You know, this is like, hurting your credibility... Right?

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When was the last time you caught yourself saying:” I just wanted to quickly touch base about..."

Just. Quickly. Wanted to.

Three words doing nothing except softening a message that didn't need softening. You might not be feeling nervous when you say that, but the words usually slip off the tongue before the mind catches up.

Just as we barely notice our facial expressions mid-conversation, we rarely notice our verbal habits when we communicate, too.

Last week, we looked at the physical dimension of mirroring: how our face, posture, and tempo broadcast a signal to everyone in the room before we've said a single word.

Today, we will explore how filler words, the ‘hedges’, the ‘qualifiers’, and the way we construct leadership, credibility, reliability, or erode it, in language.

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A hedge is any word or phrase that modifies the meaning of predicates, making them fuzzier or less fuzzy. George Lakoff first introduced the term in a landmark 1973 paper in the Journal of Philosophical Logic. For example, we say "sort of," "very," "technically," "strictly speaking," "loosely speaking," and "regular" to position statements somewhere on the continuum between absolute truth and approximation.

At work, we may say:

Robin Lakoff's later work on politeness theory showed that hedging functions as a social lubricant: it is used when we subconsciously try to avoid overstepping or appearing demanding. Her foundational paper, published in Language in Society in 1973, documented how hedging clusters around face-threatening speech interactions in: disagreements, strong claims, and direct requests.

The problem is that most of us hedge by reflex, as a habit.

Robin Lakoff's politeness framework showed that the more we perceive ourselves as lower status in an interaction, the more hedges we use: we ‘hedge’ to manage social risk.

Lakoff observed that women are socialized and conditioned to use more hedges, tag questions, and qualifiers than men, to soften assertions and avoid the appearance of imposing. This linguistic deference, Lakoff argued, results in women's speech encoding tentativeness as a default, making them sound more hesitant even when extremely competent.

When we walk into a pitch, and our sentences start collecting qualifiers: "I think we're basically seeing...", our language is forming a perceived status that may not act in our favor.

However, this does not apply to epistemic settings. For example, "the evidence suggests," "it appears that" are markers of intellectual rigor. "Around 40%" is more honest than "40%" when we don't have exact data.

Let's be precise about fillers. "Um" and "uh" are not the same thing, and neither is the pause we're scared of.

Psycholinguists Herbert Clark and Jean Fox Tree, in a 2002 paper in Cognition, distinguished between "uh" (signaling a short delay) and "um" (signaling a longer delay). These are not random sounds. They are real communicative interactions — we use them to search for a word or construct a thought (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002).

They are also mostly fine.

The fillers that actually cost us are the semantic ones: "You know." "Like." "Basically." "Kind of." "Right?" These are different from um and uh because they carry intended meaning, or try to.

That last one is worth noting: "We've built a strong pipeline, right?" is a structurally different sentence from "We've built a strong pipeline." The first is asking the listener to validate, and the second is asking for permission to have said it at all.

Gikas and Sutcliffe tested this directly. In a 2019 controlled experiment published in the Cal Poly Communication Journal, participants listened to identical interview responses; the only variable was the frequency of fillers. The higher the filler rate, the lower the speaker was rated on professional credibility and communication competence, regardless of gender (Gikas & Sutcliffe, 2021).

The content of the answers was identical.

We spend enormous amounts of time on the deck, the numbers, the narrative. Assuming it’s about substance, when it’s more about how we deliver it.

Mirroring isn't only physical. We mirror verbally, too, in vocabulary, complexity, and even sentence rhythm. And just as with postural mirroring, this builds rapport. When we match someone's linguistic habits, neither too formal nor too casual, complex enough to signal competence, accessible enough to signal warmth, we create a sense of ease.

What gets particularly interesting for founders is that we often navigate between very different audiences within a single day. The language that builds trust with our engineering team isn't the same language that builds trust with the board. The language that works with a new investor is different from the one that works with a longtime operator.

Most people unconsciously drift between these forms of communication. The skill is learning to shift deliberately, which requires knowing our default first.

Audit your verbal habits, just as we do with facial mirroring: notice them first. Record a real conversation, a meeting, a voice note, or a call, and listen back.

Count the "likes." Count the "right?" Count how many statements end with rising inflection, turning them into questions without meaning to. Count how many times we open with "I just wanted to..." when we actually mean: "Here is what I want."

Then look at where the hedges cluster. For most people, verbal hedges appear in patterns around three specific types of interaction: authority, disagreement, and moments when we're making a statement we haven't fully decided we're allowed to make.

That clustering tells us something more useful than the count.

If we're chronic ‘qualifiers’, monitor the amount of "I think" and "kind of." If we're approval-seekers, track "right?" and "you know?" If we hedge our own expertise, notice the moments we open with "I'm not an expert, but" before saying something we actually know well.

When we make it visible to ourselves, we then move from automatic to consciously choosing.

Next week: the role of silence. Specifically, why the pause we're rushing to fill is often the most authoritative move available to us, and what the research says about how listeners interpret it.

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Until next week,
Lavena

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