or two per day.

Why you say um in the first place

Two reasons, and neither is a character flaw.

First, word retrieval. Your mouth runs ahead of your brain, hits a word that isn't loaded yet, and stalls. "Um" is the engine idling while the next word gets fetched. Everyone does this. Fluent speakers stall too; they just stall silently.

Second, fear of silence. A pause feels like dead air, and dead air feels like an invitation for someone to jump in or judge you. So you fill it. The catch is that listeners don't hear a half-second pause as hesitation. They hear it as emphasis. The person who pauses sounds like they're choosing their words. The person who says "um" sounds like they're losing them.

Both causes have the same fix: the swap. Filler out, pause in. Every rep below is practice at that swap until it stops being a decision.

Measure your filler rate first

You cannot fix what you do not hear, and you will not hear your own fillers live. Nobody does. So measure.

The metric is fillers per minute: count every filler in a recording, divide by the length of the take. What counts as a filler:

• The classics: um, uh, er
• The stealth crew: like, you know, right, kind of, sort of, basically, actually
• "So" when it starts a sentence and carries no meaning

Most people guess low. A typical untrained baseline lands somewhere in the 4 to 8 per minute range, and hearing your own number for the first time is humbling in a useful way. Count by hand from a voice memo, or let an app score it for you. Either way, get a number before day 1. That number is your starting line, not your verdict.

The 7-day plan

Each day is one spoken exercise, one to two minutes, done out loud. Not read, not rehearsed in your head. Out loud. This is a motor skill, like a golf swing, and you don't fix a golf swing by thinking about it on the couch.

Day 1: Baseline

Record 60 seconds answering: "Explain what your team does to someone who just joined the company." Do not try to sound good. Count the fillers, write down your fillers per minute, and stop. Honest numbers today make the rest of the week mean something.

Day 2: The swap, in slow motion

Same prompt, 60 seconds, one rule: pause at the end of every sentence. A full beat. It will feel theatrical. Record it and listen back; the pauses that felt like craters sound completely normal. That gap between how it felt and how it sounds is the lesson.

Day 3: Two takes, beat the first

New prompt: "Explain the product you work on to someone who has never heard of it." Record 60 seconds, count fillers, then immediately record it again and beat your count. Two takes, second one better. That gap is the skill forming.

Day 4: Catch it live

New prompt, 90 seconds this time. Your only job is to notice the filler coming before it leaves your mouth and close your mouth instead. You'll catch maybe a third of them. That's fine. Yesterday you caught zero.

Day 5: Hold the swap, add pace

Same as day 4 with one extra constraint: don't rush. Racing through sentences to outrun your fillers just moves the stall to the end. Aim for a conversational 130 to 160 words per minute and keep the pauses at the ends of thoughts, not the middles.

Day 6: Pressure

Answer a hostile question for 60 seconds: "Why should anyone fund your project?" or "What has your team actually shipped?" Filler rates spike under pressure, and that spike is exactly what you're training out. Expect a worse number today. It still counts.

Day 7: Rematch

Repeat day 1. Same prompt, 60 seconds, count the fillers. Compare to your baseline. Then keep the habit: one rep most days beats a heroic weekend binge you never repeat.

Before and after: what the swap sounds like

A real day-1 answer tends to look like this (fillers in bold):

"So, um, our team basically handles the reporting pipeline? Like, we take the raw numbers and, you know, kind of clean them up so that, um, leadership can actually use them."

Eight fillers in roughly fifteen seconds. Around 30 per minute under a bit of nerves, which is common and fixable. The same content with the swap applied:

"Our team runs the reporting pipeline. [pause] We take the raw numbers and clean them up. [pause] Leadership gets figures they can trust."

Nothing was added. Fillers came out, pauses went in, and the same sentences now sound like someone who knows the answer. Notice the second version is also shorter. Fillers aren't just noise; they're scaffolding for rambling.

What improvement to expect

Heuristics, not guarantees. In one focused week, most people cut their baseline filler rate by a third to a half. Getting from 6 per minute to 2 or 3 is a realistic seven-day outcome; getting from 6 to near-zero usually takes several weeks of reps, especially under pressure. Watch a second number too: deliberate pauses per minute should go up as fillers go down. If both are falling, you're not swapping, you're just rushing.

When fillers are fine

Don't aim for zero. In casual conversation, fillers are social glue: they signal you're still holding the floor, soften a disagreement, buy a beat without seeming abrupt. A friend who never says "um" over coffee sounds like a press release. The goal is control, not purity. Cut fillers where the stakes are up, in the pitch, the interview, the answer everyone turns to hear, and let them live everywhere else. You're building a gear you can shift into, not a personality transplant.