The reason for writing this is that since World Stop Stuttering Association was born, the number of Success Stories has rocketed. This means that more and more people are defeating stuttering. But as most of us PWSS know, unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that we have stopped having stutter fears and stutter threats. That’s our next battle.
Posting a Success Story means that we have avoided appearing speech disabled for at least four weeks. In other words, we have proven to ourselves that we know how to avoid stutters and blocks. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish this. We’ve won the battle against stuttering, but not the war against fear, yet.
This battle is much easier, but it takes longer to achieve victory. Fears must not be ignored, as they are pretty much like an infection: they will rapidly spread if we don’t do anything to control them. To avoid this from happening, we must reject these fears immediately and counterattack them with positive anti-fear affirmations, and claim our victory over stuttering as often as possible. We must never forget the words of late Dr. Frank S. Caprio:
“We have free choice:
to accept or reject thoughts.
Nothing compels us to think anything
except our own desires.
Use your mental switch
to dictate your thoughts…
Believe that you can improve
and you will.”
So, how can a PWSS who has feared words for such a long time learn to love to speak? Well, since the most repeated thought becomes the predominant one, auto-suggestions and self-hypnosis obviously play a vital role here. The other very important thing to is to slowly expand our comfort zones and celebrating each and every of our speech successes. Every time we succeed at speaking fluently in an uncomfortable situation, such as speaking on the phone, or in a meeting, we have to celebrate it. This way, the next time we face the same, or a similar situation, we will feel much more confident and relaxed, and we will perform even better. If we continue doing this, there will be no situation, or almost no situation, that we will fear speaking in.
This is one of the main reasons why we created the SpeechMasters Club. This is a place where we can begin to get rid of the fears of speaking to groups of people, to learn to love to speak no matter the situation, and become better speakers.
If we do all that I have mentioned before, we will realise that in the end, stuttering is actually a blessing. We have improved and we are improving so many aspects of our life, and we have learned to become the bosses of our mind. Most likely, if we hadn’t been cursed with stuttering, we would have never discovered these tools. If we have really mastered auto-suggestions and self-hypnosis, we will know their potential, not only against speech anxiety, but many other malaises. That’s the true reason why we affirm that stuttering has become a blessing for so many of us.
