The five day speech course for stuttering/stammering

The first two days of course are used to learn all of rules of fluent speech.

The first day is most important day. This is “clients” easy day as I do most of talking, explaining in detail around half of speech rules. I ask client to talk about their history, including information about how their stutter started, about their family and about their interests, plus any other information they would like to disclose, i.e., where they work. The client will have at least one further speech task on this first day, which they will be asked to complete after they have heard first set of rules.

On second day client becomes more involved, starting to put into practice what they have learnt from previous day. The final speech rules are taught on this day.

The final three days are spent practising, enabling rules to start becoming embedded and a natural part of client’s speech.

Some of areas included in course are:

1.Why people stutter. 2.Telephone technique. 3.Interview technique. 4.Public speaking technique. 5.The speech rules:

How I overcame my stutter/stammer

After having years of unsuccessful speech therapy I decided only way I was going to achieve fluency was to try and overcome it myself. Being a negative thinker at time I had little confidence in my ability to succeed.

Most of my achievements in life up to this point had been sporting and I asked myself question, how had I reached high standards at these sports? What I used to do was watch and study best people in that sport and to basically try and copy them, and with plenty of practice and dedication, I gradually improved.

I decided to take this approach with my speech, I would concentrate on various good fluent talkers, Tony Blair, Gordon brown, Chris Tarrant, and Bianca from Eastenders etc, and try and work out differences between their speech and mine.

The second approach was to deal with physcological. I needed to think and approach life differently, gain confidence and to be thinking in same way as when I was drunk i.e. care free. I started to read various books regarding psychology such as mind over matter books.

It was slow progress however I did notice major differences in my speech compared to good fluent talkers and was practising solidly to speak more like them.

After six months of searching I finally had keys and techniques needed to achieve fluency, these are what I now call speech rules. For me, speech is like a jigsaw and to be fluent you need to have all pieces to complete jigsaw. A stutterer will have at least one of pieces missing. The speech rules are pieces of speech jigsaw.

What I now needed to do was to put in a serious amount of practice to enable these speech rules to become a natural part of my speech. I did not know how long I would need to practice for, however I felt after three months that it was now more or less natural.