I started with a small difference. When somebody approached me, I felt two inches tall. When I approached them, my speech was a little better. I still stuttered badly. But when you're in that kind of pain, you'll take something that's slightly better.
I was about 14. After the time when I was crying in my parents' driveway, I challenged myself to talk to one new person per day. I didn't call it the Once-a-Day Challenge then. That is the name I use for it now.
What could I actually do at 14?
If I was out at a store with my parents, I could ask an employee a question. At school, I could speak to a teacher or another school employee I didn't know. Once I could drive, there were more opportunities to go somewhere and do it.
Those ordinary places mattered. A grocery store. Target. Someone who worked there. I was practicing approaching respectfully, using my voice and getting into an exchange. Taking the approach was part of the work, and so was the talking after it.
Here is the sort of exchange I mean
In a later grocery-store recording, I walked in and saw a man looking at cookies. I commented that if they were on sale, I was in trouble. I talked about how I used to eat a lot of junk food and asked, “how about you?”
He told me he was diabetic and couldn't touch it. “But you still look at it,” I said. “Smart.”
That was a little conversation about what was in front of us. I hadn't worked out his answer beforehand. He said something, and I could respond to that. Then the exchange was over. It is one of the examples I use to show how I practiced.
The next words were part of what I had to learn
For years, another person could be talking while I was busy working out my response. What would I have to say? Which words could I get out? Which ones would I try to get around? There was very little of my attention left for what they were actually telling me.
So asking the first question wasn't the whole job. I had to learn to listen and let the answer give me something to respond to. I wanted to be in the conversation. That took practice because I was so used to planning it in my head.
I failed a lot of times. Someone would say something, and I wasn't quick enough. Or I blocked. Learning to speak more spontaneously meant letting go of some control while I still felt nervous. I did that work gradually.
There was work before and after the conversation too
I also worked on what I said to myself. I had years of being hard on myself after difficult speech. My early phrase was, “It's too early in the day to hate yourself.” Later, I learned to give an actual small success some room in my head too.
The way I prepared, the thoughts I carried, the things I read and the conversations themselves all became part of the work. I would take an idea into a classroom, a job, a phone call or a social situation, see what happened, and keep refining it.
That is where my account begins: one difference I could notice, one person I could approach, and a lot still to learn. I'm sharing what worked for me because I would have loved that explanation when I was struggling. I don't know whether another person's experience will be the same. The fuller approach explains the other parts of my own work.