The Everyday Phrases That Quietly Undercut You at Work

If you want to sound confident, avoid expressions that broadcast your insecurity, according to Judith Humphrey writing in Fast Company, who identifies six words and expressions worth eliminating from your speech. At Metaintro, we track roughly 50 million job postings, and the pattern behind all six is worth understanding before the list itself. None of them are rude or unprofessional. They are simply verbal habits that leak uncertainty, and the people using them are almost always the last person in the room to notice.

Why Do These Phrases Undermine You at All?

Because each one contains a small confession. That is the thread connecting expressions that otherwise look unrelated. Commanding someone to look or listen confesses that you doubt you have their attention. Saying what I mean is confesses that your last sentence failed. Saying I'll be honest confesses, unintentionally, that honesty is not your default.

None of these are conscious admissions, which is exactly why they are effective at undermining you. The listener does not consciously register them either, but the cumulative impression forms anyway. Over the course of a meeting, a dozen small signals of hedging add up to a general sense that the speaker is not entirely sure, and that impression attaches to the content rather than to the phrasing.

The good news is that this makes the problem tractable. Because the mechanism is specific rather than a vague matter of gravitas, the fix is specific too. Removing a handful of constructions and replacing them with definite ones changes how you land, without requiring you to change your personality or speak more loudly. This is the same underlying skill gap we described in the presentation skills most people never develop.

What Is Wrong With Look and Listen?

They are commands, and commands signal that you have lost the room. Humphrey notes that look is usually uttered in a commanding tone that orders the audience to pay attention, and is rarely the mark of a respected leader. Saying it suggests you have lost the audience or do not feel confident your message will hold their interest, and that speakers who bark this way are trying desperately to sound strong.

Listen has the same effect and reveals the same insecurity. The example given is pointed, describing a leader who opens with listen up before announcing a bad quarter, and thereby compounds bad news with an offensive expression. Delivering difficult information is the moment when phrasing matters most, and a command at the front of it converts a hard message into a hostile one.

The replacement is a conviction phrase. Humphrey recommends strong openers built on conviction verbs, along the lines of I believe that, I am convinced that, I know that, or my experience has taught me that. These do the job the command was attempting, which is to signal that what follows matters, while carrying authority instead of anxiety. As she puts it, when you show confidence, others will believe you and follow you.

Why Are What I Mean Is and I'm Thinking That So Damaging?

Because they retroactively discard what you just said. The expression what I mean is makes clear that the speaker has fumbled in getting their message across. Humphrey gives the example of a speaker who says "we have worked hard but we need to work smarter" and then follows it with what I mean is, at which point listeners decide the last thing they heard is not worth remembering. It is a confession that you have not been clear.

The alternative is simply to say the clearer version without the throat clearing. Instead of announcing that a restatement is coming, deliver the restatement. The suggested replacement in the example is concrete, saying "we can work smarter by being mindful of three things", which is more specific than the original and does not draw attention to the fact that the original underperformed.

I'm thinking that fails differently but lands in the same place. It suggests the presenter is collecting their thoughts, and as Humphrey observes, if that is the case, there is little reason to take those utterances seriously. Audiences do not want to hear that you are thinking, they want the results of your careful deliberation, and the expression makes you sound half baked. In a meeting where you are being assessed, that is an expensive impression to create.

Why Is I'll Be Honest Worse Than It Sounds?

Because of what it implies about everything else you said. The phrase undercuts the speaker by suggesting you have not been honest elsewhere in your remarks. Nobody intends that meaning, and most people use it to signal candour or warmth, which is precisely why it survives in otherwise careful speech.

Its second function is more mechanical. Humphrey notes it is often used as a filler expression to buy extra time while the speaker works out what to say next, which is a legitimate need served by an illegitimate device. The recommended alternative is to pause in silence instead, because pauses heighten the audience's interest in what you are about to say.

That advice is harder than it reads. Silence feels considerably longer to the person speaking than to anyone listening, which is why people reach for filler in the first place. Practising the pause is genuinely uncomfortable at first and is one of the highest return communication habits available, particularly in interviews where the temptation to fill space is strongest.

How Much Do Fillers Like You Know Actually Cost You?

More in some settings than others, and interviews are the expensive setting. The expression you know often has no meaning, or is presumptuous. Humphrey's example is drawn directly from hiring, noting that when you say in a job interview "you know, I believe I have what you are looking for," you assume the interviewer has a certain outlook.

That is a specific and avoidable error. In an interview you are making a case to someone whose criteria you do not fully know, and a phrase that presumes shared understanding works against the very thing you are trying to establish. The advice is to eliminate you know along with uh, er and ah, and to learn the power of the pause rather than cluttering the listener's mind with empty filler.

Worth noting is that fillers are not evenly penalised. In casual conversation they pass unnoticed, and eliminating them entirely from everyday speech is neither necessary nor natural. The moments where they cost you are the assessed ones, meaning interviews, presentations to senior audiences and any situation where someone is forming a judgement about your competence in a short window. Our guides to what to wear to an interview and negotiating salary in an interview cover the other variables in that same window.

What Does This Actually Mean for Your Career?

