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Chapter 7. WHAT I NOTICED ABOUT MY SPEECH The thoughts and feelings I learned to work with I started stuttering when I was in grade two. My mom told me I came home from school and started to stutter. I don't know why it began. This chapter describes the thoughts and feelings I later learned to work with. It does not establish the cause of my stutter or yours. My beliefs were that I stutter. That I am a stutterer. It's hard to talk. I can't say my name. Oh, I'm gonna stutter for the rest of my life. I could spend a conversation thinking about my stutter and trying to avoid the next hard word. Those thoughts did not help me be present with the other person. That was a pattern I could notice and work on. Here's the part I want to share: I worked on what I expected, how I felt, and where I put my attention. I kept testing ideas in actual conversations. Those parts of my experience gave me things to practice, even though I could not explain everything about why I stuttered. For years, my mind was full of worry about speaking: what I had done, how sh*tty I felt, and what might happen next. I could go to bed replaying the worst parts of the day and worrying about tomorrow. That was one burden I wanted to change. Do you worry when you lie down at night? The expectations I carried into speaking I found ideas about belief and expectation in a book that had nothing to do with stuttering. I used those ideas to think about my own experience and what I might try. A useful idea from a self-help book still needed to be tested in my real conversations. Belief became important in how I approached speaking. I had spent years expecting my name or the next conversation to be hard. I wanted to make room for the possibility that something could go better. That was one part of the work I chose to do. A person's stutter does not show that they failed to believe enough. I'm a big believer of beliefs. That our beliefs will govern our lives. So if you're struggling with your stutter and you're thinking about stuttering all day long, pick up the book Magic of Believing and read it today. This is one of the most impactful books I've ever read, and I own 4 copies of it currently, and I pass out copies to people who I come across in my daily walk of life who I think can benefit. A side note, none of these people stutter. My expectations changed as I practiced I can tell you what I remember about my own expectations. Speaking became something I worried about. I thought ahead to difficult words and back to moments that hurt. I cannot reconstruct what happened in another person's brain or assume that our histories are the same. As I practiced, I wanted more actual experiences to draw on. A slightly better conversation could give me something to remember before the next one. That did not make every attempt easy. It gave me another part of my experience to pay attention to, alongside the difficult moments. Replaying the same painful moments I compare that replay to learning the words of a song. The more I went over a painful speaking moment, the more familiar it felt. That is an analogy for what I was doing in my own head. I wanted to give better moments some attention too. I had spent years worrying about speech. Changing how I treated those thoughts took time and practice. I could start with something small that had actually gone a little better. We feel about this big. Like about 2 inches tall. When I felt scared and intimidated, I described myself as 2 inches tall. When I felt more confident, I called it 10 feet tall. Those images helped me talk about the feeling I wanted to bring into speaking. I worked with music, preparation, and practice to explore that feeling. A bigger feeling was something to try, without treating it as a guarantee of fluent speech. The connection between my emotional state and my speech became crucial to me. I paid attention to what I expected, how intimidated I felt, and what happened when I spoke. Working on those things became a big part of my practice. The expectations I brought into a conversation The expectations I carried into a conversation mattered in my own experience. I had spent years expecting certain words and situations to hurt. Changing what I brought into a conversation took repeated practice. It took more than trying to think my way into a better day. I worked on preparation, confidence, listening, and actual conversations. Over time, more of that work became familiar to me. Why I paid attention to my good speech days Some days my speech was on fire, and some days it was crap. That variation gave me a question worth working on: what was different about the situation and about how I felt when I spoke? It gave me a reason to pay attention. It could not, by itself, prove what causes stuttering. I looked at what I had been thinking, feeling, and anticipating on those better days. Confidence and preparation became things I could work with. I am describing the pattern I noticed and the ideas I tried; another person's pattern may be different. I sometimes use a million dollars as an imagined example. Suppose you believed something wonderful was about to happen. How might that change the feeling you brought into a conversation? That is the part of the example I want you to consider. Money and belief are not guarantees of fluency. Positive enthusiasm without a reason for being positive is not going to work. Imagining the race before running it I liked the idea of an athlete imagining a race before running it. I used imagination to think about how I wanted to feel before speaking. The next real conversation would still bring things I could not predict. Imagining it could be part of my preparation; it did not make the imagined result a fact or a promise.