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https://usedtostutter.com/reader/book/editions/corrected-2026-10-04-9e1d376a993f/chapters/i-will-go-first

Chapter 21. I WILL GO FIRST In that moment, in that very second, I was brave. So here's the story about one of the most intimidating environments I've been in, with a girl I liked a lot. I was taking a yoga class that a girl I liked invited me to. We were friends at this point, not anything else, but I liked her a lot. There were 30 people in this class. They were all 20s, like the late 20s. All the guys were jacked, all the girls were hot. The teacher made everyone at the start of the class get into a circle, and she said, this is where my heart dropped, we're going to go around the circle and introduce ourselves. What was she doing to me, man? I know, I know. We've all had the thought run. Use the bathroom, make up an excuse, do something. But the problem is, I was sitting next to a girl I liked. So I was not going to be a pussy. I had already beaten a lot of my stutter, but not fully. I was very nervous. What was I going to do? Well, we all have a moment where we can either sh*t our pants or we can be 10 feet tall and brave. In that moment, in that very second, I was brave. I raised my hand in front of the whole group and said, I will go first. Oh yeah, what we're going to have to do? Not just introduce ourselves by saying our name. That's hard enough, right? But we had to tell, I swear, an embarrassing story about ourselves. What I realized is that this was a group of people who had a lot of confidence. What I decided to do was, of course, go first and tell an embarrassing story so we could all laugh together with me. It was a story about how I was on an inner tube going down a Florida spring with a group of people in their 20s and 30s, and there was this girl who I liked. She was on the trip. People were jumping off from land onto a rope swing and into the spring, and a bunch of people did it. When it was my turn, I grabbed the rope, went back, and as I swung, the rope broke. I fell in, and it was very funny. We all had a good laugh at my expense. So I did it. I killed it, because I relied on spontaneous speaking, which really helps. But I was still scared. But I would rather go first, always. Volunteer and go first. Than sit there like a piker, like we all have done, where you count down how many people until it's your turn. Four more people, or 12 more. There's no way how to have good speech right there. There's no way how to beat your stutter and be counting down, dreading it. So in that moment of being afraid, I raised my hand and I chose to be big and brave and 10 feet tall, instead of feeling 2 inches tall and intimidated. That moment exists for all of us. That moment exists for you in your speech life. I know it does. I've talked to hundreds of people who stutter. We all feel it. There's a moment where your heart drops. In that moment, you can train yourself, teach yourself to be bold and brave. You can teach yourself to be courageous. You can do it. Whose birthday are we celebrating? So I'm walking in. I used to go out a lot to practice. When I say a lot, like 3 times a week I would go out at night. I walk in to meet my friend upstairs on the third floor of this bar restaurant. You know by now I have my confidence in my bag. It's massive. But like I'm not planning to use it. I'm planning to go upstairs. But I'm walking in with confidence and swagger. I walk into a table of 16 girls. 16, celebrating someone's birthday. The thing that I do is in stride. So like I don't stop and wait around. I just walk up, and I'm like, whose birthday are we celebrating? They laughed, and I said something else about how pretty they all looked, and I'm going upstairs to see a friend. It was not about the flirting. It was about the day. It worked because it was unexpected. It worked because of spontaneous speech. How could anyone have expected that? When I walked into the bar restaurant to scope it out, I felt 10 feet tall. In my mind, the bigger we feel, the better our speech. That exact moment when you're about to speak In speaking situations, in all of them, you have a moment to either be brave or to be a pussy. Seriously. Especially when you stutter, there's always a moment. I'm going to talk about that, because no one does, and it's critically important when you want to beat your stutter in the real world. There's a moment before it starts where we all feel it. This is half a second, where your heart starts to race. I'll say that we stutterers proverbially sh*t our pants, but allow me to explain. We get nervous, we feel intimidated, and we shrink to be 2 inches tall, is how I describe it. Where we feel timid. What I learned is how to become a world-class professional at handling that moment. Instead of being 2 inches tall, I now live my life 10 feet tall at that moment. It's a learned skill. I learned it. I figured it out. I created it. At that moment, where your heart races, and they turn and see you, and your heart drops, there's a moment where you can be 10 feet tall. I know you know that moment, because you probably, like me, for so many years, I sh*t my pants in a proverbial way. I became tiny and really nervous and scared. All you want to do is just kind of find an exit out of the situation as quickly as possible. It just happens when meeting strangers, or just being out somewhere that you're not comfortable with. Which is called living life. There's a split second moment where you see that word coming up, or you see a block, or you feel trouble. In a split second you literally have a choice to be big and brave and bold and with balls and guts and confidence, or you feel intimidated and you feel 2 inches tall and small and weak