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JavierModeratorHi Brianna. Sure, I’ll check it with the rest of the team and get back to you as soon as possible.
Best regards,
JavierJavierModeratorThanks Brianna! We will contact you very soon and assign you a coach.
JavierModeratorHello Brianna. As far as I know, none of us coaches have had a student with spasmodic dysphonia. I’ve just did a bit of research on this now, and watched a couple of videos of people with this problem, to get a better idea. I am going to show this message to Lee Lovett anyway.
All I can say is that we will be glad to help you master our methods in order to defeat the fear of words, fear of speaking, word-planning and hopefully help you with your problem.JavierModeratorHello Susan! Welcome to WSSA! I’m glad to hear that you are finding this program helpful. It has helped many achieve fluency and love to speak. I used to be a very severe stutterer, and within a few months I became a PWSS, and now I’m one of the coaches of WSSA. It would be great to see you today at SAM, our weekly speech club (https://worldstopstuttering.org/speech-club/). You can learn a lot from these meetings, as you will be meeting the coaches, Lee Lovett, other PWS and PWSS, and learn from their experiences with this program.
Please keep us posted with your progress!JavierModeratorHi Damian. I haven’t heard you speak, so I’m just guessing. Those mini-blocks may be because you’re speaking too fast and without pausing every few words. Have you tried speaking slightly slower and with more pronounciation? Most PWS that I’ve coached speak way too fast, and that doesn’t help. They don’t even realise that they are fast speakers, because it’s the way they’ve been speaking all their lives. And there are a lot of people out there who speak too fast too anyway. But when we slow down just a bit, and use C-9, our speech not only gets more fluent, it makes us better speakers than 90% of the world.
JavierModeratorHi Damian! Like Farooq said, welcome to WSSA! I’m sure that once you master the Crutches, have an Emergency Speech Plan to use in high-pressured situations, keep your mind clean of negative thoughts and keep hearing massive amounts of fluency every day, you will eventually become a PWSS and learn to love to speak anywhere, including public speaking.
Do keep us posted with your progress!
Try to make the most of this program. It has helped so many, there is no reason why it won’t work on you. I’d recommend you to watch at least 1 video of coaching sessions every day, to attend to the Crutch Practice Sessions whenever you can, to the weekly SAM Meetings too, and, of course, if you need private coaching, let us know!JavierModeratorHi Damian,
Thanks for sharing your progress with us. Making the Crutches automatic is a matter of time and practice. The more you use them, the easier and more automatic it gets.
The more feeling and passion you put in your speech, the less you’ll need the Crutches.
About speaking to large groups of people, I would recommend you to do it one step at a time. I mean, expand your comfort zones. You may now feel comfortable and relaxed speaking to groups of, let’s say, 3 people (more than that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable). Okay, to reach the goal of speaking comfortably to groups of 20+ people, we need to start working on smaller groups. Start speaking to groups of 4-5 people. Focus on the things you’ve learnt here. After speaking to groups of 4-5 people several times, you will feel as comfortable speaking to them as you do when speaking to 1 person. Now is the time to expand again your comfort zones to groups of 6-8 people, and repeat this process. Then do it again with groups of 9-12, and so on until you no longer feel pressure speaking to groups of people, no matter its size.
You can find a lot of useful tips about speech anxiety in Lee’s book, “Speech Anxiety to Public Speaking”, only available here, at WSSA.JavierModeratorI would try to put all of my attention on the soft voice, instead of the next word you’re going to say. You may also want to try modulating your voice, and show passion in the way you talk.
Do watch some of the videos of the coaching sessions I shared with you in my previous email. I’m sure the advice that is given to those PWS/PWSS may well apply to you too.JavierModeratorHello Gerald! I have already replied to this issue of yours in the introduction section of the Forum:
If you have any other questions, please do let us know! And please do keep us posted with your progress!
JavierModeratorHi Gerald! Welcome to WSSA! My name is Javier, and I’m one of the certified speech coaches of WSSA. The phone is one of the high-pressured situations for the majority of PWS. You haven’t said much about your speech when talking on the phone, so I can’t give you specific advice, but I can say, from my own experience as a former PWS and as a coach, that speaking in a softer voice, for example, works really well in these situations. When we speak on the phone, the mic is really close to our mouth, so we don’t have to talk so loud. We can talk very softly, we will be heard just fine. So, make sure you speak in a lower voice register, and keep it like that throughout the entire conversation. This will keep your mind focused on that, so you won’t be so concerned about your words and your stutter. Speaking softly also keeps us more relaxed, and that helps too.
