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Finally some progress! I've stuttered for as long as I can remember, at least as far back as 3rd grade. As an example, since I was a kid I wouldn't order what food I wanted in restaurants, but instead ordered what as easiest to say. In the past I had been practicing avoidance tactics, mainly word substitution and pausing. I'd read through Fraser's [*self-therapy for the stutterer*](http://www.stutteringhelp.org/portals/english/book_0012_tenth_ed.pdf) and a couple things really hit home for me, mainly the physical characteristics I exhibit and the fact that I never stutter when I'm talking to myself. I've been working on keeping eye contact through the stutter (which is damn near impossible for me). I also had kind of a "ah-hah" moment. I noticed that in the past that I would try to, in an almost physical sense, "power through" my blocks. This would always inevitably fail. It finally started clicking for me when I made the subtle, but important, distinction between "physically" trying to power through blocks, and "mentally" getting through them. The best way I can describe it is the "[there is no spoon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXtO5dMqEI)" scene in the matrix. Anyway, through practicing eye contact and focusing on self confidence to mentally "get over" blocks I was able go through a 1x1 performance review at work with hardly any stuttering at all! (The review went very well btw). After all this time it feels good to finally make some progress.