Chapter 13

Conquering Hesitation and Stuttering

In This Chapter

Tackling your stop reflex

Addressing stuttering’s emotional components

Following through with sound

Changing your thinking and bolstering fluency

I n 2010, the popular and critical response to the film The King’s Speech brought stuttering into the public gaze. (See the sidebar ‘Stuttering – a king’s story’.)

If you stutter – or stammer as people in the UK more frequently call it – you know what a painful and difficult condition it is. I devote a whole chapter to stuttering because the condition causes a high degree of anxiety and embarrassment, and yet has often been misunderstood as a purely physical voice production problem. In reality, stuttering is likely to involve the stutterer’s beliefs, perceptions and intentions as much as his or her physical responses. To become fluent, you need to address the problem on all these levels, as I explain in later sections.

This chapter addresses the full range of hesitations from an occasional stumble to a full-blown stutter. Whatever the degree of hesitation, you can do a lot yourself to improve your fluency. I also suggest where you can look for professional help.

Hesitating: Realising that Everyone Stumbles

Hesitancy in speech covers a range of different situations, from the occasional slight trip over a word to a full-scale stammer that cripples daily communication. Do you experience any of these milder stumbles?

Starting hesitantly if you’re uncertain how to answer a question or what to say next.

Interjecting an ‘er’ or ‘um’ before you find the words that you want to say.

Hesitating when you’re confused, embarrassed, emotionally upset or overwhelmed.

Tripping over your words in your rush to express an idea because your brain works faster than your lips.

Leapfrogging from one idea to another in a jerky way because you’ve so many ideas in your mind.

Hesitating due to shakiness from old age or a physical disability such as Parkinson’s.

Everyone experiences vocal hiccups at times. Most people don’t even notice when they hesitate now and then – but for people who stutter, any stumble can be hell on earth.

If you know that your speech is hesitant and want to do something about it, take the following first steps:

Think more clearly.

Slow down your speech and speak with more emphasis.

Master good breathing.

I cover the first two bullets in the following sections, but I want to highlight the last point briefly. Much hesitation is entirely due to poor breathing. If you develop the ability to breathe better, launching into speech is easier, your words flow more easily and you don’t snatch tiny breaths or intersperse ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ into your speech. Refer to Chapter 4 for more about effective breathing.

Thinking clearly

Don’t be insulted by my next comment! You can avoid much hesitancy just by knowing what you want to say. I’m not suggesting that you don’t know how to think, but you may not be getting yourself in the right state for good thinking or allowing sufficient time for it.

If you speak before you’re ready, you’re heading for a cropper. As Abraham Lincoln said, it’s ‘better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.’ Yet many people start speaking before they’re ready. As soon as someone asks a question or looks at them expectantly, they feel a tension that they can only relieve by launching straight into words. Ironically, though they speak immediately in order to look confident, they usually produce the opposite result.

When you hear people start every sentence with an ‘erm’ and then slot in an ‘um’ a few words later, they’re probably searching to bring something out from their minds, and because their thoughts do not come quickly enough, they feel they must make sound anyway. In these situations, the mind – not the voice – is creating the hesitation.

Give yourself thinking space. Not only do you speak better, you look more confident when you take your time. Clarity starts with clear thoughts. If your mind is all over the place, you’re going to sound muddy. Of course, you don’t need to plan in detail the exact words you’re going to use, but you do need to think and feel as you breathe in before speaking in order to clarify each thought.

The following activity shows you how to clarify your thinking and, in the process, better focus your speaking. Write a short speech or refer to one you’ve already written. Then:

1. Select a sentence or a short section from the piece and read it out loud.

2. After you read your statement, imagine someone asking you, ‘What did you just say?’

3. Look up from your text and give a shorter, simpler version in your own words.

If your simpler version is still quite long, repeat the question, ‘What did you just say?’ and simplify your simpler version yet further.

