PART 4. THE REAL WORLD IS UNSCRIPTED

In the real world, nothing is predictable, right? The real world is whatever you want to do outside of your house. Make a phone call, go out with friends, work, school, go out, be social. It doesn't matter. That's the real world. It's the non-safe space world.



Chapter 19. THE ONCE-A-DAY CHALLENGE

One thing you can do right now is learn how to talk to one stranger a day. Why? Why would I do that, Craig? Because the more you fear talking, the less you talk. The less you fear speaking and talking, the more you talk. The only way how to beat your fear of talking is to go out and do it. What I advise, what I suggest, what worked for me in my life, was speaking to one stranger a day. Someone who worked in a store or something. I would go up and engage them with a question.

You practice with people who are gentle

The thing about practicing is, who do you practice with first? You practice with people who are gentle, like grandparents, who are not going to be dicks, who are not going to be jerks, who are going to be patient if you stutter at first, or while you work on your stuff. Nice, gentle people. The way I think about it too is, when you practice, it's like ski slopes. You want to choose something that's not hard at first, or that's less hard.

Why an old person? Because they seem more harmless than a young person. Now imagine you're walking in a grocery store. I mean a big one. I don't mean a Whole Foods, but like a Publix, or some normal kind of grocery store. You walk around and you do a lap of the store. Let's say you're walking through the produce aisle, where there's fruit and stuff. Say an old man, or a woman, or whoever, but like someone who feels harmless. They hold up something. How are the grapes? Oh wow, those are big, aren't they? You can say all sorts of things like this, just to start a convo.

You can approach strangers without flirting, to ask real questions and work on some confidence and some fluency. But you can't be like, you look great. It's more like, how much is this? She'll tell you, 'cause she works there, but you still gotta speak to her.



How I used to practice talking to one stranger a day

So, we're going to walk into a Publix (grocery store) and show you exactly how I used to practice talking to one stranger a day.

In this case, he was looking at the cookies.

Craig: If that's on sale, then I'm in trouble. I used to weigh a little bit more. I used to eat a lot of the junk food, and sometimes you just see it. Calls to you, man. How about you?

Other person: I'm diabetic, I can't touch it.

Craig: But you still look at it. Smart.

Alright, so there, boom, practice is over! First person I saw, it happened. It flows like that. What you're looking for is a natural way to start a conversation based on something that we all have in common or that we saw.

Why I practiced with a stranger

Why a stranger instead of someone that you see at school or work? Because when we talk to someone who we know, if we've stuttered in front of them a lot in the past, then we are feeling that judgment, that they're judging us, that they expect us to stutter. It all happens very subconsciously in our minds. When you're talking to someone who you don't know, it's kind of like a fresh start. They see you for the first time. So they haven't heard you stutter. You get to start fresh. Those fresh starts, when you practice speaking in the real world, are critically important. There's a reason why I practice talking to a stranger, not someone who I knew, or someone who had a lot of authority.

I stuttered more on the word vanilla

I was on campus at the University of Florida, and it was summer B. This meant fewer students on campus, and for me, a chance to feel more comfortable, knowing that most girls were walking around with smaller groups of friends between classes. Or in this case, the girl I liked was walking alone. I never saw her before that day. My confidence was pretty high. So I approached her. I managed to put together a fluent question of asking if she wanted to get some ice cream with me at the Ben and Jerry's right across from campus.



I struggled to say the basic details that normal people discuss. I stuttered while saying my hometown, my major, and the fraternity I was part of. I also ate chocolate ice cream that day, because I stuttered more on the word vanilla. Which is what I really wanted. This was a step in my process, where I was gaining confidence, but not fully understanding how to maintain fluency, how emotional state comes into play, how to speak spontaneously.

I'm going out to learn how to be fluent, to practice fluency.

You probably have not met a guy like me, but my question is, what kind of things have you tried for yourself? Have you tried therapy? "Strangers, yeah. I haven't tried therapy." Well, speaking to strangers without a plan, I mean, I'm glad you're doing something, but I think it requires a plan of how to do it, because it takes a lot of practice.

A kid just steps outside on a freezing-cold day, and he doesn't have a jacket. Learn anything? It's not exposure. It's practice. But it's practice with a skill, an idea, if all the stuff goes together.

I think exposure therapy is a good intention, but in my opinion, it's not good. My mom shared this phrase with me when I was a kid. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The point was that just because something is well-intentioned doesn't mean it's good. Going out with no plan, just to go out there to desensitize while stuttering, in my opinion, just me, is more humiliation.

I suffered too much of that. I had a plan. A plan of how I would talk, of how to engage in conversation.

"Going out with a plan and going out without, aren't both forms of exposure therapy? The point is to put yourself in a situation that's stressful." Well, right. So both would qualify in my mind as exposure therapy. I'd say that's the fundamental philosophy. I'm going out to learn how to be fluent, to practice fluency. It's not to just live uncomfortably. I have a whole goal that is not part of exposure therapy. I'm working on fluency, and I'm gonna go approach a person, but I'm gonna engage in a convo. I'm gonna work on these tools that I've been practicing. So let's call it exposure therapy, but with the goal of fluency. Practicing fluency skills and tools. It is, but it's with a different goal and tools and way.



I keep the tools sharp. I practice all the time.

I've always thought about this as practice. I swear. It's always practice, right? I keep the tools sharp. I practice all the time. I think of it like it's a game. I'm always talking to people and I'm always working on it. I've done it for, it's now very much habitual. I'm talking to all the clerks. There's a clerk plus a bag boy. I talk to them both. If it's like travel, I talk to a lot of people. I might talk to 10, 12 strangers in a day, and hold conversations, and hold good ones. I talk to 10 people a day.

You gotta learn to talk a lot. Because when you stutter for 10, 20 years, all you've done is, you've not practiced talking for that long, because you've shied away from it. Which is natural. It's not our fault. Because when it's hard, and when we feel embarrassed, we don't want to do it. I get it. That was my life. A lot of humiliation. So to get out there, it's this concept of learning to love this.

I think what really healed me was beyond the fluency. It was learning how to talk to people more. I think loneliness comes from not talking to people on a regular basis. It can be strangers that you have little conversations with. It can be some clerk at a grocery store. But it would be better to be friends with them and have coffee outside. It's the relationship. You can build relationships and friends when you go back to the same places again and again.

You gotta push through the fear

You gotta push through the fear. Just pessimistic f*cking pikers and losers give in to their fear. It's okay to be scared, in my opinion. It's not okay not to take action. Feel afraid, but still do it. Push yourself. If you want to beat your stutter like me, you gotta do that.

We always look for an excuse of some kind. We say, well, you know what? It's not right. I don't feel good. I'm tired. I record content once a day. This is my new once a day challenge for myself. Has nothing to do with my stutter. Has everything to do with helping you. So I applaud that you push. I'm proud of you for trying, for doing, for committing to this practice. This deep work is the sh*t that makes a difference. This is exactly how I practiced.

If I missed a day, if there was some reason why I did not talk to a person for a day, I would make it up and do 2 the next day.