As far as bullies, the best mental exercise I can give to anyone is that anyone who is acting overly-confident and is acting like an a-hole to you is that it’s important to remember, they are just hiding the fact that they suck at something. And I mean SUCK. They suck eggs. Big moldy green rotten eggs. And they behave like that as a cover up. I’ve developed this knack for giving someone an unnervingly dead ass stare and once I can see their body language get uncomfortable, that’s when I give them a nice f-you grin. I’ve also found that stuttering is also a nice little tool to weed out the wrong people and facilitates the invitation of the right people. The right people will actually see it as something to admire you for. Those are the REAL ones. They get it. This life is a journey and truth be told, I think I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve grown out of mine, I’d say 50%. The rest has been practiced focused breathing while speaking and that has lent itself to conditioned habits now. It took some time. Slowly and fluidly eeeeeasing my breaths into those hard consonants we all effen hate and those words that we all know we’ll have trouble on. Our brains work fast. We all know we are calculating sentences before we speak to avoid or change what we are about to say. I learned that easing my breaths into those words helped immensely. It just took practice. Also, for me, I learned a certain level of “keeping calm” and being “stoic” while speaking helped. That’s just me. I used to be the kid that never talked and kept to himself because I was always afraid. For more reasons than I’d like to get into. The bottom line is: No one in this world is more important or valuable than the other and we all have to treat ourselves with a bit of grace and patience. Our speech isn’t a flaw. It’s what sets us apart. It makes us unique. People like “underdogs” who kick ass and make good things happen out of bad situations. They see us as leaders. We know what it feels like to be the outsiders. But we have to admit to ourselves, we make ourselves feel like that. In reality, the world keeps moving. It won’t wait on us. Find your niche for fluency. That’s my advice to anyone. Man or woman. No difference, we’re in the journey together. Thanks for reading if ya made it this far. I’m 50. I’m Gen X. And effem if they can’t LOVE you for who you are and how you’ve struggled to get where you are.