Author: Stephen Hill from The How To Stop Stammering Centre www.stammering-stuttering.co.uk www.stutter-cure.com www.stutter-stuttering.comHow I overcame my stutter/stammer
After having years of unsuccessful speech therapy I decided
only way I was going to achieve fluency was to try and overcome it myself. Being a negative thinker at time I had little confidence in my ability to succeed.
Most of my achievements in life up to this point had been sporting and I asked myself question, how had I reached high standards at these sports? What I used to do was watch and study best people in that sport and to basically try and copy them, and with plenty of practice and dedication, I gradually improved.
I decided to take this approach with my speech, I would concentrate on various good fluent talkers, Tony Blair, Gordon brown, Chris Tarrant, and Bianca from Eastenders etc, and try and work out differences between their speech and mine.
The second approach was to deal with physcological. I needed to think and approach life differently, gain confidence and to be thinking in same way as when I was drunk i.e. care free. I started to read various books regarding psychology such as mind over matter books.
It was slow progress however I did notice major differences in my speech compared to good fluent talkers and was practising solidly to speak more like them.
After six months of searching I finally had keys and techniques needed to achieve fluency, these are what I now call speech rules. For me, speech is like a jigsaw and to be fluent you need to have all pieces to complete jigsaw. A stutterer will have at least one of pieces missing. The speech rules are pieces of speech jigsaw.
What I now needed to do was to put in a serious amount of practice to enable these speech rules to become a natural part of my speech. I did not know how long I would need to practice for, however I felt after three months that it was now more or less natural.
Therefore in total it took me nine months to achieve fluency; this is by far greatest achievement in my life. It was now time to put my life in order. Even though I had been successful at insurance company where I worked and was well remunerated, I was unhappy there. I decided to leave with intention of becoming a Financial Advisor.
