How to get rid of unwanted ticks
Image by Roché Oosthuizen from Pixabay
Some common verbal ticks are: “like”, “right?”, “you know?”, “eeeeh…” and they are problematic. I cannot help it, but when I discover that a speaker suffers from a verbal tick, I start to count the number of ticks and calculate the “eeeh per minute” ratio instead of listening to the actual presentation. It even happened to me once that I got seated on the bus next to a couple of girls who said “liksom” (Swedish version of “like”) 37 times per minute. Yes, I measured it. When my measurement and calculation was finished, I looked up and realize that I had got on the wrong bus and heading away from my home. I was too focused on the verbal tick to even realize it. Clearly, we need to get rid of unwanted ticks to improve our own life and everyone around us.
A couple of years ago I did a lecture (in Swedish) which I livestreamed to YouTube. The topic was of international interest and I wanted to add English subtitles. Youtube has a fantastic AI speech to text transcription tool, which will add subtitles to your videos automatically as long as you speak in one of the large world languages. However, Swedish (in particular with Northern accent) do not work with this tool yet. So, the only way for me was to manually transcribe the presentation. I played back the ~45-minute lecture in slow motion and wrote down every single word while listening. It took many hours, spread over two or three days, to transcribe the entire lecture. Had I known it would be so time consuming before, I might have given up before I started. But I am glad I finished the work. In this process, I discovered a verbal tick that I up until then had been unaware of. Hearing myself saying “så att” in every other sentence quickly became unbearable, especially when the suffering is prolonged in slow motion. About half-way through the lecture, I wanted to strangle my virtual myself every time the “så att” tick left my mouth. I was just waiting for it to come out again, and again, and again.
I wrote down every one of my ticks in the transcription, because I like it when things are accurate. And since this day, I got rid of my tick. Sure, I say it occasionally by accident, but when that happens, it is like getting a strong electric shock in my whole body to remind me that I am verbal ticking again. It is indeed an uncomfortable feeling. I therefore consider myself cured. So, if you are a public speaker who have an unwanted verbal tick that you are or aren’t aware of, try this method. Record yourself and transcribe yourself. Every. Single. Word. My gut feeling is that you will find your own verbal ticks just as annoying as I found mine.
Yesterday, a completely crazy (or perhaps genius) idea struck me. What if we were to put a GoPro camera with a chest mount on ourselves and record a whole day and then evaluate the footage? It would be excruciating to go through the footage, so we might need to increase the playback speed a bit. I suspect we might discover some behavioral ticks by doing this Big Brother-like experiment. Here’s the first thing that comes to my mind: How many times per day do I pick up my smart phone? Sure, there are apps that can count this for you, and the numbers can be outright scary. Still, I keep treading in my old tracks. However, if I would have to watch myself pick up and look at the phone X times in a day, I think the message might hit closer to home. How many unwanted behaviors might we discover? Or, if we have a hunch that let’s say picking up the smart phone too often is a problem, maybe we could use machine learning to program the GoPro to only record the picking up part and create a video compilation? I know this is a borderline insane proposition, but I think it might work…
As a final note, some quick googling indicated that the number of smart phone pickups can reach three-digit numbers per day.