Space fillers are those sounds, not necessarily words that people use when they speak to avoid awkward pauses. If you are like me, when you are listening to a speaker and you notice the space fillers, nothing else they say matters because your brain focuses on the space fillers for the rest of their presentation. Recently (last night) however, I came to a better understanding of space fillers. They show up in other aspects of our lives besides speech.
Have you ever considered relationships that you picked up at a time when you thought your life was in a season of dryness? those relationships that you could have completely gone through life without and have been all the better? Have you considered the extra activities you picked up because you had too much free time on your hands and wanted a ‘fuller’ life but it turned out that those extra activities stole from your rest time and accelerated your burnout? I consider these life’s space fillers. Space fillers differ for everyone. For some people, they go into a marriage and commit to a life with someone not realising it is a space filler, distracting them from their true path. For other people, it is an excessive drinking habit, or an overindulgent personality.
When you take public speaking classes, they tell you that to minimise the space fillers in your presentations and speeches, you must get comfortable with silence. Once you get comfortable with it, you will take more pauses in between your speech, you will replace space fillers with a second or two of quietness. Not only does it improve the experience of your listeners, but it also changes the flow of your message and how it is delivered as a whole. Unfortunately, no one remembers to tell us that we can take pauses in our life and so we go on trying to get to the next part. We also very often measure our movement against our peers but everyone doesn’t have the same experiences and training which means, we don’t always know the same things or deliver our ‘speeches’ at the same level of expertise.
Space fillers are similar to comfort zones in a way because they work in helping us avoid the awkwardness of any silence or emptiness but like comfort zones, they don’t enable or foster growth. A space filler every now and again is important for establishing stock of ‘what not to do’ in the future but they cannot become a constant part of our lives because that makes difficult our ability to pay attention to the main message as the focus is drawn to the space fillers.
