Everyone can benefit from working with a coach says John Hannon, especially people who stammer.

John Hannon

One of the most highly-regarded professions in the world today is that of the sports coach. As someone who has stammered from time to time since childhood I am very interested in how coaching can help people who stammer. Those of us who read the back pages of newspapers often learn that a leading golfer or tennis player is changing their personal coach. Sportsmen and women at the very top of their game, skilled and dedicated to a degree that most of us only dream of, know that it is crucial to have a coach to help them become even better. The success of England's World Cup winning rugby side squad has been largely ascribed to the coaching skills of Sir Clive Woodward and his team.

Although it's clear that skilled coaching improves performance, it's not so much about the athletes involved learning new skills because they are usually long past that stage. So what is going on? What is coaching?

These questions have been of great interest to me for several years as I have been developing my ability as a professional coach, not in sport but in business and life. I have seen many times how people benefit from working with a coach, whether they are trying to change the direction of their life, or advance their career. As with elite sports people, the coach's role is not so much to teach skills but to work with the client so that he or she performs at their highest level of personal effectiveness, as they see it.

My interest in coaching has led to an innovative two-day workshop that I am running at the City Lit in early 2005; Life Coaching for People Who Stammer. This workshop is designed to be an opportunity for people who stammer to experience the benefits of life coaching within a group setting. The workshop is based on certain fundamental principles that all coaches would endorse. The first and most important of these is that the client is resourceful. All of us who stammer can speak fluently on occasion; we do know how to speak. The role of the coach in this case is to assist the client to tap into their own ability to speak more fluently. There are many ways in which this can be done. One is to become more aware of how we 'talk to ourselves' about our speech. Most people who stammer often feel embarrassed or ashamed when their speech is not as good as they would like it to be. We expend huge amounts of energy worrying about how poor our speech is.

Coaching can help a person look more to the future and how they want to speak, rather than to the past. There is something incredibly powerful about having specific, realistic goals, and an action plan to achieve them.

The workshop will help people define their own unique goals that are personally relevant to them. There is a significant difference between coaching and therapy. I am neither a speech therapist nor a psychotherapist. As a coach, my role is to work with my clients in a partnership in which the client sets the agenda and we work together to explore their current situation and their chosen future. I foster an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect in which they feel safe, can speak freely and honestly, and will allow themselves to feel vulnerable. In such an atmosphere of mutual support there can be questioning, challenge, feedback and encouragement.

While we all know that it is naïve to think of a cure for stammering, we have also learned that the way we feel about ourselves and our speech has a dramatic effect on our fluency. I am confident that this workshop will be useful for all the participants to move closer towards being the speaker they want to be.

For further information about the City Lit go to www.citylit.ac.uk/stammeringtherapy or our City Lit web page.
John Hannon is a professional coach, trainer and consultant. He is currently studying for a Masters in Coaching at Middlesex University and he is a member of the BSA and the International Coaching Federation. For further information go to www.newprojections.com

From the Winter 2004 edition of Speaking Out

Related articles:
Life coach or speech coach? - Winter 2006
You are what you think - by John Hannon, Autumn 2005
Coming clean about stammering by John Hannon, Spring 2004