and scared. There's a moment. There's a literal moment in all conversations where we have a choice. The moment you walk into a bar and you walk up to a bartender, the moment she looks at you and says hi, is the moment you have that thought. That's when it happens. That exact moment when you're about to speak, or when you feel the pressure on, or when your boss says, hey Don, walk us through. It's that moment where it's the sh*t-your-pants or feel confident. Feel the fear and do it anyway You learn just to block stuff out, where there's a moment where you can panic or not, and you just choose not. You'll feel the butterflies in your stomach, and they won't go away totally. I used to worry about that, like, a lot. Then I read a quote from Tom Brady, the quarterback in the NFL who won 7 Super Bowls, the most of all time, period. He said that he still got the butterfly feeling walking onto the field each game. Here's someone who had played for more than 20 years, and was the most successful football player of all time. I thought, if he still felt some nerves before playing, then it's okay for me to feel nerves before starting a conversation. So I want you to know that I've learned to feel the fear and the nerves and do it anyway. Feel the fear and do it anyway. When Tom Brady's nervous, in his mind, is he expecting failure or success? You tell me. Tom Brady expects to succeed, always. They all visualize success. When they wake up in the morning, they are nervous, yes, but what's in their head is they're crossing the finish line first. The biggest balls under pressure So the story's about balls. This guy rented space for his work company. He has a few employees, and the person who had the whole floor sold the whole rental space to this huge company. But my friend's like, I have a lease here. They can sell their contract, but they can't sell his. They tried to basically pressure him for about a month with real bad tactics. But the thing I wanted to share is important. He has the most balls I've seen. Now, I have balls with stuff, right? But he has balls when people are bearing down pressure. He has the biggest balls under pressure. So he's talking to an attorney, and he's basically playing hardball. He played hardball to an attorney when most people would cave. Now they're going to buy him out for cash money. He's probably going to get 10,000 just to leave. He's 5 foot 9, and he did this to a guy who was 6 foot 2 and 300 pounds. He stood right up, man. For me, he was like standing up for the rest of us who get pushed around. When you're a shooter, you gotta shoot So let me share a story that happened on Sunday. I'm running this local AI group. I had a meeting, Sunday from one to 3, and I had 4 guys show up. We're in this coffee shop. I've never done this next part. This lady walks in, and she is drop-dead gorgeous. I've never done this, but she's back at the table with her food, and I say to the guys, excuse me, I'll be right back. I walk over, and I walk up to her. But like, when you're a shooter, you gotta shoot. You gotta take the shot. As I look at what she's looking at, it says a church's name on a piece of paper. I said, I just came over to tell you you're beautiful, but then I looked down and saw this church's name, so I felt bad about it. We started to talk about religion. So I sat down for 20 minutes, cold, with my group waiting. It was a lot of the tools we spoke about, but it's all subconsciously, right? It was a spontaneous approach. As soon as she sat down and I had a moment, I didn't wait 20 minutes and wonder what I was going to say. I did not pre-plan. The way I think about it is, the worst thing that will happen is she will say she has a boyfriend. I won't hesitate more than 3 seconds from when I see a person There's a 3 second rule. The 3 second rule is, I learned to, I won't hesitate more than 3 seconds from when I see a person. Because what I found from years of practice is that it never went well, right? The more I would hesitate, the more I would wait, the worse my fluency was. So I will now just skip the person if I ever was in that spot. So it's this concept that it worked because it was unexpected. It worked because of spontaneous speech. You know the feeling when you see someone and you want to say something You know the feeling when you see someone and you want to say something, but you doubt yourself, and then it's been a while, and you're like, oh, it's been too long. Well, I can't now. Where you wait and then you lose momentum. I'm gonna show you how I do it and how you can do it, where you do it the moment you think about it, and you walk up, and you're scared, but there's no hesitation. That is super, super powerful, man. It won't go well at first, probably, because it's new. But it's unbelievable. Put yourself in the best position possible I want to talk about when I beat my stutter, about how I learned to put myself in the best positions possible for good speech. See, there is a flow, in a pattern, that until I learned that, I was always a little intimidated. Putting yourself in the position, it's being strategic, always. I'm not just walking out to talk. I'm doing something for my mind. I'm doing something to practice speaking. I'm doing something always before I go out. It's being intentionally strategic. It's kind of like how we make, how we go from an unplanned world to here's a strategy. So how do we put ourselves in the best position possible? Well, I'm going to get some ice cream, and we're going to talk about it. I would love a vanilla with cookie dough mixed in. This is the real world, unscripted convo. You can do it wherever you are. These rules apply. If there's like a rule that I've learned along the way, it's no hesitation. So he who hesitates is lost.