When it is time for you to talk, make yourself effortless to be heard and easy to listen to. Eliminate from your speaking useless filler words that make you sound uncertain, unprepared, even uneducated: “you know… uhm… huh… ah… okay, okay…” At the very least, if you must say them, say them silently to yourself when speaking out loud.
Research in the past has shown that people believe what they see over what you say. A recent study reported in the Wall Street Journal showed that people believe what you say based on how you say it at a two-to-one ratio.
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Benton and Wright-Ford, co-authors of The Leadership Mind Switch (McGraw-Hill, 2017)