For example, in a coaching session Sunish read the following long sentence:

The regulator for energy companies put simple tariffs and clearer bills at the centre of proposals for a root and branch overhaul of the energy market this afternoon as it warned that deliberately confusing systems is creating a lack of competition in the market, which is certainly indicated by soaring profit margins, which have risen at least 8 per cent on average for consumers in the past six months in spite of opposition.

In answering the question, ‘What did you just say?’ Sunish had to think of the main points without reading them and then say them in his own words. This task simplified his statement substantially. I then prompted him, ‘What’s most important about what you said?’ and he simplified even more. After a couple of trial attempts, he came up with this shorter version:

Fuel bills have risen significantly this year. The regulator suggests that clearer tariffs will increase competition by allowing customers to make easier comparisons.

When you express the main points in your own words, you gain ownership of your material, and most importantly, you think and speak, rather than read out words that you crafted earlier. The process hones your thinking and forces to you focus on only the most essential information.

1. Read through to yourself a five-minute speech until you’re familiar with it.

2. Look up from the text, and summarise the entire speech in no more than five sentences.

3. Test out your summary by having a friend ask you about your speech.

Reply out loud: ‘It’s about . . . ’ and share your summary. Remember: five sentences max!

Try the process several times with the same speech; you should find that the summary becomes increasingly succinct with repetition.

This activity is great practice prior to networking events or meeting new people. Imagine how great you can feel when you’re able to respond fluently and concisely the next time someone asks you, ‘And what do you do?’

Slowing down and using emphasis

One of the best ways to think more clearly is to convince yourself that you’ve no need to hurry. The following tips are sure-fire ways to steady your pace without sacrificing your passion.

Take time on the in-breath. A full breath helps you to slow down and helps your thinking too. Big breath equals big thought. Lots of inadequate tiny breaths on the other hand interrupt your thinking pattern and scatter your thoughts.

Know where you’re going energetically. Have a strong intention to reach the end of your thought and feel this intention in the way you breathe out, using your air to move towards the end of your sentence. When you do this, you’re less likely to pepper your speech with ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’. Refer to Chapter 4 for more about following through with your breath.

Pause. Listeners enjoy a pause – if only more speakers realised this fact! Without breaks, everything runs together, whereas a pause allows you to punctuate your thoughts and think new ones. Just as the comma and the full stop on a page help the meaning of a written sentence, so a short or longer pause in speaking helps your listeners to make sense of what you have to say.

Use language that prepares and explains. Some words and phrases have the purpose of signposting where you’re going.

In a meeting, instead of offering the main thrust of your thought in your opening words – before people even have a chance to tune in – first provide an introduction to your idea. Use words such as, ‘I’d like to add something here’, or ‘I have an idea I think we should consider’. Short, simple phrases like these let people prepare themselves for what’s to follow.

Use emphasis. Emphasise the words that are most important for the meaning of the sentence.

Read the following sentence, placing strong emphasis on the italicised words

Emphasising your main points
helps you to slow down,
to speak with understanding,
and to sound clear and confident.

When you speak a sentence with strong emphasis, you find that you do indeed slow down and sound clear and confident – and that any hesitancy disappears. Whether reading or speaking off the cuff, remind yourself to emphasise strongly, and you find that your delivery becomes better paced and your meaning clearer. (You can find more about using emphasis effectively in Chapter 8.)

Practise reading with emphasis. Read out loud a piece of text from a newspaper. Decide which words are most important for the meaning, and mark them by underlining or highlighting. Then read the text again, emphasising heavily the words you marked.

Discovering the Roots of Stuttering

Stuttering is of a different order from mere hesitation. A person who stutters knows for sure that they have a stutter. Most adults who stutter have struggled with fluency for a long time and find stuttering painful and distressing. They constantly block on particular consonants, struggling to get those sounds out, and often attempting an initial consonant several times without success, producing the typical stutter. This block can also feel like a physical lump in the throat, preventing a stutterer from getting a word out.

Stuttering is very common – 750,000 people stammer in the UK, more than 3 million in the US and an estimated 70 million worldwide. Medical and voice experts have looked into remedies for years.

