Hi Marianne! It’s great to have you here. Have you read the 3rd Edition of “Stuttering & Anxiety Self-Cures”? This 3rd Edition has much more content, and a much better book. If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you to do it.

Regarding your questions, learning to use the Crutches is like learning to play any sport or learning a new skill. The first times you play tennis, most likely you won’t be good at it. But if you keep on practicing, you’ll become really good at it. This is like driving a car. The first time you drive a car, you’re paying attention to the speed, the mirrors, the accelerator, etc. After having practiced it for some time, you just do it “automatically”. You just get into the car and go from A to B, effortlessly and without really thinking about this process. The same happens here.

My suggestion is to practice with the Crutches as much as you can, even when you don’t need them. This is very important. And one day you’ll realise that you will be using them automatically, unconsciously. This only requires consistency and practice.

I strongly recommend you to look at the videos of the coaching sessions. You can find them at the “Video” section of this website. There are plenty of videos where we show how to use them. In the online course Lee explains them pretty well too. And of course, we, the Certified Coaches, will be glad to help you personally with private coaching.

About which one to chose, pretty much depends on the situation. As you might remember from the book, Crutches 1-8 are best suited for First Feared Words (names, for example), and Crutches 7-12 are better for middle word issues. Combining Crutches is also a great idea.

I hope I’ve been helpful with these comments. Please do let me know if you have anu other questions.

Javier

Hi Ahmed,
I think that the best suggestion, rather than writing is, it to recommend you to go to the “Video” section of this website. Over there you can search videos by tags. Look for the ones with the tag “presentation”. On those videos of coaching sessions we work precisely on that. I’m sure you’ll find them very useful. All the PWS that I have coached and asked me for help regarding presentations, always do pretty well when they follow our advice.

Very inspiring Doug! If there are +100 Success Stories so far, which means that at as far as we know, there are more than 100 people who have stopped stuttering (we don’t know how many have achieved this goal without receiving coaching), there is no reason to think that you can’t do it!!

I agree with you, we’ve been stuttering for so many years, and changing such a habit is surely not easy, but it can be achieved. More than 100 people have done it and posted their Success Story. If they have done it, so can you. It requires patience and determination, that’s all!

the idea is that every week you have to experience improvements in your speech. If this is the case, you’ll end up achieving your goal. In my case, it took me 8 months more or less. But I have coached people who did this in a bit more than one month.
The way I see it, as long as you are improving every week, you’re on the right path. Continue working on your speech, practicing and using the Crutches, doing mind training treatments every day and being a Speech Cop.
One last thing… Have you considered joining us at the SpeechMasters Club meetings. You will have the chance to meet us, other PWS/PWSS, and we all learn about improving our speech. I strongly recommend it to everybody who shares this goal.

Hi Mark!
I’m glad you asked this. Many people fear specific letters, but that is just fear. We can link words beginning with any letter. If some letters are harder for you, it is because you are hesitating, so you are “interrupting” the word linkage. Word linkage works if we don’t leave any spaces between syllables and words, because there won’t be any space for stutters. This will only work if we focus 100% on linking our words and not hesitating while speaking.

So, my advice is:

1) If the feared word is at the beginning of a sentence, or after a full stop/pause, begin with any of the Crutches 1-8.

2) If the feared word is in the middle of the sentence, using word linkage is a good option (Crutch 10), but any of Crutches 7-12 should do the job.

3) Even if this feared word is at the middle of the sentence, you can insert a pause (2 seconds) before that word, and then say the feared word holding the tone. This Crutch works great and it is helping a lot of PWS. I strongly recommend you to go to the videos of the coaching sessions and simply search for “holding the tone”. You’ll find plenty of videos explaining and showing how to do it.

I hope this has been helpful.

Hi Charley,
thanks for your comments. I must say that I’ve heard you speak on the last 2 SMC meetings, and I must say that you spoke pretty good. Honestly, if I hadn’t known about your speech problems, I would have never guessed that, so congratulations! Keep on working on your speech and you’ll see that week after week, these fears will get weaker and weaker, and less and less frequent. After a while, you will realise that you might get one of those stutter threats once a month, or 2 months, or a year. And when they show up, they will be so weak, so insignificant, that it will be extremely easy for you to crush them.