Hello and welcome. I'm so happy you're here. I really appreciate you tuning into this episode of The Beneath Your Stutter podcast. But before we start, I really have to share a funny story with you.
I did not realize that when I decided to do this podcast, that recording in my office, like my studio was not going to work. My window looks out onto a busy street, so there's a bus stop that's just right outside my front door. So due to the outside noises of traffic and the busyness of the city, I'm recording and coming to you from my makeshift podcast recording studio in my bathroom.
I'm surrounded by curtains and pillows and it's actually quite cozy. My perfectionist side is definitely learning to roll with the punches.
Alright, let's jump into this episode where I'm going to share a bit of my experience. Waiting to grow out of stuttering, going for speech therapy and getting my first taste of short-lived fluency and my journey of becoming a coach and what it takes to make real change with your speech. And here's a hint, sometimes it's not more speech therapy.
Okay, let's go.
I spent my entire childhood waiting to grow out of stuttering. By the time I was 16 years old, I realized that I was most likely past the point of. Outgrowing it. All of the adults in my life, from my parents to teachers, they all had a wait and see attitude. They told me that one day I would just grow out of it, and of course I believed them.
I truly thought that one day I was gonna wake up and poof it would be gone. I did what I was told to do, but of course it did not work out that way. I was very disappointed in myself as if somehow I should have known better, that somehow I didn't do enough to stop it. But I thought I was trying every day.
I was trying so hard not to stutter. I knew there was something called speech therapy, but because I went to a small school and this kind of support was not available. Even if there was help, my family did not have the money to pay for that. So my only option was to wish and hope. Wishing and hoping to outgrow my stutter was my strategy.
So when that did not happen, I felt very resentful that I still stuttered
since I was told. Speech therapy is what fixes stuttering. This became the holy grail for me. Like the answer is to all my problems and I desperately wanted to get it. My opportunity finally came in my early twenties. I was fortunate to have a bit of extra money left over from my student loan that year.
I was going to art school at the time, so I went for intensive speech therapy, a three-week program, even though I felt scared and unsure if it would even really work. I thought to myself, this is it. I'm going to get rid of my stutter once and for all. I remember the days being long and exhausting full of learning and practicing the techniques over and over again.
It felt like I was learning to ride a bike and within a short period of time, I was thrilled to actually achieve my first taste of fluency for the first time in my life. But it felt strange speaking in this new way, and I found it hard to use it to use these fluency techniques out in the real world.
Now, not for the fear of stuttering, but for the fear of sounding so slow and mechanical like a robot. I don't think I'm alone on this, and like many other stories I hear. From others who've gone to speech therapy. Once I left the safe protection of the clinic, my fluency bubble quickly burst. As soon as I hit the first dresses going back into my life, my speech became wobbly again, and it absolutely fell apart.
And the result of this is I just became so frustrated with myself again. Sometimes I think maybe I set myself for failure. I went into speech therapy having such high expectations of being cured and anything less than perfect fluency was the daily reminder that I had failed.
Within three months after speech therapy, I felt like I had fallen back to the same place where I started. I was still feeling fear, anxiety, and dread. I was still avoiding most speaking situations if I knew I was going to stutter. I didn't say anything at all. I didn't like being stuck within myself, but it was better to play it safe than to stutter.
It was so deeply ingrained in me that no matter what, it was not okay to stutter. It was better to betray myself at all costs than to stutter. So the big question I have to ask is this. Why did I fail speech therapy? Why did it not work for me? Did I not try hard enough? Was I lazy and undisciplined to put in the work?
Another way to look at this is maybe, perhaps speech therapy failed me. I. I'm curious, did speech therapy work for you? I mean, if it did, that's amazing. That is wonderful. But if not, what else might be going on? What might be missing? this is a question that we'll be exploring here.
It is been a long time since those days of speech therapy, and it's been a journey of growth and personal development to get to where I am now. Getting to fluency did not happen overnight, and it did not always come easy, but I want you to know that I'm not special. I do believe that because I thought it was possible, it became possible for me.