Recently, specialists have made rapid advances in curing the condition after recognising that stuttering isn’t so much a voice problem as a systematic communication problem. For too long experts treated the physical vocal symptoms in isolation, but when you look further into the whole context and examine the causes, you discover an interlocking system of mental and physical causes including behaviours, emotions, perceptions and beliefs that have to be unpicked before you can finally speak fluently.

Getting stuck with the label of ‘stutterer’

Stuttering is nearly always triggered by fear at an early age. It’s often triggered when children fear they can’t fulfil the expectations of authority figures, particularly in reference to speaking. George V, for example, used to show impatience when his son Bertie (King George VI) stumbled, and would bark at him, ‘Get it out!’ Sometimes, children are frightened by scary kids at school and find their hesitant responses are then ridiculed, exacerbating their fears.

Stuttering only really becomes a problem when you get the label. What starts off as common stumbling develops into something bigger through criticism or ridicule. Sometimes, in spite of excellent intentions, sending a child to a therapist can suggest to the child that something is wrong with him or her. The child then assumes that they have a problem and that the problem has a label: ‘stuttering’. They then identify themselves as ‘a stutterer’.

If you have a child who hesitates badly, of course you want to seek help from a professional. Be aware though that over-concern on your part, especially when the child is young, can exacerbate the problem. Be happy to accept hesitation in your young child; this hesitation is probably a sign that your child’s early language skills are unable to keep up with a bright enquiring intelligence. Given encouragement, your child should soon acquire fluency.

Stuttering becomes a fully-fledged disability when children come to understand that not only is something wrong with their speech, but also that something must be abnormal about them in order to create the problem. They internalise and take responsibility for the problem, creating more fear in the process.

After you take on board that you’re ‘a stutterer’, you set yourself up for an intolerable situation in which you think in impossible never-ending circles:

I have to speak, but I can’t speak.

I have to stop stuttering, but in trying to stop, I block.

I want to speak, but if I do, I block, so I don’t want to speak.

Pip stuttered from early childhood and knew that it disturbed and irritated his parents. At secondary school, he was unable to give his name to his teacher in front of the class on the first day and the other children instantly labelled him stupid. He vividly remembers the agony of reading aloud in English class. He used to work out in advance how many lines each child would be asked to read and, therefore, which lines he was likely to have to recite. He then scoured the lines for tricky consonants before deciding whether to brave it or ask to be excused and leave the room just before his turn. When he became a civil engineer, he became extremely skilled at finding alternative words for ones that were hard to say. Thus, every day of his life, he used his intelligence to mask his difficulties. When he finally discovered ways to avoid blocking and began speaking fluently, he always told people that he was grateful for his former disability. ‘I put in hundreds of hours on creative thinking,’ he said. ‘It certainly taught me to think laterally about problems!’

Creating what you fear most

Putting your attention on what you don’t want is a great way to confuse your unconscious mind; every time you think about what you don’t want, you create a mental image of the very thing you fear, which then gets larger and larger as a mental block in the mind and becomes ever more likely to happen.

Almost everything that happens in communication with others confirms a stutterer’s conviction that something is wrong with them: a teacher doesn’t understand properly what a hesitant child is saying and avoids contact; other children don’t bother to stop and listen and then don’t invite the child to play.

When George VI started as a Royal Navy cadet at Dartmouth, his tutor asked him a simple question: what is half of a half? Bertie was unable to pronounce ‘q’ for ‘quarter’ and so froze. The class sniggered and the tutor resorted to sarcasm. In such ways, Bertie came to believe that he was stupid.

If you struggle with stuttering, you may begin to see life through the eyes of ‘a stutterer’ and doubt your ability in all areas. You sense that you cannot relate to others. You decide that something about you as a person is unacceptable. You become everything you fear most.

If you regard stuttering as the kind of stumbling that everyone does from time to time, it has no power. But stuttering becomes embedded when you make meaning of your tendency to stumble, when you allow it to become a fully-fledged abnormality that extends to every part of your life. You come to believe that you’re weird or different, that you haven’t any friends and that you’ve no chance of any success in any aspect of your life.

