How I Largely Overcame a Stutter and became a College Professor.

How I Largely Overcame a Stutter and became a College Professor. Hi Fellow Stutters: I’ve overcome my stuttering enough to spend a year studying in a non-English speaking country, and have been a college professor for the last 25 years, so here are the steps I took to overcome my disability. **Speech Therapy:** when I was in middle school I spent a year in speech therapy where they taught me “gliding” which is the process of slowly gliding on the beginnings of words that cause you to stutter. The famous scientist Carl Sagan is a perfect example of this, and you can here him doing this by saying things like, “The cosmos is literally bbbbbb-illions of years old, and can take mmmmm-ilenia for major changes to occur.” Once you know which consonants cause stuttering, you will know to glide on them. I’d say that this helped cut down on my stutter by about 30-40%, and it’s something I still do today on the rare occasions I am having a stressful experience in public and my stutter comes back. **Learning to not care what others think of me**: While my gliding helped, I felt incredibly awkward in middle school and high school, and I can say my opinion of myself kept dropping and dropping. But here is where it all changed. I reached a point one day where I hit rock bottom in terms of how I felt about myself and had the following revelation. I began to think: “well, if everyone thinks I’m a moron, so what? At least it can’t get any worse than this! Fine, I can’t speak for shit. I don’t care anymore what people think of me!” And I didn’t anymore, for the most part. The funny thing though, is that once I stopped worrying about what other people thought of me, I was able to forgive myself, and then love myself, and that made almost all my teenage stress go away, and I began to feel much more confidant. And my speech impediment instantly went away by about 90%, and today I’d say it’s about 95% gone. It just comes back when I get drunk, or try to speak a foreign language, or when put in an incredibly stressful situation because the techniques I’ve developed to control it don’t work when my brain is being over stressed or I’m drunk or high. Now when the stutter occasionally comes back I just slow down, do a little gliding, and I make it through. But I’ve also found herbs and medicines that prevent stress which allow me to speak super fluently. **Beta Blockers and Valerian Root**: Although I’ve been a teacher who publicly speaks for a long time, job interviews are a stressful thing since you will be judged by what you say, so probably no stutterer looks forward to these. I found a fair proof chemical solution. After learning that actors with stage fright take beta blockers because it forces their heart rate and adrenaline to stay low, when ever I have an important interview or major public speaking event I’ll take a half a beta blocker about an hour before the event. And if it’s a super stressful thing like an interview for a life changing job, I’ll mix the ½ beta blocker with a half a pill of valium. Taken together, they completely chill me out and it actually makes public speaking and being grilled enjoyable (if you like attention). And if you can’t get valium or lorazepam, you can take a dose of valerian root pills, which are an herbal, weaker replacement for valium. But maybe experiment first since if you are super sensitive to drugs this might make you loopy. I’d compare the effects to having 1 glass of wine over ½ an hour. So for those of you who are young and dealing with this, don’t worry, it gets better once you work out techniques to manage it. In fact, I’d say as someone who took university classes in a foreign language, and now do public speaking on a weekly basis for a living, I’d say I’m living proof that this is manageable. However, I only had a medium stutter, so if you have an extreme stutter you may need to do extra and more extensive speech therapy than I did. All I can promise is if you do nothing to help yourself the odds are very high it won’t go away. Good luck on your path to normal speech fluency.