Obviously: The Filler Word That Turns People Off

When I was 24 years old, I was promoted into management for the first time.

I was young, ambitious, and incredibly excited about the opportunity.

The woman giving me the promotion asked me a question I have never forgotten:

I remember thinking, is she crazy?

I was already the first person into the office and the last person out almost every day. Of course I could turn the lights on in the morning and turn them off when I left.

I did not say any of that.

I just said yes.

And I went off to become a manager.

It was not until a few years later that I finally understood what she had been talking about.

We were having a conversation about how things were going, and she said to me:

"You're really good at turning the lights on and off."

There it was again.

This time I asked her.

"What exactly do you mean when you say that?"

Her answer changed the way I thought about leadership.

She explained that once you become a manager, you have an enormous amount of power in the way you make people feel.

What you say can turn someone on: energize them, motivate them, encourage them, make them feel capable and ready to move.

Or you can turn them off.

One conversation.

One comment.

Sometimes one word.

That was what she meant by turning the lights on and off.

And she told me something else.

Even when something was not going well.

Even when I needed to address a performance problem.

Even when I needed to have a difficult conversation.

The job was not to avoid the issue. The job was to address it, correct it, and still leave that person understanding what needed to happen next and believing they could do it.

I have carried that lesson with me ever since.

And it is one of the reasons the final word in this five-part series is obviously.

If It's Obvious, Why Are We Saying It?

Of all five words I have worked to eliminate from my vocabulary, obviously may be the easiest one to remove.

Because what value does it bring?

Think about how we use it:

• "Obviously, that's not going to work."
• "Obviously, we need to change the strategy."
• "Obviously, she misunderstood."
• "Obviously, that's the right answer."
• "Obviously, we can't do that."

Now remove the word.

• "That's not going to work."
• "We need to change the strategy."
• "She misunderstood."
• "That's the right answer."
• "We can't do that."

Nothing was lost.

The information is exactly the same.

But something important was removed:

The judgment.

Because when I say something is obvious, I am not just communicating information.

I may also be communicating:

You should already know this.

Everyone else understands this.

I can't believe we're even discussing this.

This is easy.

How could you not see it?

I may not mean any of those things.

But intention is not the only thing that matters in communication.

Impact matters too.

"Obviously" Can Make Someone Feel Small

What makes this word particularly dangerous is that we often use it as filler.

We are not intentionally trying to insult anyone.

It just comes out.

And because it seems harmless to the person saying it, we often do not notice what happens to the person hearing it.

But imagine you are sitting in a meeting and you have just offered an idea.

Your boss responds:

"Obviously, we can't do that because..."

What happens next?

Are you more likely to offer another idea?

Ask a question?

Challenge an assumption?

Admit that you do not understand something?

Maybe.

But maybe not.

Maybe you decide that everyone else in the room already knows something you do not.

Maybe you stop talking.

And that is where a filler word can become an operational problem.

Because now we have not just affected someone's feelings.

There Is Actually Research on This Word

I went looking for research on this because I wondered whether my reaction to obviously was simply personal.

It is not.

A 2025 experimental study actually tested the word. Researchers built doctor-patient conversations and compared essentially the same medical advice with and without subtle condescending language. The condescending versions differed by two inserted words: simple and obviously.

Across 140 participants, those conversations were rated as less respectful and the doctors delivering them as less trustworthy. Between 83 and 89 percent of participants preferred the non-condescending doctor, and on average they chose to pay more and travel more hours to see that doctor instead.

Think about that.

The underlying information did not need to change.

Two seemingly insignificant words changed how the person delivering that information was perceived.

That matters enormously when you are in a position of authority.

There is another piece of research that I think makes obviously especially interesting: something psychologists call the curse of knowledge.

Once we know something, it becomes surprisingly difficult to put ourselves back into the position of someone who does not know it. We use our own knowledge as the frame of reference and overestimate how much of our point of view other people share.

A study on perspective-taking tested what actually reduces that bias, and the result is worth sitting with. Simply telling people their estimate was wrong did not do it. What reduced the bias was hearing the other person's reasoning.

Being corrected does not teach us what someone else knows.

Listening to them does.

In other words:

That does not make it obvious to you.