This interpretation of what stuttering means becomes a downward spiral that constantly lowers your self-esteem, feeding on itself in the process. However, you can respond differently, as I show in the following section.

Changing Your Focus

Fluency comes when you stop fixating on stuttering. Because thinking about not stuttering only intensifies your stuttering; you have to get your mind to pay attention to something – anything – other than the specific words and sounds coming from your mouth.

The following sections cover various ways that you can shift your focus from stuttering to other more useful topics.

Seeking out times when you are fluent

A few years ago, help for people who stutter always focused on attempting to cure the physical manifestations of stuttering. But this approach ignored an important fact. Nearly all people who stutter have occasions when they don’t.

You most likely stutter when you’re acutely aware of other people’s expectations and feel under pressure. Perhaps you feel that someone’s waiting impatiently for an answer, or you feel a sense of urgency in a phone call, or maybe a conversation is making you tense, or you have to speak in public or to an authority. On these occasions, you get self-conscious and go into ‘fear mode’.

If you don’t stutter in particular circumstances, then you already know how to speak fluently. So the obvious starting point to look for clues on how to speak fluently is to investigate those times where you’re already fluent.

Make a list of every occasion when you don’t stutter – including where, when, how, with whom. The following scenarios may jog your memory. Do you stutter when:

You’re talking inside your head?

You speak out loud at times when you’re alone?

You talk to your cat or dog?

You’re with close friends?

It’s so noisy you can’t hear yourself?

You feel completely comfortable?

Play the part of a detective and examine these occasions closely. Ask yourself, what are the factors in each situation that allow me to speak fluently? Write down anything useful that comes to mind.

Pretending to be someone else

Some people stutter when they feel self-conscious, but become fluent when they’re released from the straitjacket of being themselves and can pretend that they’re someone else.

Examples of actors who stutter in private life but not when playing a part abound. I mention Rowan Atkinson, James Earl Jones and Marilyn Monroe in the sidebar ‘Fluency tactics of the famous’, and other stars include Nicole Kidman, Emily Blunt, Bruce Willis and Anthony Hopkins; numerous public figures are much less fluent in interview than on stage.

Watch online unedited video clips of your favourite celebrities or public figures being interviewed. You quickly see that these larger than life figures are people too – who speak with pauses, hesitations and ordinary verbal mis-steps.

Alan Badmington, a former stutterer who won the international oratory championship at the World Congress for People Who Stutter in 2004, encountered countless difficulties in his former career as a police officer. Yet he recalls playing the part of Goldilocks in a pantomime he wrote himself for a Christmas party, and having no problem with stuttering whatsoever. Badmington’s Goldilocks was assertive and spoke fluently; whereas Badmington as himself was shy and reserved – and stuttered. His problem was one of identity not fluency.

In a similar way, parents of children who stutter often note that when their children have their teddies talk, the stutter disappears. Of course, if teddy makes a mistake, that reflects badly on teddy, not the child! The phenomenon is similar to the actor in a role: when it’s not ‘me’, there’s no stutter.

1. Choose a celebrity figure or character who you admire as a communicator.

2. Step into that person’s shoes.

Pretend to be that person. Stand, move, gesticulate, adopt the expressions and even try to think and feel and breathe like the person. Take your time to get into being the other person.

3. Speak as that person speaks.

Make the kind of comments the person makes. If you like, imagine that you’re that person in interview, and tell the interviewer about your latest project, about how you became famous, or about what you’re looking forward to. The more you can make the pretence real, the easier it becomes to speak.

When you next need to speak as yourself, notice what elements of this practice you can take into your own speaking, without having to adopt a different persona in his or her entirety.

Singing

The speech therapist Lionel Logue got King George VI to sing phrases that he was having difficulty speaking, and the King found that he was fluent in song. Before his coronation speech, Logue even encouraged the King to take singing lessons.

