Paul Bartlett
11-09-2005, 09:47 AM
I have not been to this site in many years. The stuttering that dominated my life for over 30 years has become a minor nuisance in my life. This message is to share the formula that has worked for me. I cannot promise it will work for you. These are the things I review before public speaking.
1. Exaggerated movement. Watch how wide the announcers on TV open their mouths when they talk. Now watch yourself in the mirror. Open your mouth in big movements when you talk. Exaggerate all other movements too. This technique (Paul Cooke, Michigan State University) is very similar to other methods such as prolongation.
2. Light contact. Refuse to put any “muscle” into a block. Keep your mouth loose.
3. Pace. Talk slowly and don’t have fits of fast speech with lots of starts and stops. Talk like John Wayne and James Earl Jones (both former stutterers). Don’t stop when you see a block coming in a couple of words.
4. Priorities. Don’t try to be fluent. Fluency is a target you will never hit if fluency is what you are ing at. Fluency is not my purpose in life. My purpose involves my faith and my family. When I’m giving a talk, my focus needs to be on communicating an important message to my listeners. It doesn’t really matter if I stutter. Redefine success and pray that you get your message across. (This works best when your message has an important humanitarian purpose in which you really believe, rather than “Buy my company’s junk instead of some body else’s junk.”)
5. Strut. This is my way of remembering to puff up my self confidence just before I start speaking.
Stuttering is everything I do to avoid stuttering. I re-define success and focus on how well I do numbers 1, 2 and 3 (above) and, most importantly, on how well I communicated to my audience. I have had many years of speech therapy and methods 1, 2 and 3 (above) were taught to me by speech therapists to whom I am very grateful.
1. Exaggerated movement. Watch how wide the announcers on TV open their mouths when they talk. Now watch yourself in the mirror. Open your mouth in big movements when you talk. Exaggerate all other movements too. This technique (Paul Cooke, Michigan State University) is very similar to other methods such as prolongation.
2. Light contact. Refuse to put any “muscle” into a block. Keep your mouth loose.
3. Pace. Talk slowly and don’t have fits of fast speech with lots of starts and stops. Talk like John Wayne and James Earl Jones (both former stutterers). Don’t stop when you see a block coming in a couple of words.
4. Priorities. Don’t try to be fluent. Fluency is a target you will never hit if fluency is what you are ing at. Fluency is not my purpose in life. My purpose involves my faith and my family. When I’m giving a talk, my focus needs to be on communicating an important message to my listeners. It doesn’t really matter if I stutter. Redefine success and pray that you get your message across. (This works best when your message has an important humanitarian purpose in which you really believe, rather than “Buy my company’s junk instead of some body else’s junk.”)
5. Strut. This is my way of remembering to puff up my self confidence just before I start speaking.
Stuttering is everything I do to avoid stuttering. I re-define success and focus on how well I do numbers 1, 2 and 3 (above) and, most importantly, on how well I communicated to my audience. I have had many years of speech therapy and methods 1, 2 and 3 (above) were taught to me by speech therapists to whom I am very grateful.