A read on your speaking patterns, pulled from 30 days of recorded meetings — and a plan to sharpen how clearly you land your ideas.
You're a listener who speaks in concentrated bursts. That's a strength — but the bursts tend to either snap too short or run too long, and they're peppered with filler that softens otherwise sharp points.
Per 1,000 words you speak, here's how often each crutch shows up. "Like" and "uh" lead — together they fire roughly every 35 words.
"Like" is the headline. At ~16 per 1,000 words it's frequent enough that listeners start to notice — and it tends to land right before your most important nouns, which is exactly where you want crispness.
Almost a quarter of your turns are three words or fewer ("Yeah, see," "Okay, so"). But 39 turns run past 40 words — and those tend to spiral into run-ons that lose the thread.
Your longest turns chain three or four thoughts with "so… right… like…" and rarely close cleanly. The insight is in there — it just arrives buried.
Lots of "Yeah," "Right," "Okay." Great for rapport, but they let others set the frame. Your strongest ideas deserve a full, deliberate sentence.
"The no, the we ideas have to and hit 90% without that — this is still like above and beyond like as a recovery mechanism. So it's not even counted in that 90%…" — your turn, beta-readiness debate, Jun 4
Only 1 in 10 of your turns is a question — and most are logistics ("How do I see the notes?") rather than the kind that pull thinking out of the room. The good news: when you do probe impact, you're sharp.
"Does that impact — have you done the evaluation of its impact?" — your turn, outage review, Jun 2
More of that. Questions that test assumptions ("What breaks if we're wrong about the 72%?") make you the person who sharpens the decision, not just reacts to it.
Ordered by impact-per-effort. Don't do all five at once — stack them one per week.
It's your most frequent filler and the easiest to kill. The fix isn't speaking faster — it's getting comfortable with a half-second of silence where "like" used to go.
Silence reads as confidence. Filler reads as still-deciding.
You start a lot of turns with "So…" as a runway. Replace it with your conclusion. Lead with the point, then support it.
When you feel a turn running long, stop at the first complete thought and let it land. If there's a second point, signal it: "Two things — first… second…"
Your 40-word turns carry 40 words of value compressed into a shape no one can follow. Chunking it gives the room handholds.
Once per meeting, where you'd normally say "Yeah" or "Right," ask instead: "What would change your mind?" or "What's the risk if that's wrong?"
"Just," "I think," and trailing "right?" all shrink your claims. You earned the seat — say "We should ship the major-cities cut," not "I just think maybe we could, right?"
One small focus a day. Low effort, compounding returns — and you already have the recordings to check yourself against.