The Most Important Thing to Stop Stuttering

The Most Important Thing

I am Lee Lovett, an EX-stutterer, the author of 8 stuttering-related books and founder of WSSA and of this program. The title of my remarks today is, “The Most Important Thing”. Now, what might that be? As Einstein told us, “The measure of intelligence is our ability to change.” I would add the words, “for the better.” This program seeks to help you join hundreds of PWS who have stopped stuttering and who now live seamlessly in the fluent world, as do I. Everything we say and do is aimed at that objective. We want YOU to join us in the fluent world and to elevate your life to the best that it can be.

To stutter, we must think words, fear words and force words. If we fail to do ALL three of those things, we will NEVER stutter: Think words; fear words and force words. Stuttering requires ALL three of those things! Why have I captioned my remarks today, “The Most Important Thing”? What is “the most important thing”? It is the primary goal, of our program. It is this: It is avoiding any and all humiliating stuttering incidents and to improve our view of life. That is “the most important thing” to me.

When you KNOW that you can do that, anytime, anywhere, with anybody, the fear of stuttering will be replaced by thoughts of your message, not of specific words, but of thoughts, ideas, and HOW to express them more convincingly. THAT is what will then fill your mind: HOW to express your thoughts more compellingly. How close are YOU to that goal? How can you TEST your progress? Ask yourself: How many minutes, in the average hour, do you think about stuttering? I can remember thinking about stuttering over 50 minutes of most hours, all day, every day. That was no life, not really. It was my own form of self-created Hell. In my mid-20’s, I began experimenting constantly with ways of stopping stuttering. By age 30 or so, I stopped having humiliating stuttering incidents – thanks to using the methods that I describe in my books. For the next ten years, I still worried about stuttering most hours, most days. At first, I still thought about it 50 minutes an hour, then 40 minutes, then only 30 minutes and so on down to thinking about stuttering only an occasional minute or two per hour! But, still, even though I had stopped stuttering totally, my fears did take nearly ten years to die, BUT I did not have WSSA, its program, its Mobile App, Practice Sessions, nor any EX-stuttering CSS to coach me. Even so, by around age 40, I stopped thinking about stuttering. For all of the decades since then, I have had almost zero thoughts (and NO fears) of stuttering. I have truly joined the fluent world. I have done NOTHING that you can’t do!

What’s the key? What’s the secret? WHAT is the most important thing?

OUR MINDSET.

It is my BELIEF, my CONVICTION, my absolute certainty that I can avoid ANY humiliating stuttering incident, anywhere, anytime, with anybody. I am able to think that because I have METHODS to avoid stuttering, methods that WORK. I proved this to myself once, twice, dozens of times, hundreds of times, even thousands of times by now. Then, long ago, I stopped thinking about stuttering. If it weren’t for this program and my efforts to help you, I would NEVER think about stuttering – not ever! My once fears of it are long dead. They died the natural death of NON-use. Yes, to be trite, everything is “Use it or lose it.” I haven’t stuttered in over half a century. The body of my stuttering demon has turned into ashes – “from dust to dust” -- just as it says in Genesis of the Christian bible. I would be lying if I did not admit that, on very rare occasions, a stutter thought still crosses my mind, but, BUT I have trained myself to think about stuttering defensively and offensively. How so? I LOVE TO SPEAK ESPECIALLY UNDER PRESSURE. I have said those words out loud and under my breath millions of times since age 40. I LOVE TO SPEAK ESPECIALLY UNDER PRESSURE!

How does this work? As any neurologist will tell you, the most repeated thought becomes your dominant thought which becomes who you are. As the great playwright, George Bernard Shaw, said, “Life is not about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself.” In some important ways, I have created myself. YOU can do this too. You and I are our thoughts. We control our thoughts. We can dictate our thoughts. DO IT! When you and I become the best speakers that we can be, we will be among the best speakers we know. You now have no further excuses to stutter. You know hundreds like me, who have defeated stuttering permanently. It’s YOUR turn now.

