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  "title": "I Used to Stutter",
  "subtitle": "How I Beat My Stutter and How I Remain Fluent",
  "author": {
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          "text": "PART 3. THE TOOLS I STILL USE",
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          "text": "So I'm gonna give you what it really took me to beat my stutter, the 360 degree view. What the f*ck does that mean? That means I'm going beyond fluency shaping. I'm going beyond the basics. I'm telling you what it takes up here. 360 view.",
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          "text": "So what does work, Craig? Help us. Well, let me give you a big hint. All up here. Mindset, belief, subconscious mind, learning about how the emotional state impacts your fluency. All of the sh*t that I had to figure out in the real world.",
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          "text": "Let me tell you what it was. 50% was in my mind. Now that does not mean it was simple at all, my friend. Hard. The other 50% was practicing. But like practicing specific things in a specific way. So that was the combination. None of it was technique based. There's no breathing exercises. It was none of that.",
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          "text": "Chapter 10. IT'S TOO EARLY IN THE DAY TO HATE YOURSELF",
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          "text": "I used to beat myself up all day and all night.",
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          "text": "How was your self talk? Do you talk well to yourself, or do you do what I did, which is talk down to yourself, especially if you're stuttering? Yep. I used to talk bad to myself. Oh, Craig, you're, you fail again. You can't talk. Oh, you bombed this one. Oh, no one's going to like you. All of those thoughts is what I literally had in my head for far too many years.",
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          "text": "If you're like me, and working on your speech, or considering working on it, you probably have that kind of a self talk too. But it doesn't mean it always has to be that way. But it is important to acknowledge, hey, I realize I'm talking to myself in a crummy way. Yep, so when we're struggling and stuttering, we tend to beat ourselves up. That's what this negative self talk is. It's beating ourselves up.",
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          "text": "I used to beat myself up all day and all night. I used to replay in my own head the worst stuttering moments of my life. They would just play without me even thinking.",
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          "text": "I created a crutch out of total desperation!",
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          "text": "But eventually I learned, and I was thinking about this, that I don't remember exactly how I was exposed to positive self talk, or how I made the shift, but I remember what the first shift was. My first shift was moving from I hate myself, and all of those self talk feelings that people who stutter have, and being very hard on ourselves, into a neutral-ish statement. My statement was, I would move from the bad self talk into, it's too early in the day to hate yourself.",
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          "text": "You can't beat your stutter and talk sh*t to yourself. It's NOT POSSIBLE. While I was figuring this sh*t out, I created a crutch out of total desperation! Here it is. It's too early in the day to hate yourself. There's so much emotional baggage tied in there. For me, that was a personal f*cking struggle. Right. I've literally lived that life.",
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          "text": "Of course, it didn't matter what time it was, it was always too early to hate myself. You need to create your own crutch to stop your negative self-talk. I suggest you start with using my crutch, then figure out the crutch that works best for you.",
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          "text": "I'm not suggesting that was the best way, but for me, I had to break the self talk pattern, and that's how I broke it.",
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          "text": "These are the things on how not to live that life. No one shared it, and that's why I'm very happy to put it out there. This is what I wish I would have had. The real truth again is, no matter what time of day it was, it's too early. I'm real, and there are stutters at times. So that was my crutch.",
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          "text": "I bet you say that word a lot. You hate yourself. Cause I've said that a lot.",
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          "text": "When I committed to working on my speech, I got happier.",
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          "text": "So you do have to like yourself and what I hope will help you like yourself more is what worked for me was when I committed to working on my speech, I got happier.",
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          "text": "That doesn't mean I had good speech yet, but it means I committed to doing the work. I committed to putting the time in. That gave me something to build, to build momentum for and to be excited about. I committed and it's a promise. It's a promise you make to yourself, right?",
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          "text": "The compare game is one that I used to play, and it destroyed me. The compare game's a bad game.",
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          "text": "\"When I'm on a call and I hear my team talk, I start to compare my speech to them and be like, oh f*ck, they said a word that I probably couldn't say.\" It's a great point that you make. So I used to compare myself to, I wouldn't do it directly on calls, but I've done it. What I always found is when I compared myself to someone else, I always would beat myself up and have bad self-talk. So the comparison does not help us. It's not going to give us confidence. It tears it away. The fact that you did it while you're on the call means you're beating",
