My team clocked me saying “you know” 22 times in one minute.
I found this out when I was leaving a role at a communications consultancy. I was given a leaving card listing my “fun facts” which were all quite amusing until got to one that I absolutely floored me – how much I used the filler words “you know”.
Once I knew, I started to notice it and heard it a lot.
I didn’t like it so I did something about it.
I started taking more time to prepare, particularly for important moments, introductions and key ideas. I started practising things out loud rather than only running them through in my head. And I started paying much more attention to how I spoke when I was actually in the room.
That led me to think differently about the small things that can change how a story lands.
Pace turned out to matter more than I’d realised. Speaking too quickly can make it harder for people to follow, and it leaves less space for you to think as you speak. Slowing down gives people time to process what you’re saying and gives you more thinking time too.
Paraphrasing became another useful discipline. Checking that I had understood someone correctly or checking that my own point had landed as I intended, gave people a chance to correct a misunderstanding before it grew. Something as simple as “Have I understood that correctly?” can do a lot of work.
And then there’s the pause.
I used to think silence was something I needed to fill quickly, in case it looked as though I’d lost my thread. Now I see a pause as a productive part of the communication itself. It gives people time to process what they’ve heard, and sometimes it gives a room the space it needs to refocus. Silence creates spaciousness and time for quality thinking and comprehending.
All of this sits within what I call Story Shaping: practising your story with others, getting honest feedback, and making adjustments before the moment matters.
The important part, for me, is that I didn’t discover any of this by listening to myself in my head.
Someone else had to hear me, notice something I couldn’, and write it down.
I still catch myself saying “you know” now and then, although thankfully nowhere near 22 times a minute.
I think about that little statistic whenever I’m working with leaders on communication. We can spend a lot of time thinking about what we want to say and how we want to say it. It is much harder to hear what someone else hears when we are the ones doing the speaking.
That’s why I encourage people to practise out loud, get feedback and pay attention to what happens when their words meet an audience.
The story in your head is only the starting point.