As Rick Hanson, the author of the book, “Hardwiring Happiness…”, wrote, “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, Change the way you look at it.” We DO change our speech BIGtime. We also change the way that we look at our speech and at ourselves and our lives. We insist on improving ourselves. Isn’t that what YOU should and could be doing right now? If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be what you’ve always been.

I want to be a better person, every day, in every way, and I intend to die trying. It’s fulfilling. Join me. Join me now. Join me forever. Never look back. Stuttering is the trigger that we use to create our NEW selves, our better selves, our determined selves, our happy selves. We convert stuttering into a blessing that elevates our lives. Do it. Do it NOW.

Abraham Lincoln, possibly America’s most beloved President, once said, “My reputation is what others think of me.

My character is what I think of myself.” You and I can’t change what others think, BUT we can change what WE think, and THAT is what this program is all about. Now, let’s get back to stuttering. Your DESIRE to stop stuttering and your BELIEF that you CAN stop stuttering are the No. 1 pre-requisites for your success. The methods in this program have enabled hundreds to post glowing SSS. Thousands more PWS have surely beaten stuttering using our methods; they just haven’t posted SSS on WSSA’s website.

A great Chinese General, Sun Tzu, said, “Every battle is won before it is fought.” Similarly, your battle with stuttering is won before it is ever fought. How so? You either WANT to overcome it or you don’t, and you either BELIEVE that you can overcome or you don’t. Only YOU can answer those questions. You must answer them honestly. If your answer isn’t positive, CHANGE YOUR ANSWER and get to work mastering our proven methods.

Try as you may, if your answer is still negative, you – deep down in your psyche – likely do not WANT to beat it, and so you never shall. Similarly, even IF you want to do beat it, if you do not BELIEVE that you can overcome it, you never will.

For those of you who DO want to beat it (which is most of you) BUT IF you are still not sure that it is possible, I urge you to study with care the hundreds of Stopped Stuttering Stories that have been posted on WSSA and even more on my website (Speech Anxiety Anonymous). Those hundreds of SSS come from those ages 4 to 88, both genders, from all faiths, from all continents, from all languages and cultures on our planet, all stories VOLUNTEERED, NOT PAID FOR. Never before in world history has such a body of SSS been assembled. There are simply far too many to be faked. They are true. You have no choice save to accept these countless proofs as true. IF all of those PWS can beat it, so can you.

While all humans are unique, we are 99+% identical. None of us, not even you, are freaks. Most things that any of us can do, all of us can do – most things. Bottom line: YOU NO LONGER HAVE AN EXCUSE NOT TO STOP STUTTERING. IF you are too lazy to learn and use our methods, shame on you and our pity goes to all of those who must continue to listen to you stutter.

The bottom line here is this: IF you will learn, really learn, how to use our methods and thus avoid ANY HUMILIATING stutter anywhere, anytime, you WILL stop stuttering. Your speech will never be perfect; every human makes some verbal boo-boos. You, I and all of us will always do that, BUT, those of us who learn to avoid ALL HUMILIATING stuttering incidents, will no longer be seen as stutterers by normal speakers. THAT is THE primary goal of this program. Yes, you can go farther. You can adopt daily mind-training and give yourself twice daily, 20-minute treatments to attack NON-speech issues too – issues like anger, anxiety, jealousy, hatred, inferiority, defeatism and other forms of inappropriate thinking – and, by so doing, you can and will elevate your lives beyond anything that you ever dreamed possible. Yes; yes; you can. You can do all of this by correcting your thinking about your speech -- your thinking and, thus, your life. Your life can and will rise above all levels that you had dreamed possible. As goes the Latin proverb, “Believe that you can have it, and you shall have it.” Everything that I have said today relates to your MINDSET. If we don’t have the proper mindset, we aren’t going to be able to stop stuttering. However, in addition to our mindsets, we need to address the mechanics of avoiding humiliating stuttering incidents – be it initially or in relapses. Let’s talk now talk about the mechanics, the methods of avoiding humiliating stuttering incidents. I can’t now read to you my 700-page How to Stop Stuttering & Love Speaking book, but I can give you a very truncated summary. Here it is.

