ROADMAP TO FREEDOM FROM STUTTERING Copyright 2017 Life Quality, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Contents Why freedom from stuttering 3 What is it?.. 4 The path.. 5 Three massive mistakes on the way...6 Automated pattern... 10 The foundation...12 I can 13 The hardest part 14 Next steps. 16 2
Why freedom from stuttering? Some people say Acceptance. It ll make you more fluent. Some people say Acceptance. I don't want to change anything in my stuttering. I respect all of that. I respect freedom to stutter. Moreover, as we go deeper, you ll see that acceptance is something we ll need on the way to freedom from stuttering. But it's not about acceptance. It s about your why. For me, it was clear that stuttering affected my character. It was also not letting me connect with the person in front of me the way I wanted. And once I learned about the hand technique and saw it working I bear a burden of responsibility for improving my speech since then. Each of us has its own reasons why we want to get free from stuttering. I m just assuming that you ve listened to your heart and that you want it. 3
What is it? Freedom from stuttering is when you don't need to change the words or use any other tricks, when you re free to do and say what you want. All people have glitches and disfluencies from time to time, but it's important how you feel about it. 4
The path Imagine football, or basketball, or baseball, or soccer. Imagine tennis or ice hockey. Just any game sport. Choose one. Imagine yourself as a player. Got one? What are the main fundamentals of your success as a player? 1. Fundamentals - run, pass, dribble, shoot (depending on the game choice) 2. Field - how you see the field (court, skating rink), how you feel the field and how you interact with your partners (if any) 3. Character - how you behave when it gets tough With stuttering, it's all the same thing. 1. Fundamentals - speech exercises, your new speaking skill 2. Field - how you use your new speaking skills in real life settings 3. Character - how you act when it gets tough As you can see ⅔ of it is not about the technique itself. So the words treatment, cure, therapy, medicine do not represent the kernel of it. It's a path. And not just a learning path because it's not enough to know the technique. It's all about using it. And that is all about character. So it's not just about eliminating speech impediments. It's about your personal transformation, becoming that better self you want to be. Some might think, That's not for me. I m neither a football nor tennis player. I don't have the stamina. Well then this path might be not for you. But you ll never know until you try. If it seems impossible - it's totally fine. We all start there. All we need to do is... TO START. 5
Massive mistake #1 The first massive mistake we re making is sitting in the shell. That s where our journey starts. Let s face it. Stuttering is painful. This is so natural to evade pain. As live creatures, we adapt to the environment and surrounding conditions. If we have problems speaking we start speaking less. Once we think about the improvement, we need to get out of the shell. It s uncomfortable, but that s something we need to do first. Now, let s assume that some motivation came down on us and we ve made it. So we start our journey, and we get on the path to freedom from stuttering. So where do we go first? Right, we look for speech exercises, tips and tricks and techniques to help us stop stuttering. And we find a lot on YouTube; we go to find a speech-language pathologist; we read books about stuttering on Amazon; we attend workshops. And here comes the second massive mistake. 6
Massive mistake #2 When people get sick, they go to the doctor, get some medicine or stay for a treatment and get back home all fine. At least we expect that. It doesn't work this way with stuttering. We quickly realize that all the exercises that we do in a clinical or home setting change our speech in that comfortable setting, but don t change our speech in everyday life situations. The point is that in real life we want to look better than we actually are. We want other people to think that we re fluent. We don t want to reveal our stuttering. Even more, we don t want to reveal our speaking exercises in real life! We pretend to be normal. So the question is: what shall I do with all these exercises, practices, techniques, and skills? And here comes a clear choice either go implementing the exercises in the real world which is awkward, and you need to reveal your stuttering and your clunky techniques or still pretend to be normal and go back to sitting in the shell position. It s an easy way to come back and say, It didn t work. There s no way. 7
Massive mistake #3 Imagine that we finally get equipped with another portion of motivation to go and try our new technique in the real world. We take the courage to embrace stuttering, show everyone that we use the technique, but it still doesn t work. I mean it works, we improve, but stuttering doesn t go away completely. We still have that fear or that uncertainty that it may come up anytime. We re making the third massive mistake - trying to control our speech. Our speech goes mostly automatically, we don t have much time to think about exercises. And the way it s automated now is the wrong way. By doing exercises, we haven t yet developed a new automated pattern. We need to override the muscle memory of years of stuttering. So when you get to that phone call, to that meeting, or to that fast where you re from? and you hasten to answer you feel that you re going to block 8
We say to ourselves No way. I ve gone so far, I ve done everything I could, but there s just no way. And we feel relief. Thinking that nothing can help, blaming SLPs, the methods we used, the techniques, or saying that stuttering is our nature, hereditary, it s part of us And that there s no way out. We come back to where we began our journey. Sitting in the shell. 9