Singing has various things going for it from the point of view of people who stutter:

When a person who stutters sings, rhythm takes precedence over fluency and consonant sounds. As soon as rhythm takes the attention over everything else, blocking is released.

Breathing also takes place rhythmically. Sound follows breath directly, with no hiatus. You breathe within the rhythm of the music and break into song within the rhythm.

You’ve no time to worry about the initial beat because the next beat comes hard on its heels. If you have rhythm in your veins, you’ll find it quite hard to sing un-rhythmically. The pulse of rhythm is such a strong impulse within you that it overcomes any impulse to block.

Quite a few professional singers stutter. The singer and song writer Carly Simon turned to song for release when she felt blocked at the age of eight. The operatic baritone Robert Merrill was probably offered singing lessons in the first place as a child because he stuttered. Scatman John had an almost superhuman fluency in rhythm.

The young English singer-songwriter Gareth Gates first appeared on the scene as a petrified contestant in the first series of the UK TV talent show Pop Idol in 2001. He went on to become runner-up, sell more than 3.5 million records in the UK alone and become a popular live performer in musical theatre. In his audition, he was unable to pronounce his name and had to tell the panel from the outset that he had a stuttering problem. There was something extraordinary in watching the young man go from embarrassing blocking straight into fluent song. For him, rhythm was the difference between disability and talent.

A similar effect of unlocking happened in 2011, when the English National Ballet commissioned Roehampton University to conduct research into the effects of dancing for Parkinson’s sufferers. Researchers noticed remarkable results from patients moving to rhythm and music.

1. Find a song with a catchy tune you know well. ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ has a good strong rhythm ideal for this purpose.

2. Sing the song with plenty of gusto, beating out the rhythm with your foot. Don’t worry about getting it perfect; strong rhythm and enthusiastic energy are all that’s needed.

3. Get the rhythm going again with your foot, but this time say the words in rhythm instead of singing them. Again, strong rhythm and enthusiasm are the only requirements.

4. Sing the first line of the tune in silence to a good beat, and for the second line, instead of the song lyrics, launch into a spoken comment.

(Line 1 sung in silence): ‘O when the saints go marching in, o when the saints go marching in.’

(Line 2 starting when the tune starts, but with spoken words) ‘I want to tell you all a story.’

Getting it out with bad language

Many people who stutter admit that they never stutter when they swear. In swearing, you utilise two important factors for fluency:

When you swear, you’re already breaking a barrier – you’ve already moved beyond the powerful inhibitor of caring what others think. In a memorable scene in The King’s Speech, Logue deliberately provokes the King to swear.

Incidentally, there’s an interesting correlation between the favourite initial consonants for swear words and the consonants that people who stutter find hard to say – ‘f’, ‘c’ and ‘b’ for instance!

The powerful emotion that makes you swear carries you straight from breath into language. The emotion of anger is more powerful than the inhibitor of fear, so you don’t block.

Go to Chapter 7 for examples of Shakespearean insults to practice loudly without offending your neighbours. Notice the strong mental energy you can bring to the insults and try using similar energy for other strong (but acceptable!) comments such as, Go for it! Now or never! and Seize the day!

Being among friends

Many people who normally stutter find that they’re fluent when they feel comfortable among friends and family or with pets. Similarly, many children easily talk to their toys or an invisible friend. Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) stammered in the company of adults but not with young girls because he felt more comfortable with them.

When you’re among friends, anxiety is low, and other energies, such as trust, curiosity and connection, come into play. You’re completely absorbed in interacting with others and don’t have time to focus on how you’re performing. You’re no longer involved in a test; you’re in a relationship.

In a scene late in The King’s Speech, Logue encourages King George VI before his broadcast to the nation to speak just to him as a friend. In fact, the whole of his coaching has been about promoting the idea of a friendship between equals.