You can find many videos of our coaching sessions in which we discuss phone conversations. Here’s a link to several of these video recordings, I hope you find them helpful:https://worldstopstuttering.org/videos/?filter_video_tag=phone
JavierModeratorHi Kaarina,
as you know, children are much more insecure than we, adults are. Something that can be meaningless to us can mean a lot to them.
My advice as a coach and a PWSS who started stuttering at age 6 and who has gone to speech therapy for probably 15 years or so, be careful with the SLPs. They may make your child feel more insecure about their speech, and make things even worse.I highly recommend you to watch the videos in the link that I sent you in my previous message. The role of the parents is key, and you can learn a lot from those videos.
As a coach, I recommend to teach by example. I mean, make it a game. When talking to your son and the rest of the family, you should all talk more slowly, pronouncing everything more clearly, more passionately, so that he imitates you… make it a game!
Read aloud to your son! I’m sure you have some fun books to read to him. Make it a game. Make him repeat some of the things you read aloud to him. He has to realise that speaking is fun.
Kaarina, do send me an email to [email protected] and I’ll try to get you in touch with Lee Lovett.
JavierModeratorHi Kaarina!
Our program is best designed for adults, but of course we can adapt our methods for kids. My youngest PWS-Student so far has been 17, and he has been among the fastest to become a PWSS: he only needed 3 or 4 sessions and 1 month to get there.
Lee is the most experienced of us in this aspect. He has coached several kids, as young as age 3. Here you can watch some of Lee’s sessions with a 9-year-old PWS:Kaarina, do any of your kids stutter?
JavierModeratorHi Juned!
Vowels, consonants… that’s not the problem. Hasn’t it ocurred to you that after you finally say a word, you can say it a million times immediately afterwards? Or you can say that same word if you’re alone?
The problem is fearing words, planning words, and the insecurity we feel when saying that word to someone. What will they think about my speech? Will they laugh at me for stuttering? And so on.The truth is, nobody cares about your speech and/or has time to care about it. People have things to do, like study, work, pay bills, take care of themselves and their families, they have their own problems. Do you think your speech is in their top priorities? Not even close. Even if you have the worst block in ages when saying a word, that person will have forgotten about it in 2 minutes.
I’m saying this to help you realise that you need to stop being sooooo worried about your speech and other people’s opinions. They don’t matter. Your opinion about yourself is what matters. You need to work on having a good opinion about yourself, and the way to do it is to give your best at everything you do (no matter how mundane it may be) and be as loving as you can be. This includes giving your best at improving your speech and achieving the PWSS status, obviously.
One thing you need to learn is to use Crutches properly. By this I mean that when you use a Crutch, you put all your attention and determination on the Crutch, and not on the word. Again, words are irrelevant. How we say them is what matters. For example, if we’re speaking in a soft voice, we put all our attention (100%; 90% is not ALL our attention) on keeping the voice in that register. Period. Another example: if we are using Crutch 4 and then linking the rest of the words, we make sure we start with a sound-launch and then we link it to the next words. So you have to make sure you link everything, as if those words and the sound launch were one single individual long word. You must leave no “spaces”, no matter how short they may be. This requires a lot of attention, especially at the beginning, so you may need to practice it several times, especially in low pressure situations and gradually climb up the ladder to higher ones, expanding comfort zones.
Watch some of our recordings of coaching sessions (https://worldstopstuttering.org/videos/) and use the search filters on the left to find the most suitable ones for your case. You may want to use the video tag “crutches overview” or “emergency speech plan”, for example.
You may also consider purchasing coaching sessions with one of us, Certified Speech Coaches, to help you in this journey to fluency and loving to speak in all venues.
JavierModeratorMaybe you’re simply not used to it. I’d recommend you to practice it in Crutch Practice sessions and ask for the feedback of the rest of the people there.
JavierModeratorHi Rob. Welcome to WSSA! We all have our favourite Crutches. Having said that, linking is how fluent people speak. It is the opposite to choppy or halting speech. Some people may confuse linking with elongating syllables. Maybe that’s what you’re doing, I can’t tell without listening to you.
Maybe attending to our Crutch Practice Group sessions may help you, as you will hear other people using this Crutch, among others. And, of course, private coaching may be the most helpful. -
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