Automated pattern Ok, if you re still with me, let s start it again. When you start with a plan, it can make a whole difference. This time we ve got a plan. Let s try to go a bit deeper about what happens when we stutter. We have the internal synchronization of speech impaired. Speech is a pretty darn complex process. We have several systems in place working at the same time: Thinking what to say, finding words, putting them grammatically together, Breathing, finding voice, Articulating sounds, Engaging body movements and eye contact, Listening to what we say, our inner ear registers that in real time, giving feedback and launching this cycle again and again. As we say a word or phrase this process goes many, many times with a speed of a thousand miles an hour, it all happens like a flicker. We align all these processes together live, on air, in a tiny fraction of a second! It s so complex and so fast, and we've got it loose, not put together. As we fixate on it, as we focus on impediments the limbic system comes into play. The limbic system is part of the brain that, among other things, is responsible for emotions and memory. We anticipate stuttering, heart beating fast, that emotional condition strengthening the problem. So it s coming from somewhere - heredity, neurological issues, emotional environment - we can blame everything, but it s a fact we re facing. 10
Our internal synchronization of these processes is broken. Which is firmly backed by emotional conditions. We start the machine, it gives a lot of noise, smoke, but doesn t work properly. We try to put them together in a clinical setting, and it works. We go live, and it doesn t. We forget about all the exercises. Again, speaking works as a highly automated pattern. So we need to not just put all these things together. We need to glue them together. We want to make them really stick. So that when it comes to everyday life situations, they still stay one firmly and confidently. We need something to put all these exercises on. We need a foundation. 11
The foundation One of the effective ways to do it is to use hand and fingers. That s the method that I used myself. We do the exercises and combine them with pressing our fingers on the thigh. Why do we need that? What happens when we do that? There re two main reasons: 1) First, there s a link between part of the brain responsible for speech and motor activities. Motor activities and speaking intersect, they come from the same area of our brain. So by using a hand, we much more effectively override the memory that holds our stuttering experiences and new experiences go much deeper. 2) The second reason is that we put our exercises, our new skills like beads on a thread or a stick so that they stay together and don t fall apart when it comes to live situations. When it comes to everyday life, there s no need to remember anything. We launch our speech pressing the finger. And all the exercises are there. It happens in an instant. We synchronize all the processes together. We fix the internal synchronization using external synchronization with hand. But it s not a device. It s still you. It s YOU building your new automated speaking pattern. 12
I can You start to realize that when you use your hand and combine there all the exercises the right way you just cannot have an impediment. That s where it all begins. That s the first straight blow at stuttering. Stuttering is so puzzled. You re so happy. Every real life situation when you used that speech values more than 100 exercises in the classroom. You feel a total shift in the mindset. I can't turns into I can. As a boy, I remember learning to ride a bike. It seemed impossible to me. Then at some point, I felt that balance on the bike. When you go left and right and don t fall. It was the moment. I felt that now I got it! 13
The hardest part When you think that you ve made it, here comes the hardest part. And exactly because you think or you have a feeling that you've made it. You re just beginning to create your new automated speaking pattern free from stuttering. You re just beginning to really override your previous stuttering muscle memory. You re just beginning to be in that state when you re confident that you won t stutter. We re facing the risk of pretending to be normal AGAIN! Remember our path and the 3 elements: fundamentals, field, and character? So we re building our character big time here! You see, our task is to make our training speech as close to our normal speech is possible. But it's still slower and smoother than our usual speech which is fast and choppy. And using this new speech is obviously a challenge. Because you need to reveal that you re on the way to freedom from stuttering, that you are undergoing, still undergoing this treatment and this is not your final speech this is just a training speech. It's like some people are ready to use dental braces, they want to use them, but they are not willing to show dental braces because they don't want other people to know that they improve their teeth. Or they think they don t look good this way. So even where they want to improve, they don t do it. I m using this as a metaphor. 14
Our training speech is like dental braces. Everyone would see that we are correcting the way we speak and we re speaking slower, that we re on the way to freedom from stuttering. Like dental braces, we don t need our training speech for good. Once you're confident with your speech, you can speed up as you ve built a new automated pattern which replaced the old one, and you don't need your hand anymore. You can truly say that you are free from stuttering now. Your airplane keeps flying! 15
Next steps Life is now. Don't put it off. One of the ways to start your journey to freedom from stuttering is to join my Improve Program. Currently it has 3 modules: Improve, Using Hand and Practice. I keep adding content there and updating it based on your feedback. So get inside and see whether it fits you. It s absolutely free! You can get inside here or simply click on the image below. See you there! 16