In every presentation skills class, at least one participant asks how to get around their tendency to use filler words. Also known as “crutches” and “disfluencies”, they are words like “umm”, “you know,” “like”, “ I think”, and “right?”.
While there is nothing wrong with the occasional verbal filler, especially because it can make the speaker more relatable, excessive use of fillers is usually a sign of inexperience and nerves, and their effect can be both distracting and even irritating.
No one changes the world while playing catch up; that is why cultivating the agility to act swiftly and smartly in any given situation is one of the keys to managing the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world. I know from personal experience how hard it is to find a balance between thinking a situation through and acting too quickly. Indeed, overcoming “analysis paralysis” is easier said than done. Nevertheless, developing the agility to transform rapidly increases the likelihood that you can withstand and even thrive in the face of whatever comes your way.
Lessons I have learned with Web Marketing Strategist extraordinaire David Asarnow.
Pandemics and plagues have a way of upending people’s lives and shifting the course of history. Starting in the 14th Century, the Black Death killed nearly half of Europe’s population in a calamity that lasted four years and continued to come in waves for over two centuries. But even as the plague inexorably wiped out whole villages, it also transformed the fixed strata of medieval society,
