Comparing stuttering to basketball or karate

Comparing stuttering to basketball or karate Let's compare basketball, karate and stuttering. When we miss in basketball or karate it doesn't feel like a failure. It doesn't feel like I'm a failure. It's fun. It's a game. When we miss in speaking - how does that feel? That's a big question. So, when we focus on maintaining the forward flow of speech - do we do it from the place of fear and better escaping the failure or from the place of curiosity, courage and from the place of enjoying the game and having fun with it? **Share your thoughts in the comments.** I think that making mistakes in basketball and karate is not scary like speech is. I think because, unlike sports, EVERYBODY is an expert at speaking. I think that little fact is wildly under appreciated. Speech is easily the most complex subtle intricate motor skill available to human beings. It's far more difficult than basketball or karate, even at the professional level. Yet everybody is a master of it. Even people that don't speak well. And so I think because we're all so good at it. I think we fail to appreciate it for what it is. We think it's automatic and easy and treat it like something we're born with. It's not. But we act like it is. So when we "***mess up***" in speech, it's like "***why can't you talk right?***"... I think that's where the feeling of failure comes from. We expect to miss shots in basketball and not run routines quite right in karate. We accept that we're learning, and that is difficult. We don't expect that in speech beyond early childhood. Beyond early childhood we tend to experience more: * pressure to speak fluently or to make less speech errors * feeling like a failure * feeling anxiety * anticipation of negative impact on performance * unhelpful self-efficacy beliefs * experiencing some form of perfectionism especially viewing our speech skill as a problem and to be avoided * unhelpful (fixed) mindset, beliefs, attitudes, goals, and definitions We could then adopt an attitude to reinforce neurological pathways towards behavioral inhibition