I talk a lot about getting to the other side of stuttering, and I want to explain what I mean here. Getting to the other side of stuttering means that speaking is no longer a highly charged emotional situation. It means that my thoughts, feelings, and energy is not consumed by stuttering in a negative way.
It's this side that I've always wanted to be on for myself. Now, this is not all about perfect fluency. 100% of the time, I still have the capacity to stutter. It just depends on the conditions or certain factors that I'm being influenced by at any particular moment. Now, you might be wondering, hearing me speak on this podcast, did I even stutter at all?
And yes. Yes I did because I started stuttering as a child. I had no real memory of what fluency felt like, but now that I do know what fluency feels like, here is the trick. I take control of certain factors to limit, reduce, or eliminate the probability of stuttering. For instance, I've created an environment in recording this podcast to encourage a positive speaking experience where I feel comfortable and at ease in myself.
I do this by giving myself patience and plenty of time and taking the pressure off to hurry. I have clarity on what I'm doing and I use positive self-talk to believe in what I'm doing and that my words will be well received. Therefore, without any negative tension, my speech flows and is at ease. I have been a guest on other podcasts and I was very nervous.
In fact, the very first podcast I was invited to speak on, I, I was a wreck at the moment of recording. I felt this huge tsunami of fear just come over me, and I was shaking and crying. And sometimes no matter how much I prepare, if I still feel uncertain about what I'm going to say, I get rattled.
This is what I call it when I feel stressed. Of course in these situations I stutter more. it all comes down to my internal emotional temperature. This critical insight is something I've learned about myself along the way, and these factors are what I'll be sharing with you in the next Beneath Your Stutter podcast episode.
So you can start to understand how these factors are working within yourself as well.
Growing up, I had no role models to know what it was like or even know if it was possible to live life without stuttering. It's amazing that I've come as far as I have to be at the place to have such ease and flow of my speech farther than I ever thought was possible. So this is why a few years ago, I decided to dedicate my passion, time, and energy to helping others who might still be struggling with stuttering To make this possible in 2020, I embarked on a nine month training program to become a coach. In the spring of 2021, I received my certification as a professional coach. I felt this was the best way I could combine my firsthand personal experience of stuttering with the tools and knowledge of personal development and my goal.
Is to be the person I needed when I was younger. In my experience, I've always felt there's been a gap in the treatment that I see between speech therapy and counseling or like talk therapy when it comes to stuttering. My goal with this podcast and with the coaching services I offer, it's to start bridging this gap.
Now you may be wondering what the heck as a coach compared to a speech language pathologist or a speech therapy program. Now I want to be clear neither one is better than the other is beneficial to utilize both modalities to some degree as they each bring their own benefits.
Here are three ways coaching is different than other therapy. Number one, there's this idea of needing to be fixed versus working with your strengths. The idea of therapy can sometimes make you feel like something is broken or something needs to be fixed. Something is wrong with you. When I went for speech therapy, it felt like all I did was working on what was wrong with me, everything that I was not good at.
In coaching, your strengths are celebrated to empower you to work towards your goals. The coaching I do focus on the inner workings of stuttering, the psychological blocks that get in the way versus the physical blocks experienced in stuttering.
Number two, lost in the group versus one-on-one. Attention stuttering is complex and there is no single silver bullet, one size fits all kind of solution. When I went for speech therapy, it was in a group. Yes, there was some benefits to this, but I felt that everyone was treated the same.
When what I really needed was one-on-one attention, and this is where coaching is customized to you to do the deeper work in a private and intimate way. Number three, it's the idea of 20% mechanics versus 80% psychological work and mindset. When I went for speech therapy, the traditional approach for stuttering treatment focused primarily on fluency techniques.
Back then, there was very little, if any, focus on the emotional and mental inner workings of stuttering. Now, to be honest, I'm not sure how much this has changed these days, but the truth is for long lasting personal change of any sort, the secret to success is 80% psychology. Working with the mindset versus the smaller 20% apply to the actual mechanics or behavioral changes.
