The Clicker Exercise

Imagine an event planner named Annelise who has done the work of the last few lessons. She has counted her habits on a recording and stripped three answers to the facts. She has practiced them with Ximena, who runs the office with her. As far as she can hear, her hedges are gone. On Thursday she meets Mrs. Hollingsworth about a dinner for 40 in the garden in June.

She asks Ximena to come to the meeting, as she often does, and to do one more job. Ximena will keep a tally counter in her lap, the kind with a button on top. She will press it once for every qualifier Annelise says. The list is on Ximena’s phone: “just,” “I think,” “probably,” “kind of,” “a bit,” “maybe,” and “if that works for you.”

The meeting goes well. Mrs. Hollingsworth asks whether the garden can take 40 people at one table. Annelise says, “I think one long table would probably be best, just because the lawn narrows at the far end.” Mrs. Hollingsworth asks about the price, and Annelise gives it, and adds, “if that works for you.” Mrs. Hollingsworth asks for the proposal in writing and says she will decide by the end of the month.

In the car, Ximena asks Annelise how many she thinks she said. Annelise thinks back through the hour and says four, maybe five. Ximena turns the counter around. It says 23.

Annelise does not believe it, so Ximena goes back to the first answer. “I think one long table would probably be best, just because the lawn narrows.” Three in one sentence, before she even got to the reason. Annelise remembers saying the sentence, and she remembers the lawn. She does not remember “I think,” or “probably,” or “just,” because to her they were the sound of being polite about a table. To Mrs. Hollingsworth, and to the counter, they were three words that said the planner was not sure about the table.

That is the clicker exercise, and the number on the counter is only half of it. The other half is the gap between 23 and five. The 18 qualifiers Annelise did not hear are the ones she cannot take out on her own. She will not hear them next time either. Your colleague’s count will be higher than yours. Here is why, and what to do with the gap.

A speaking club gives one member the job of counting, because the speaker cannot

Toastmasters, the public speaking clubs, give one member at every meeting a role called the Ah-Counter. The club’s description of the role is to “note any overused words or filler sounds used as a crutch by anyone who speaks during the meeting.” The Ah-Counter keeps a log through the meeting and reports what was counted at the end.

William H. Stevenson III is a freelance writer in Huntsville, Alabama, who belonged to three clubs there. He wrote in the Toastmasters magazine about why the role exists. “Filler words are insidious because they are invisible to the speaker, but not to the listener,” he writes. He quotes Eric Jahn, a member of a club in Lincolnshire, Illinois, on new members: “They are often not aware that they are using filler words in their vocabulary, since nobody ever counted them.”

Some clubs do not wait for the report. In some, the Ah-Counter rings a bell at each filler word, and in others, drops a nail into a bucket. Stevenson adds a caution. Some speakers get rattled by the bell, use more filler words, and set off more bells. The counter in Ximena’s lap is the Ah-Counter’s log with the bell left off. The number waits until the end, so the clicking does not rattle you into more of them.

The article also carries a drill for two people, from Susan Ward, a speech specialist. A week ahead, write 20 topics for short talks and seal them in an envelope. On the day, a partner reads out a topic, you answer for two minutes, and the partner counts your filler words. The answers get longer until you can talk for five minutes without an “um” or an “ah.”

A professor of educational psychology says the listener notices what the speaker does not

Yue Yin is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She belongs to a Toastmasters club in Indiana. In a magazine article from October 2025, she writes, “Speakers are often unaware of how frequently they use crutch words, but listeners tend to notice and get distracted.”

She gives four reasons people use the words. They buy time while working out what to say next. They hesitate when they are unsure. They make a statement sound less direct. They mark a shift to a new idea. Then she adds that people “may also develop a habit of using their go-to filler words repeatedly and unconsciously.” The third reason is the qualifier’s job. “Just” and “I think” made Annelise’s sentence about the table sound less direct, and that is what she wanted from them. So from inside, they did not sound like a habit.

Her own count comes from a transcript. Record the talk, let the software write it out, and use the search function “to count how often each filler word appears.” That works for a word that is only ever a filler, such as “um.” It fails for “just” and “I think,” which are sometimes the real sentence, as in “I think the tent arrives at nine” when you are not sure. A colleague can hear which one you meant, and a search box cannot.

A communication coach has the partner say the filler back out loud

Hope Timberlake is a communication coach who wrote a book on speaking up. In an excerpt from it, she describes a client, Gabriela, whose manager wrote “improve gravitas” on her year-end review. “But during the monthly meetings you come across as, well, junior,” the manager told her. “I am not sure exactly why.” On video, Gabriela’s updates were full of “um,” “uh,” and “like,” and her sentences ran on. Within weeks of starting the pausing exercises, her filler words had dropped. By the end of the year, she was promoted.

