2 very common ways to "work on your speech" that never helped me.

2 very common ways to "work on your speech" that never helped me. Having been a severe on and off stutterer, you better believe I tried everything in the book to gain fluency. I'm going to breakdown 3 extremely common mainstream ways speech therapy or youtube/Google recommends to work on your speech that has never helped me (and 95% of the people I've seen overcome their stutter). 1. Reading outloud 🚫 Reading outloud is probably the most common remedy you will hear from mainstream sources to work on your speech. The recommendation comes with good intentions but is severely flawed. Practicing reading outloud in a room by yourself does not replicate the stresses and anxieties of a real life interaction. Reading outloud for fluency is saying that we have a speech problem. But we don't and we know it. We can already speak fine. So many people will try to re-teach you how to speak. When in reality if you feel safe and natural, you speak completely fine. Making progress in stuttering isn't about getting better at saying words fluently, it's about learning to feel safe and a sense of belonging in every interaction/environment. That's where you best version of yourself shines. 2. Judging progress in your stutter journey based off of how fluent you were. 🚫 This keeps people stuck and it bugs me. There's so many reasons why this doesn't work: ➖ the more you try to be fluent, the more you will stutter ➖ the more value you give fluency when in a low self esteemed state, the more discrepancy you feel to you achieving that. ➖ you are engraining a mindset that alone allows you to feel good when you are comfortable. But the biggest truth of all.. YOU MUST STUTTER TO OVERCOME YOUR STUTTER. In order to overcome your stutter you must be willing and able to put yourself in uncomfortable situations and desensitize yourself to the fear of being judged. And what happens when you leave your comfort zone? You will usually stutter more. And if you are saying "I stuttered more than usual, so I didnt grow", you are absolutely sabotaging yourself. We must be able to stutter and feel good about it simply because we took the action. Once we can feel good about ourselves after pushing ourselves and stuttering.. the path becomes wide open. I have never met someone who has overcome their stutter that didn't leave their comfort zone on a daily basis. These are the 2 main narratives I hear in the mainstream that has never worked for me (believe me I've tried) or people I know who have overcome their stutter as well. I just wanted to quickly share these 2 things that were on my mind, I hope they were helpful. I love answering questions so drop em in for you any 👊 (Btw, this is my personal experience. Don't let it diminish any wins you may have took from these experiences)