Maybe what I needed is not more speech therapy. Maybe what I needed is the shifts in mindset, attitude, and beliefs that account for the other 80% that leads to true success. In my own experience, concentrated effort in the short term produced fluency quite quickly, but it was the deeply ingrained negative self-talk and toxic emotions that chipped away at any gains that I had made in my speech with fluency.
It was such a deeply painful experience to relapse after my own experience with speech therapy. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that speech therapy techniques are part of the equation, but in my own experience in understanding not the entire solution. So if you've already had speech therapy in the past and it has not worked out for you with steady results. Maybe what's missing is the 80% psychology part.
This is the part explored through the coaching process.
I believe I also became a coach because I've always been interested in personal development, everything, which is below the tip of this stuttering iceberg. When I was a teenager, I remember desperately looking for a book that would explain why I was the way I was, and why my family was the way they were.
Of course, I didn't know what this book would be called, but I somehow knew I would know it when I found it. But in such a small library and before the internet, I never find the answers. But since then, I found the answers to my most pressing questions in books. Books have enriched my life, a lot of them only being written in the last five to 10 years.
In the last two years, I've read tons and tons of books to learn and discover everything there is to know about stuttering, including personal development and coaching. In pursuing my goal to understand stuttering from the inside out, I've also looked outside of this complex disorder to find solutions.
Some of these are around fear, anxiety, trauma, childhood, P T S D, self-talk, phobias, perfection. Okay. Even around neuroscience, introversion, mindfulness, public speaking, compassion, shyness, social anxiety, stage fright, self-confidence, habits, self-esteem, mind body disorder, inner critic sensitivity, and much, much more.
What I've learned is this. There is a lot more going on than just the mechanics of speech. Knowledge is power and it can change your life as it has changed mine. I've learned that if you're not where you want to be, it comes down to either one of these two things, and a lot of the times both. Either there is a gap in knowledge or there is a gap in skill, both knowledge and skills.
It can be acquired and developed. This is great news because what was learned can be unlearned, and if you fail to develop certain skills in childhood, it means you can learn them. Now, in order to understand how I got to where I am now, I had to reflect back on my own journey Trace the bread comes to see how I got here. It's a path I had to go back and excavate and to slowly review the evidence to understand how it all fit together. It's like one big puzzle, definitely not a linear path in a counterintuitive way, I discovered that overcoming my stutter was not about obsessing over every detail of each speaking mistake.
I found when you focus on the problem, then you just get more of what you don't want.
I left this quote by Socrates. He says the secret of change is to focus all of your energy. not on fighting the old. On building the new true change happens when you build the new, and you do this by shifting your focus away from the problem and put your attention to new solutions, which answers the very root of the cause.
It's about healing the true cause, because what is causing stuttering is beyond mechanics. I believe stuttering is a symptom. Not a cause. And if you see you're a stutter as a teacher and if you listen to it, you can see that it gives you lots of information. I did not achieve more fluency by trying to get rid of my stutter and rejecting a part of myself.
I more fluency by developing a stronger sense of self and embracing more of who I truly am. I believe the answer to stuttering less comes from aligning to your true self, which naturally leads to less struggle for [00:20:00] smooth speech. And when there's less struggle, there's greater ease and flow of speech, which is a natural by-product.
If you're listening to this, you might still be one of the 20 to 25% of children. Who did not outgrow stuttering going into adulthood, but know that you're now in control and you can do a lot more than just wait and see. You may not have outgrown your stutter, but I know you can grow through it.
Only you can say what you do or don't need. Ask yourself, do you need more speech therapy? or what else do you think is missing that is getting in the way of having fluency? There might be other gaps in skills, but these are all learnable and doable. I understand that when you're so close to the problem, it's pretty hard to have the perspective.
But my goal as a certified professional coach is to help shine some light on your path. Of course, not the entire way, but enough to get you thinking differently and moving forward by getting to the other side of stuttering myself and understanding how I got to where I am today. I know it's possible for you too possible to stop wishing and hoping that stuttering will just go away, but to grow and thrive to the other side of stuttering.
This wraps up this episode up beneath your Stutter. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you for staying with me and listening to the end on the next episode. Learn about shifting your attention from the mechanics of creating speech to the various fluency factors that are at play beneath your stutter.