It means a fixable habit may be costing you credit you have already earned. Being good at the work is not sufficient for advancement, a pattern we examined in why being good at your job is not enough for promotion. Decisions about who is ready for more responsibility are made by people who mostly encounter your judgment through how you describe it, so verbal habits function as a proxy for competence whether that is fair or not.

The effect is largest in exactly the moments that matter most. Visibility events, meaning the update to a senior stakeholder, the project readout, the interview, compress a great deal of assessment into a short window. Someone who hedges through that window reads as less certain of their own work, and that reading is difficult to correct afterwards. The talent visibility problem is often described as being about exposure, but the quality of the exposure matters as much as its quantity.

There is a fairness dimension worth naming. Hedging language is not evenly distributed, and people who have learned to soften their speech in order to be received well, often because directness has been penalised for them in the past, carry a double cost. They are the ones for whom deliberate practice on conviction phrasing pays back the most, and the goal is not to speak more aggressively but to remove the qualifiers that are doing no work.

The practical route is narrow and specific. Pick one phrase, notice it for a week without trying to change it, then substitute one replacement. Attempting all six at once produces self conscious speech that is worse than the original habit. Our guide to getting career feedback from reluctant managers covers how to find out which of these you actually do, since self assessment is unreliable here.

Does Any of This Change in Writing or on Video?

The written version is easier to fix and just as common. The same hedges appear as phrases like just checking, sorry to bother you and I might be wrong but, and because writing can be edited before it is sent, a single re-read catches most of them. The test is whether removing the qualifier changes the meaning. If it does not, it was doing no work and should go.

Video calls sit in between and are arguably the hardest case. The small delays and the absence of natural turn taking cues make people reach for filler to hold the floor, which is why hedges multiply in remote meetings. Our guide to virtual meetings for remote teams covers the mechanics, and why most meetings fail covers the structural side.

There is a new wrinkle worth flagging. As more written communication is drafted with AI assistance, the polished version increasingly sounds nothing like the spoken one, which makes the contrast between a crisp email and a hedging verbal update more noticeable rather than less. We covered that tension in what happens when AI writes your emails, and it raises rather than lowers the value of speaking clearly in real time.

How Do You Actually Break a Verbal Habit?

Not by trying harder in the moment, which is where most people start and fail. These expressions are automatic, and automatic behaviour is not reachable by willpower while you are also concentrating on the content of what you are saying. Attempting to monitor your speech in real time usually produces a stilted delivery that costs you more than the original habit did.

The method that works is to separate noticing from changing. Spend the first week only counting, ideally by recording one meeting a week and listening back, which is uncomfortable and unusually effective. Most people discover they use one or two of the six heavily and the rest barely at all, which turns a vague worry into a specific target.

Only then introduce a replacement, and only one. Because each phrase has a distinct failure mode, each has a distinct substitute, and pairing them explicitly is what makes the swap available under pressure. If your habit is what I mean is, the replacement is to restate more specifically without announcing it. If your habit is filler, the replacement is a pause. Rehearsing the substitute in low stakes settings is what makes it survive a high stakes one.

Expect the habit to reappear under stress, because that is when automatic behaviour reasserts itself, and the visibility moments that matter are precisely the stressful ones. That is an argument for practising in ordinary meetings rather than saving the effort for the presentation that counts. The board presentation that wins the top job is not the place to attempt a new speaking habit for the first time.

Is There a Risk of Overcorrecting?

Yes, and it is worth guarding against. Conviction phrasing applied to something you are genuinely unsure about is not confidence, it is overclaiming, and it damages credibility faster than hedging does. The correct move when you do not know is to say so plainly, because saying you do not know and naming when you will have an answer is a definite statement that carries no hedge at all.

The difference is easy to state and harder to hold under pressure in a room full of senior people. The distinction is between uncertainty about the world, which is honest and should be stated directly, and uncertainty about yourself, which is what these six phrases leak. Removing the second while keeping the first is the entire skill. A leader who states what they know, states what they do not, and does neither apologetically is the version of this advice worth aiming at, as our piece on what to do when a team loses confidence in you explores from the other direction.

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People Also Asked

Q: What phrases make you sound less confident at work?

A: Six in particular were identified: look, listen, what I mean is, I'm thinking that, I'll be honest, and you know. Each signals a different form of uncertainty, from commanding attention you fear you have lost, to conceding that your previous sentence was unclear, to filling silence while you think.

Q: What should I say instead of I'll be honest?

A: Nothing at all, ideally. The phrase suggests you have not been honest elsewhere in your remarks and is often used to buy thinking time. The recommended replacement is a deliberate pause, since pauses heighten the audience's interest in what you are about to say.

Q: Do filler words really affect hiring decisions?

A: They matter most in assessed settings like interviews, where a short window carries a lot of judgment. The example given involves saying "you know, I believe I have what you are looking for" in an interview, which presumes the interviewer shares your outlook. The advice is to remove you know along with uh, er and ah, and to use pauses instead.

Ready to level up how you come across when it counts? Metaintro tracks roughly 50 million job postings so you can see exactly which communication skills employers are asking for in your field, and you can create a free account to get matched with roles where your judgment is the thing being hired.