Daily Speech Exercises

Daily Speech Exercises Daily speech training for Stammering/Stuttering. If you are a person, like me, challenged with this speech impediment, you will realise that this is a daily struggle that we have to deal with. In most cases, it does not suddenly turn itself off for a day or two, where you experiences hours and days of 100% fluency and forget you ever had this issue. Like any other form of training, in other aspects of your life, you need to constantly and regularly, train your ‘normal’ speech neurophysiological speech pathways. By doing this, we train our brains to speak like a fluent speaker, and if done long enough, we will develop enough of these pathways to make us more likely to speak with the ease of a normal speaker. Speaking is actually a very easy thing to do! Not many stammerers would believe this statement, most commonly it is the most difficult thing that most of stammerers had to contend with in their lives. As we all know, we experience times of 100% fluency, such as when reading aloud alone or with another person, or speaking to a pet. Our brain actually ‘forgets’ that we stutter and we become a fluent speaker. This very fact confirms to me that there is nothing Neurologically, Physiologically or Pathologically wrong in the brain tissue, or articulators, of the person who stutters, in terms of their abilities to produce normal sounding speech. But when we have to say our names, speak in front of a crowd, on the telephone, we revert back to our anxious, fearful, stuttering selves. Something is inherently wrong in the way in which our brains deal with performance, fear and anxiety. It, effectively, turns off our normal speech Neural pathway and turns back on the dreaded stuttering pathway that we all know too well. By doing daily exercises, we strengthen our brain’s, normal speech neurological pathway, and weakens the brain’s stuttering pathway. This will take a lot time, dedication and practice, but it will be worth it in the end. Using these exercises, along with other aspects of your life to minimise stammering, will help you along your way to freedom from this affliction and to achieve more fluency in your life, with less pressured, forceful speech. The daily morning exercises consist of: 1. Rehydrate yourself- drink a lot of water till your brain feels alert, open a window and breathe in the morning air to wake your brain up from slumber. 2. Thiamine and Magnesium supplements have been shown to help stuttering. 3. Reading aloud, first thing in the in the morning- you can read anything you like! It could be news articles, a novel, magazines, whatever you are interest in. 4. Spend at least 15 minutes doing this, but you can go for as long as you want, depending on your daily commitments, ideally before entering in any speaking situation for that day. 5. Speak at about 2/3 of your normal speech rate initially, slowly increasing to your ‘normal’ rate and even speaking faster, but only if you have been speaking with fluency at the previous 2 speeds. 6. Try to imagine yourself as a news caster or news reader on a radio station, or as anyone you know who has highly fluent and articulate speech. 7. If you find yourself stammering, or can feel a stammer coming on at any time, on a feared word, for example, slow that word down even further and really stretch out any aspect of the word. Cooo-roooona-viiiiiruuusss etc. 8. Put a bit of music into your voice, try to make yourself sound captivating, as if you are telling an exciting story and want to keep an audience engaged, by accentuating various parts of the sentence as you see fit. 9. With a good solid 15 minutes done, or whatever amount of time you have done, and you feel you are in a fluent speaking mood, at the very end, speak slightly faster than you were before, for about 1 minute. This will provide you with a lot of confidence when leaving your front door when you face your speaking scenarios for the days. Only do this if you can do it fluently. Remember, these exercises are all about strengthening that normal speech neurophysiological pathway! 10. Challenging yourself from here, in real speaking scenarios- naturally at work, going to a shop, making a phone call to a café etc etc. I would recommend speaking using the 2/3 rate initially until confidence develops, and after which, you may increase to your normal speech rate. 11. Fake it till you make it! You might not feel like a confident person or a fluent speaker, but we need to convince ourselves we are. You may use positive affirmations, while at home or in you car, for example. ‘I am looking forward to the speaking challenges that in store for me today’ ‘ I am really excited about….’ ‘I can’t wait to….’ 12. Repeat the above steps every day. 13. If you feel that your speech is becoming more dysfluent throughout the day, find a quiet space and read along in a quiet space for 10 minutes again and use 2/3 speed speech. Avoid pushing though any speech roadblocks as this may be counterproductive. True confidence stems from past experiences of positive performance. If we have stuttered in this situation before, we will not experience true confidence, however if we regularly speak fluently in a certain scenario, we have proven to ourselves that we can do this and will experience true confidence. The key to this is to develop as many positive speaking experiences as you can. These experiences will stack onto each other, each one building a solid speaking and confidence foundation. This stems from starting your day utilising the above exercises, and reverting, when necessary, to any top up speech exercises throughout the day. Obviously, there are a lot more aspects to the issue of stammering as a whole, but I feel the above exercises are a practical way in which we can strengthen our speech muscles on a daily basis and hopefully gain the desired speech freedom that we are so hungry to attain. Conquering stammering is a very difficult thing to do, something that many fluent speakers would not understand. But remember, difficult roads lead to the most beautiful of destinations! Good luck everyone, hope this can be of benefit to you.