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          "text": "yourself up while you've got to talk, which is really hard. It's not your fault, because there's no one who taught you how. No one taught me how, except me now.",
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          "text": "Next is daily positivity is required. Why? Because stuttering is f*cking brutal, just like you know. When I went to beat my stutter, I had to fill my head with daily positivity to be optimistic. You can get that from all sources.",
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          "text": "So find something small you can be excited for",
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          "text": "So in order to have good self talk, think about one of the times where you are more fluent than you expected. What would you have said to yourself when that was done? Yeah, you probably said, gosh, why can't I do that all the time? But what else did you say? Because maybe you said quietly something like, man, I nailed that.",
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          "text": "Then think about how did you talk to yourself when that was done. If you can find something in that self talk that was positive, that's something you can now consciously and very intentionally bring about.",
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          "text": "One thing I would do is at the start of your day, I would sprinkle in whatever those positive comments are that you've said to yourself when your speech has been good. Intentionally sprinkle them in to start your day.",
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          "text": "One of the last, but important things that really took to beat my stutter in the real world, the 360 degree view, the full picture, was feeling good about you when you looked at yourself in the mirror. Why is that important, Craig? That's bullsh*t. It's not bullsh*t. Because you got to love who you see. It doesn't mean you got to love yourself yet. We'll talk about that.",
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          "text": "But you got to be happy with who you look at. For me, I had to take a brutal view that I had to lose weight, for myself to feel good about who I saw. I improved my style. Whether it's a haircut, a necklace, a style, it's important. Because when you beat your stutter, it takes all of this. If",
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          "text": "it took less, if it was so easy, you would have already done it by now. But it's not.",
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          "text": "Those of us who grew up stuttering don't look in the mirror the same way as a person who has never stuttered. What the hell does that mean, Craig? Well, you might look at yourself in the mirror, but you never look in your eyes deeply. No, you look at your hair, or face, or what you look like, or what you've got on, but you never look in your eyes. You never look really at yourself, truly. It's because, in my opinion, of all the shame and humiliation and embarrassment, and all the beating up of oneself we have done. It's the total opposite of loving yourself. It's beating yourself up. It's the pain. Learning to love ourselves is one of the foundational philosophies.",
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          "text": "Stop negative self-talk by speaking to yourself with the kindness you'd show a good friend. So be nice to yourself, love yourself, be kind, and next time that you make a mistake, along with positive self talk, just treat yourself well. What normal human beings can do, it takes us practice and work, and sometimes we fail and struggle at it. So you got to learn how to be nice to yourself, right? I've talked to a lot of people who have stuttered or who do stutter. This refrain is very common, that they are so hard on themselves. I'm here to say, stop that.",
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          "text": "I learned to forgive my old self.",
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          "text": "Another foundational philosophy is learning to forgive yourself. Now, what the hell does that mean, forgive yourself? Well, in order for me to sustainably beat my stutter and remain fluent for such a long time, I had to be kind and forgive myself. Forgive yourself for all the mistakes you've made in the past. That was hard for me. It was very hard. I learned to forgive my old self. You could write it down on a piece of paper that says, I, Craig Coffee, forgive myself.",
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          "text": "But I'm sharing what worked for me, and I'm also sharing what I would have loved to have heard years before I discovered this on my own. So forgive yourself for the mistakes you make because you want to be smooth. You want to talk well. You want to have a good life. You want",
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          "text": "to reduce the stress. You want to accomplish your goals and dreams and be happy. But it's hard, in my opinion, to do all those unless you forgive yourself.",
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          "text": "Fluency came before the scars healed",
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          "text": "I carried mine on my shoulders for a long time. Fluency came before the scars healed.",
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          "text": "We are not defined by our failures or by our successes. We are defined by how we treat others. Be gentle and kind, and we will be defined as such. Whatever past mistakes you feel you have made, these do not define who you are.",
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    "title": "IT'S TOO EARLY IN THE DAY TO HATE YOURSELF",
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