HOW TO STOP HUMILIATING STUTTERING

Aka Avoiding Relapses

The most important question for stutterers is always, “How can the PWS avoid the next humiliating incident?” Until they teach themselves how to do that, AND CAN DO IT CONSISTENTLY, AND KNOW THAT THEY CAN ALWAYS AVOID STUTTERING, they will continue stuttering to their graves. We tell stutterers this, over and over and over again. They, we, YOU MUST stop ALL HUMILIATING incidents – not routine mistakes but, rather, those that HUMILIATE a PWS.

Avoiding the next humiliating incident is not that hard, not when you master our methods. There may be other methods that work; we hope so, but we only know our methods, and that is what we teach here.

In a nutshell, WHAT ARE THE KEY METHODS TO AVOID STUTTERING?

1. STOP TALKING!
2. TAKE A TWO COUNT! Say, “one thousand one, one thousand two”.
3. Then, BEGIN WITH ANY WORD EXCEPT THE THREATENED WORD OR, even easier, BEGIN WITH A SOUND: “Ahhhh” or “Mmmm”.
4. THEN, HOLD THE FIRST WORD OR SOUND (as if you were singing) THROUGH ALL WORDS TO THE NEXT STOP. Example: Sing: “When I’m worried, and I can’t sleep”. Then, simply say it.
5. Put your hand on your stomach and you can feel yourself involuntarily hardening your stomach to force air from your lungs through your throat and into your mouth, thus holding your words together as if they were cemented. You can’t help but keep your words together. When your words and syllables are thus “cemented” together, it is impossible to stutter. Demonstrate it again, “When I’m worried…”

That’s it! Learn this by doing it, over and over. Keep REPEATING YOUR ABOVE ADVICE! Keep your hand on your stomach; make sure that it is involuntarily hard. If it is, you cannot and will not EVER stutter. Simple? Yes. Easy? Yes. Can YOU do it? Yes. Will you do it and keep doing it as many times as needed to master it? That’s up to you. If you won’t do it, you must ask yourself if you REALLY want to stop stuttering or not. If not, you are using stuttering as social shield, as a way of protecting yourself from exposing your feared inferiorities to others. The joke (if you can call it one) is on you. That is, EVERYONE has similar inferiorities. Some of us simply keep diminishing them until they don’t interfere noticeably with our lives. Again, DRILL holding a sound through all words. Is your stomach HARD when you do this? It should be at least semi-hard. Talk slower. Talk less. Drill more.

A great American actress, Mary Pickford, once said, “Failure is not in falling down but in staying down.”

All of us fall down, constantly, over and over. That’s just being human. Don’t get mad at yourself! Just GET UP. You, I, we must keep getting up. We are determined to get up, every time, always; we never fail to get up. We master this to beat stuttering, and, when we do, we learn how to DICTATE our thinking, and, when we do that, we elevate our lives enormously. We keep working on stuttering until it is gone, gone from our speech, and, finally, gone from our thoughts. We will then be free to live seamlessly in the fluent world, where I have now lived for over FIFTY years. I LOVE TO SPEAK, ESPECIALLY UNDER PRESSURE. Repeating and holding that thought has crushed ALL fears of words and stuttering. I LOVE words. I LOVE to speak, especially under pressure. As the great Russian novelist, Turgenev, wrote, “Without goals, we have no reason to live.” You and I have goals, beginning with our goal to best person that we can be. Now, it’s your turn to be the best person that YOU can be. NOW, it’s YOUR turn. The most certain way to predict your future is to create it. That is “the most important thing” to me.

I hope that you will resolve to create your future, beginning today.