Gentle support and friendship is the idea behind the Speaking Circles International program (www.speakingcircles.com), founded in 1989 by Lee Glickstein. Glickstein was a shy child from Brooklyn, who suffered agonies of self-consciousness that escalated into bad stage fright. Yet, he had a secret desire to be a stand-up comedian. He now observes that fear seems to be most extreme among the very people who are drawn to be in the limelight and points to Winston Churchill as a prime example. Glickstein believes that it’s possible that children who stutter or suffer badly from shyness are protecting their gifts for communicating behind symptoms. (In my own work, I notice too often for chance, that people who are most hesitant at public speaking in the beginning are often those who have the potential to speak with the greatest passion and energy.) In Glickstein’s current work, he gets groups to focus on the quality of relationship between speaker and audience and to foster a warm connection.

Look at Chapter 15 for tips on tuning in to other people. You find that as you focus on the other person instead of on yourself, fears of non-fluency melt away.

Avoiding self-judgement

Blocking doesn’t become a firm habit in the initial phase of frequent stumbling. As I describe in the earlier section ‘Discovering the Roots of Stuttering’, blocking happens when people who stutter become self-critical and have feelings about what they feel. This blocking is one of the reasons that someone who is hesitant often finds speaking off the cuff easier, whereas waiting in a line of people to do a self-introduction can be sheer hell – too much time to build up self-consciousness and self-criticism!

In The King’s Speech, Lionel Logue’s first act with King George VI is to prove to him that the King can speak fluently by asking him to read a passage out loud while wearing earphones blaring out loud music. Bertie can read this passage fluently because he is unable to hear himself and criticise his hesitations.

Alan Badmington acquired a device that blocked out the sound of his voice by emitting a loud buzzing sound every time he spoke. He wore the device every day for about 20 years, and it allowed him to speak adequately in front of groups. Although it achieved the purpose of preventing him from hearing himself, the device also created unpleasant side effects such as headaches. He eventually found more holistic remedies such as those described in this chapter. The device’s success however shows that when self-criticism is absent, stuttering doesn’t happen. Any work you can do on thinking positively and quietening your critical inner voice will bear fruit in terms of your fluency. You may like to start with a few ideas from Confidence For Dummies by Kate Burton and Brinley Platts (Wiley), which contains a wealth of useful material.

Changing Your Thinking

People who stutter and their speech therapists have in the past tended to aim towards an outcome of non-stuttering by treating the symptoms – as if being physically fluent were the cure to everything. This approach aims in the wrong direction. Given that people who stutter can at times speak fluently, their problems are not solely physical. Becoming fluent requires you to look wider.

The best book I have read on overcoming stuttering is I Have a Voice: How to Stop Stuttering (Crown House Publishing, 2011) by Bob G Bodenhamer. This important book takes the fruits of Bodenhamer’s own practice and research, plus the latest thinking on the subject to provide a pathway to success that can be adapted to the individual. Although you can work on many of his processes on your own, you need to work with a professional on some of the processes he describes. An experienced neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) practitioner specialised in voice work can help.

In Bodenhamer’s view, success depends on realising that you have the capacity to change your thinking about stuttering – a powerful process that I outline in the following sections.

Challenging your feelings

Stuttering has a physical effect – a lump or block in your throat, jaw, neck or chest. But the physical effect is caused by emotional fears – of not meeting expectations, of not being smart enough or fast enough, of others’ judgements, of stuttering itself and of the ensuing disaster.

Stuttering may feel like a physical problem but the place to start to find a remedy is with the feelings that give rise to the blocking.

Feelings aren’t simple; they’re a complex package with layers of feelings and feelings about those feelings. Generally, for stutterers, in the first layer are anxiety, self-consciousness, hopelessness and helplessness; in the second line are anger, frustration and resentment about the first feelings. These secondary feelings can be even stronger than the primary emotions.

A simple emotional trigger on its own can fire off the whole show, like the master fuse on a fireworks display, causing you to block. Trouble may start with someone staring at you, waiting for an answer. This situation creates self- consciousness in you, which triggers anxiety, which makes you feel helpless, and then you start feeling angry and frustrated with yourself . . . off goes the fuse and you stutter.

