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You, I, and We
A couple years ago, a large multinational electronics firm reached out and they asked me to analyze all their social media posts. They were essentially wondering what gets people’s attention, right? We’re scrolling through social media. Why are certain posts more engaging than others? And this is something lots of us are trying to do all the time, right? If we’re a salesperson, we’re reaching out over email, we’re hoping people open up our email. If we’re speaking and making a presentation, we’re hoping other people pay attention to what we have to say. How can we get people to pay attention?
I analyzed thousands of their posts looking through the words that they used and the engagement that they received, and I found a particular type of words, greatly increased engagement, words like “you,” “you,” “you’re,” “you’ll,” and so on. And the reason why is that words like “you” act kind of like a stop sign. If someone said, “Hey, here are five tips to save money,” you might keep scrolling. But if it says, “Here are five tips to save you money,” well suddenly now it seems a lot more self-relevant. Hold on, this person’s speaking to me. And so I’m more likely to pay attention. I’m more likely to open up that email. I’m more likely to click on that post, and I’m, as a result, I’m more likely to like it or share it at the end. And so words like “you” can be a great way to get people to pause and pay more attention to what we’re talking about.
But it doesn’t mean that “you” is always a good thing to use because in some other research working with the same company, I analyzed all their customer help pages. So imagine you have an issue with your printer or your phone or something won’t sync. So you go to their website, you type in some information to look for a help page, there’s some written content, and at the end of that page, you might click whether it’s helpful or not. Now, if “you” is useful, we should have found the same effect, right? “You” is helpful on these pages, but in that case, you actually had the opposite effect. “You” made pages less helpful rather than more. Why was “you” good on social media but bad on help pages? Imagine you read a a page and it says, “Hey, if your phone is broken, you need to reboot the phone and then you need to attach this cord and then you need to sync it to another thing.” I’m sitting there going, “What do you mean my phone is broken? I bought this phone from you, right? It should work.” And why is it my responsibility to do all these different difficult things to get it working again, right? It makes me feel like somehow I’m responsible for the problem. And so “you” not only grabs attention, which is a good thing, but it can also feel accusatory.
Imagine you come home and your spouse or partner or roommate says, “Hey, did you walk the dog? Or, Hey, did you make dinner?” You might sit there going, “Well, what do you mean? Did I walk the dog? Did I make dinner? Why is it my responsibility to do that particular thing?” What they really might have meant is, “Hey, did the dog get a walk?” Right? Or, you know, “do I need to start making dinner because we need food at some point.” At the end of this, I think words like “you” can be very powerful, but we need to understand when and how to use them.
And it’s not just “you,” right? Think about other words like “we” versus “I.” Let’s say, you’re doing a big report, and at the end of that report you say, “we found this,” right? Well, that has some benefits, but also potentially some downsides. If we want to take agency, if we want to show that we found something, if we want to get credit for it, then words like “I” and “we” can do that. At the same time, if we want to suggest that this is just truth, it’s just there to be found, then avoiding words like “I” or “we” will suggest this is just the thing that’s out there and the truth and anyone would find the same thing.
Fillers
So a couple years ago, I was working with a coaching client, that was trying to become a more effective salesperson. Eventually, we were hitting up on a wall. They weren’t having the impact they were hoping, and we were trying to figure out why. And it was during the pandemic when Zoom was sort of rolling out. And so we started having these conversations over Zoom, and they rolled out a new feature that made it easy to transcribe these interactions. And so just for fun, at the end of one of these conversations, I looked at the transcription of the interaction and suddenly, it popped out at me very clearly what the issue was. It was full of ums and uhs and even likes from time to time – what people might call fillers.
We use fillers all the time. Even the best of us use fillers, particularly when we’re speaking. We use them to essentially buy conversational time. But the problem is that it undermines our impact. It makes us less persuasive because it makes us seem less confident or certain about what we’re saying. If we’re saying, “um” and “ah” and all the time, it makes us seem like we don’t know what we want to say, which leads our audience to be less likely to listen to us. And so what do we do about this? How do we overcome these fillers? And I’d say a couple things here.
The first right is just try pausing instead. We all need time in conversations. Sometimes we all need time to think, but great speakers, great communicators often pause to bring people’s attention in. Sometimes if someone’s speaking, and they speak more slowly or they pause at the end of saying, we all kind of lean in a little bit to hear what they’re going to say next. Right? Great speakers do a really good job of that. I, by the way, I’m terrible at it. I tend to speak rather quickly when I’m excited about something. But pausing can be a really useful tool to draw people’s attention in and give us that time to think.
But the second thing I would say, and it’s really painful to do, but I’ve done it and it’s worth trying, is just record yourself talking. Record that audio, get it transcribed, and look at what you’re saying. It’s going to be painful. It’s painful listening to ourselves, even more painful reading the ums and uhs when we’re speaking. But by seeing when it’s happening, by understanding when we’re doing it, we can at least practice more getting rid of it and reducing it. If we can reduce those fillers, we can be more persuasive and increase our own impact.