Anxiety and stress are the responses that your body has created for you as a defence mechanism. For example, when a person sees a lion in front of him, he begins to sweat and experience shallow breathing because of physical body response to a danger. Similarly, when a PWS (Person Who Stutters) is given an opportunity to speak in front of people (it can be family, friends or authority figures), he experiences the same pattern of shallow breathing and rigidness similar to the experiences of a man in front of a lion.
A PWS has allowed his mind from a very young age to see speaking situations as a threat. If a PWS can forget that he has a stuttering problem, then he is more likely to get out of stuttering habit because the problem lies in the reinforcement of negative stuttering incidents over and over in his brain. Our brain is 95% sub-conscious and only 5% conscious. Fluent speech, just like breathing, is produced by the sub-conscious mind. But whenever a PWS becomes anxious, then he starts using his conscious part of the brain to produce speech and that is why he experiences blocks and forces words out leading to a stutter. Coach Lee has designed methods that can change these responses and break the habit of fearing speaking situations and stuttering.
The most important part of The Lovett Method is the mind training. Mind training is done through Auto-suggestions treatment (AST) (or self-hypnosis) in which speech related positive affirmations are recited over and over again to cleanse the sub-conscious mind. For example, when a person says “I love to speak” over and over, though he might not believe it in the starting, due to consistent repetition, he will start believing at some point in time, hence his thinking and actions will align to his positive affirmations and he will truly believe that he loves to speak.
There is another important tool called crutches which work in tandem with the ASTs. ASTs should be done diligently and consistently over a period of time to see beneficial results and during this tenure the PWS must use the crutches while speaking so as to hear the fluency. Crutches help a PWS in converting the potential bad stuttering incident into a fluency memory. Hence, the affirmations are justified in action with the help of the crutches. If a person does the ASTs diligently but continues to stutter, then there will be no improvement as he is saying something (I love to speak) and doing the exact opposite to what he is saying (allowing himself to stutter without using the crutches). This will create a conflict in the belief system.
Therefore, it is very important to work the ASTs and crutches jointly. When a PWS is consistent with using the crutches and doing the ASTs in combination, then it is only a matter of time before he becomes a PWSS (Person Who Stopped Stuttering) and gains a much more positive outlook on his life. ASTs can then be used to attack the other, common human problems (such as boredom, depression, anger, jealousy, hatred, greed, laziness, insomnia) and, by so doing, elevate his/her karma and life.