Those are two very different things.

Power Amplifies Language

This is where I come back to what I learned at 24.

Words do not necessarily carry the same weight when they come from someone with authority.

A comment from a peer is one thing.

The same comment from your boss, CEO, teacher, mentor, parent, or someone whose approval matters to you can land completely differently.

Leadership research supports the importance of this distinction. Studies of autonomy-supportive management have found benefits when managers use less controlling, more informational language, explain their reasoning, and take employees' perspectives into account.

In one intervention at a Fortune 500 company, 25 managers were trained to communicate in a more autonomy-supportive way. Five weeks later, the 169 employees they supervised showed more autonomous motivation and greater workplace engagement than employees of untrained managers.

A larger meta-analysis covering 72 studies, 83 samples, and more than 32,000 people found leader autonomy support positively associated with autonomous motivation, well-being, and positive workplace behaviors, and negatively associated with distress.

This is why I believe emotional intelligence is not just about understanding our own emotions.

It is also understanding the impact we have on the emotional state of the people around us.

Especially when we have power.

Our Job Is to Turn People On, Not Off

I have thought about that lesson from my first manager many times throughout my career.

Turn the lights on.

That does not mean leaders walk around making everyone happy all day.

That is not leadership either.

Sometimes you have to tell someone their work is not meeting expectations.

Sometimes you have to disagree.

Sometimes you have to say no.

Sometimes you have to make an unpopular decision.

Sometimes you have to address behavior that absolutely has to change.

But none of those things require us to diminish another human being.

I can say:

"This isn't meeting the standard we agreed to."

I do not need:

"Obviously, this isn't meeting the standard."

I can say:

"We need to approach this differently."

I do not need:

"Obviously, we need to approach this differently."

I can say:

"Here's something I think we're missing."

I do not need:

"Obviously, we're missing this."

The message does not become weaker when I remove obviously.

It becomes cleaner.

And the other person does not have to process an unnecessary layer of judgment before they can process the actual information.

Watch What Happens in Meetings

Once I started paying attention to this word, I started hearing it everywhere.

And I started noticing what sometimes happened immediately afterward.

Someone's posture changes.

Someone stops contributing.

Someone becomes defensive.

Someone starts explaining why they did not know something.

Someone who was about to ask a question decides not to.

The conversation shifts from the actual issue to an emotional reaction nobody intended to create.

That is expensive.

Because great meetings require information.

We need people to tell us what we are missing.

We need questions.

We need disagreement.

We need someone willing to say, "I don't understand."

We need the person in the room with the least information to feel just as comfortable speaking as the person with the most.

The moment people start worrying that a question might make them look stupid, we lose access to information.

And leaders cannot make great decisions with incomplete information.

It Adds Nothing, So Why Keep It?

That is ultimately why obviously made my list.

I am not suggesting that using the word once makes someone arrogant or emotionally unintelligent.

That is not the point.

The point is much simpler.

So why use it?

This entire five-word journey has taught me that becoming a better communicator is not always about learning what to say.

Sometimes it is about learning what not to say.

But.

Try.

Fine.

Should.

Obviously.

Five ordinary words.

Five words I used constantly.

And five words that, once I started paying attention to them, taught me an enormous amount about how language affects trust, accountability, choice, communication, and leadership.

I still think about that 24-year-old version of myself who thought her new boss was asking whether she was responsible enough to turn off the office lights.

I had absolutely no idea what she was teaching me.

I do now.

When you have influence over another person, your words carry weight.

They can create energy or drain it.

They can invite someone into a conversation or shut them out.

They can make someone more willing to speak or teach them to stay quiet.

They can turn the lights on.

Or they can turn them off.

There is a version of this same problem that has nothing to do with word choice. When people edit themselves in meetings, a leader ends up deciding from a partial picture of their own organization. The same thing happens when nobody can see where the work actually sits, which capabilities exist, and which dependencies have quietly formed. Both are information problems, and both are why understanding what workforce intelligence measures matters before the next big workforce decision gets made.

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This is the last in a series about the five words I was taught to remove from my vocabulary 25 years ago, and what they have taught me about communication, leadership, accountability, empathy, and human connection.