Why Do We Say "Um" So Much? with Dr. Steven D. Cohen
7/15/202616 min
Steven D. Cohen is an award-winning professor, author, and coach who empowers you and your team to communicate with influence, inspire your audience, and achieve your leadership potential.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsZak Rosen· Host0:00
[percussive music] Um, hey. It's Zach. This is Weirdly Helpful. Today, um, uh, um...
Steven Cohen· Guest0:17
I'm Steven Cohen. I'm a professor of business communication at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, and I also run a communication training and coaching company that helps executives and leaders speak with confidence and influence.
Zak Rosen· Host0:30
I spend most of my days interviewing people or editing those interviews. I edit other people's interviews as well. So I'm listening to human speech all day long, and I don't understand why we say "um" so much. I say it. Other hosts I work with say it. We're, we're all just um-ing. Why are we doing that?
Steven Cohen· Guest0:53
It's a great question. Lots of possibilities. One way that I like to explain it is perhaps we've been conditioned to answer right away, and we've been conditioned to answer this way from the time we were little kids. If you think about growing up, our parents or whomever raised us would ask us a question, and they'd expect an instant answer. [clicking language] Kinda like a snap of the finger.
Zak Rosen· Host1:15
Huh.
Steven Cohen· Guest1:15
And so we've been conditioned since we were very young to answer when spoken to. And this expectation continued into grade school and beyond, where teachers and then eventually professors would ask us