The stress of your condition gives you tunnel vision, so that stuttering becomes the be all and end all, with no before and after, and no limit to its scope. You begin to catastrophise and attach powerful meaning to small moments:

Trigger	Meaning
I stutter.	Something is profoundly wrong with me, and I am a bad person.
I just slipped.	I’ve always stuttered and I always will at all times and in all places. I must always try to play safe.
I feel nervous just now.	In all places, I will always stutter and make a fool of myself.
People didn’t get what I said.	I haven’t got friends, no one likes me, I’m rejected and alone for all time. I can’t ever assert myself.
I feel nervous.	All my feelings create problems for me. It isn’t safe to have strong feelings about anything ever.

The remedy is to challenge these beliefs one by one. Take the following steps:

1. Challenge the all-consuming importance of fluency.

Remind yourself that your life is more than fluency. There is more to life than consciousness of self.

2. Challenge your low self-worth.

Stuttering does not mean that you’re also stupid or worthless or completely inadequate as a human being. Remind yourself that you’re an intelligent, capable and worthwhile person.

3. Challenge your thinking about relationships.

Stuttering does not prevent excellent relationships. Plenty of people who stutter have good friends.

4. Challenge your dependence on the good opinion of others.

Develop your internal reference so that you don’t depend on others so much for your sense of well-being. Start noticing what is working well in your life – all those small successes and happy moments.

5. Challenge your hopelessness.

Success is possible; many have achieved it. Start to believe in your fluency. You’re not powerless.

6. Challenge your feeling about stress.

It’s okay to make mistakes. In fact it’s impossible for any intelligent person not to! You’re sometimes calm, so you know how to be calm. (Turn to Chapter 5 to get started.) You’re not helpless.

Challenge these beliefs one by one. Working on some of them with a competent coach is a good move. The International Coach Federation has lists of qualified coaches, many of whom can help you with this kind of work (www.coachfederation.org).

Choosing your emotional state

Emotions lie right at the heart of the problem of stuttering. One great tool in your search for fluency is the realisation that you don’t have to be stuck with negative feelings. You can change your emotional state at any given moment – as long as you:

Know what state you’re looking for.

Know what it feels like to be in the state you want.

This activity helps you experience and then choose your emotional state:

1. Discover your current emotional state.

Perhaps you feel panicky. Great. Feel that feeling.

2. Take a big breath, and release air quite strongly, letting go of that feeling.

Shake your shoulders and body as well to change your state.

3. Consider what state you would like instead – maybe calm.

Remember a time in a different context when you were in a state of calm.

4. Recreate that state of calm.

See, hear and feel in the same way you saw, heard and felt when you were calm. Enter into that state of calmness, with calm breath, calm pictures, calm sounds, calm thoughts and calm feelings. Enjoy its quietness and peace. Get to know every feature and quality of being in this state so that you can return to it whenever you want.

5. Run forward in your mind to a time when you’re likely to feel panic.

6. Breathe in the state of calm that you now know well.

Remind yourself: calm breath, calm pictures, calm sounds, calm thoughts and calm feelings. Enjoy your new state.

Repeat this practice with other feelings you prefer instead of your current negative feelings. Try it with courage, determination, trust, relaxation and flow – or any state of your own choosing.

During Step 3, think of your emotional state when you’re in conversation with friends or during another time when you’re fluent. Get to know in your body and bones as well as your mind what this state feels like.

How you feel is a choice. You have the power to choose.

Speaking with passion

Many people who stutter employ a strategy of extreme caution when they speak, and go slowly, carefully choosing words that are easier to say. But sometimes the best remedies are counterintuitive, and passion is one of these. Allowing your passion free rein may seem risky, but doing so can be your salvation as a speaker (see the sidebar ‘Passionate release’).

Take a risk. Allow yourself to be passionate about something outside yourself. The strong flow of passion carries your words along powerfully.

The power of passion can squash feelings of anxiety, as the British Labour politician Aneurin Bevan found. The son of a miner, he was a passionate fighter for workers’ rights and against the British class system. He found fluency in passion. When he became passionate, his thoughts and emotions were focused entirely on something outside himself, and as a result his stammer disappeared.

