My name is George and I’m a 24 year-old accountant from London, UK. I’ve been struggling with my speech since I was 5. I had some therapies over the years, but in the end they didn’t make much difference. I ended up accepting that I would be a stutterer for the rest of my life and that it will continue crippling in my career, and trashing my life in general. I hated it.
Finally, in the summer of 2018 I found some hope. I found a book that made me believe that I could speak like the rest of the people, to live a live just like the rest of the people. This book is, as you can imagine, Lee Lovett’s book, “Stuttering and Anxiety Self-Cures”. As soon as I read a few pages, I realized that Lee had the same issues as me, that he truly understands my situation, and that thanks to his book (and the time he dedicated to coach me) I could also beat stuttering, just like he did.
Unfortunately, I stopped speaking with Lee for around a year, when I began working for a different company. I wish I never did that. Now I realize that I could have beat my stuttering a lot earlier than I have done. But the good thing is that, at the end of 2019 I made the right decision: I decided to defeat stuttering once and for all. Lee began to coach me again (“thank you, Lee!!”), and I met a new coach: Javier, a Spaniard.
Getting to know another person who shared my speech problem and who managed to overcome it motivated me to continue working hard, and even more so when he spoke to me in English, fluently, even though his mother tongue is Spanish. He began to coach me as well. After a few coaching sessions I realized that if I really wanted to stop stuttering, I actually had to do precisely that. I couldn’t continue allowing those blocks to occur. So I became a Speech Cop. My next steps were to learn to use the Crutches and to hear as much fluency as possible.
Some weeks later I had to give a presentation at work, in front of all my colleagues. And I didn’t stutter!! I never thought I would be able to do this. I could make this happen. The more I worked on my speech, the quicker the anxiety disappeared, and speaking became easier and easier.
On March 2020 I began attending to the SpeechMasters Club meetings, hosted by World Stop Stuttering Association (https://worldstopstuttering.org/). In these weekly meetings, a bunch of stutterers and ex-stutterers meet together and speak about many things, normally related to our speech. It’s incredible to see how other people have stopped stuttering, and how well they speak. I would have never guessed they had a speech issue. It’s something worth seeing, it is extremely motivating.
Now, at the end of May 2020, I haven’t had a single bad incident in 4 weeks. Four weeks!! I can say that now, thanks to everything I’ve learnt from Lee, Javier and from World Stop Stuttering Association, I am a much happier person, a much more confident person, who is now going to get rid of the residual fears and who is going to learn to enjoy and to love to speak.
If you would like to hear me speak, go here: https://vimeo.com/425576342/396b031426
My final words is that if I have been able to do this, why not you? Currently there are around a hundred Success Stories posted. You can become one of them too. Life is so much better not stuttering.
GEORGE, London, June 2020