Timberlake’s first exercise is a recording, and she gives its reason in one sentence: “How we perceive ourselves is different from how others see us.” Listening back feels strange, she writes, “because you don’t hear yourself the same way in your head as you do when you play back the audio.”

Her partner exercise is called the Um-ectomy. One person talks on a topic with no preparation, and the partner listens for “um, ah, eh, like, so, you know, kinda, sorta.” “When the speaker utters a filler word, the observer repeats it back to them in a loud voice,” she writes, as the speaker is saying it. The pair keep going until the speaker can talk for three minutes without a filler word or a sentence that runs on.

Her partner interrupts, and Ximena does not. The two methods teach different things. The loud repeat teaches you to stop in the moment. The silent count, with your own guess before it, tells you how many you cannot hear. That number is the one the clicker is for. Gabriela’s manager could not name what made her sound junior. A client who hears a qualifier hears it as doubt about your work, and cannot name it either.

Why a qualifier is harder to hear than “um”

An “um” means nothing to you, so when you hear one on a recording, you know it was a filler. A qualifier means something to you. “Just” was Annelise’s way of not sounding pushy about the table, and “I think” was her way of leaving Mrs. Hollingsworth room to disagree. So when the word comes out, she hears the manners she meant by it. Ximena hears the word.

Yin’s list says people add the words to make a statement less direct, and then go on adding them without noticing. The step from there to the counter is the course’s own. The word that is doing a job you want done is the word you will not hear. That is why your colleague’s count is higher than yours, and not the other way around.

Why arguing with the count goes wrong

Imagine a music teacher named Lorcan who asks a colleague at his school, Gudrun, to count through a 10-minute role-play. She plays a father asking whether his daughter is ready for the grade five exam. Lorcan guesses six. Gudrun shows him 21.

He asks her to go through them. “That ‘I think’ was a real one,” he says of the first. “I’m not sure she’s ready.” The “just” in “it’s just a question of her scales” was emphasis, he says, not softening. By the end he has talked the count down to nine, and Gudrun agrees to nine to end the conversation.

He has argued away the number he asked for. Each click he talked down was a word Gudrun heard and he did not. The father in the real meeting will hear it the way Gudrun did. Lorcan will not be there to explain which “just” was emphasis. So the count stands as the colleague gives it. A real doubt stays in the count too. The fix for it is to say the doubt as a fact next time. “I’ll know after her lesson on Friday” is a sentence the counter does not click.

Being counted by a colleague is not being graded

Handing a colleague a counter and asking them to count your faults for an hour can feel like asking to be marked.

The number belongs to you, not to the colleague, and from the first round on it goes down. Stevenson’s article ends with Ceylone Boothe-Grooms, the 2009 Mrs. New Jersey, who hosts charity events. She belongs to a club in Middletown, New Jersey. At one of them, the script did not arrive. She had to do the introductions and interviews for most of two hours without it. “I had maybe five ‘ums’ in two hours,” she said afterward. “No one in the audience noticed anything was wrong.” Annelise’s 23 is her first number. Next week’s round gives the second. The gap between her guess and the counter closes as she starts to hear the words.

How to run the clicker exercise

Ask the colleague who plays your client to count as well as play. Give them your list: the qualifiers from your recording, such as “just,” “I think,” “probably,” “kind of,” and “a bit,” and the phrases that ask for approval. Give them a tally counter from a hardware store, or a counter app on their phone. For example, a florist can say to her colleague, “Click once for every ‘just,’ ‘I think,’ and ‘if that’s OK.’ Don’t show me the number until I’ve guessed.”
Run a 10-minute round. Your colleague asks the questions a client asks, including the price, and keeps asking. They click and say nothing. Ten minutes is long enough for the qualifiers to come and short enough for your colleague to keep count.
Before they turn the counter around, say how many you think you said, and write your number down. Then write theirs next to it, with the date. The gap between the two is the number you could not hear.
Ask your colleague which phrase they clicked most, and write it at the top of your list. That is the phrase your ear has stopped hearing, so it is the one to listen for. For example, a caterer whose colleague heard “just” more than anything else writes “just” at the top.
Run the round again each week with the same colleague, and keep both numbers each time. Stop when your guess is within two of the counter and the counter shows three or fewer in the 10 minutes. Within two means you can hear them now. Three or fewer means the ones you can hear are nearly gone.
In your next client meeting, listen for the phrase at the top of your list. When you hear it coming, say the statement without it and stop. Afterward, write down how many got through, and tell your colleague that number before the next round.

Next: You will see how to say “I can do that” and “I’ll send it Thursday” without sounding arrogant.