Just finished a class presentation. Stuttered here and there, maybe 85 to 90 percent fluency, feels pretty good. I am 37 years old.
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Just finished a class presentation. Stuttered here and there, maybe 85 to 90 percent fluency, feels pretty good. I am 37 years old. After getting laid off, i returned to school to get into a post-grad program so i could get into another field and find more passionate work. it's a user experience class that is very presentation-heavy, with power point, group work, the whole 9. Being out of school for so long, I was deathly afraid of doing presentations having thought i was done with them for the rest of my life. But I wasn't. I had to face that fear again. My stutter is blocks, if I see a word coming up that i know i cannot say, i will switch to another on the fly. As a result, I have become a walking thesaurus over time. I also have a weird captain kirk staccato kind of speech rhythm because of it. I just can't deal with blocking in front of many people, let alone 45. So I pause, switch. Anyway, i think i did pretty well on today's presentation. Practice really makes a difference. Talking out loud in the car on the way to school. Singing. taking gingko, brahmi, a really light workout to get the blood pumping, a good night's sleep, no caffeine. It's all part of my presentation ritual. I have to do anything that gives me that extra bit of mental peace as I believe my stutter directly correlates with my levels of stress/anxiety. Anway, I'm 37 and I'm still scared of my stutter but it's not so bad these days and even if I fuck up, I'm too old to really dwell on the embarrassment and I just have bigger, more important things to worry about than thinking about the same damn thing for the last 27 years. Just practice in front of your parents, your friends. Join toastmasters. You gotta face it, fuck up a little, keep trying and you will get to your optimal level of fluency. Sure, you will waver a bit but you'll be happy knowing that you're always trying and the more times you fuck up, the better you will feel next time, and the time after that, and etc etc.