George VI had a similar experience when he gave his most famous wartime address. Even as a severe stutterer, with Logue’s support he found his genuine passion and it carried him through.

Passion has energy and movement in it. Stuttering is the opposite. Your intention to speak instructs the diaphragm to lower to allow you to breathe, but at the same time your anxiety contracts the diaphragm upwards. Your opposing intentions cancel each other out and the result is a frozen diaphragm, unable to move in any direction. See Chapter 4 for more details on your diaphragm.

When you’re passionate, you breathe in the passion, and its energy goes straight into expression with no pause between. Moreover, as passion is a whole-body emotion, you take a full strong breath using your diaphragm and lower muscles. This energy follows through into sound.

You don’t have to wait for passion to come upon you. Activating your passion is something you can practise. Find body movements that have an energetic flow to them such as:

Swinging your arm forwards in a big vertical circle up and above your head and then down again in a broad sweep past your thigh.

Taking a big step forward and bending your leg as you land.

Raising both arms together in front of you and then sweeping them down past your thighs curving outwards at the end, bending your knees when the arms reach their lowest point.

Now find something you want to say with passion, take a full passionate breath with the upward movement, and say your words with passion as the movement comes downwards strongly to its lowest point. If you like, start with just one word, like ‘Wow!’ or ‘Yes!’ Then try the movement with a sentence.

Focus your action on outcome and moving inexorably towards ‘Wow!’– or whatever you want to say. There’s no fixed position where in-breath finishes and out-breath/sound starts – the process is continuous, like the broad sweep of your swinging arm.

Try this practice saying something quite softly as well as loudly. The energy remains almost the same regardless of volume. You find other useful material on unlocking your voice in Chapter 11.

Expanding your frame

People who stutter often make their own experiences the sum total of everything. Change comes in expanding your frame of reference.

Remind yourself that there’s more of you than this stuttering. You’re also a person who speaks fluently, has passions, determination and so on. You have flexibility.

Integrate other people and their perceptions into your frame. Stop trying to read others’ minds and really step into the shoes of others to check the truth.

Step outside yourself and look at the situation from the moon. From that great distance, how important is hesitation really?

Using neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques

In order for you to stutter, some physical stumbles connected with your emotions have influenced your perceptions and your beliefs, resulting in habitual responses that have lives of their own and feel out of your control. You’ll find it positively affirming if you stutter to gain understanding of how you stutter instead of remaining confused and out of control.

Your responses are within your control, provided that you look beyond the physical blocking to the whole system that supports the stuttering behaviour. Try any and all the following (NLP) techniques to begin taking control of your responses:

Practitioners of NLP and associated disciplines have been particularly successful at looking at stuttering as a system and developing models that can help the stutterer. Every person who stutters is different, and therefore different models are more effective for different people.

Circle of Excellence permits you to develop more resourceful states of mind, such as calm, control, flexibility, positivity and so on.

Perceptual Positions encourage you to take different perspectives and open up from your tunnel vision to see matters in a clearer, more balanced way.

The Phobia Cure allows you to dissociate from the fear-based elements of stuttering and therefore avoid falling into the ‘black hole’ of your feelings.

Positive By-Products allows you to understand the positive motivations behind blocking behaviours, such as protecting yourself from hurt, gaining control, getting back at people in authority and so on. Seeing how stuttering served a purpose, you can find alternative and less harmful ways to achieve your intentions. Bob Bodenhamer explores this search and other NLP techniques in his book on stuttering mentioned earlier in this section.

Re-imprinting involves going back to the point in childhood when stuttering began and establishing new beliefs at that point to take with you through life.

The Swish Pattern interrupts your habit of stuttering at the very point at which you decide to block and puts in place a different, more useful habit.

You can find details about these techniques and many other useful resources in Neuro-Linguistic Programming For Dummies by Romilla Ready and Kate Burton (Wiley). Working with a trained NLP coach boosts the effectiveness of all the processes I introduce in this chapter.