Let me introduce myself. I am 26, male, a University student, and I have stammered since the age of three. Recently I have made a big breakthrough with my speech and I would like to relate my story to you.

In my experience you can be as determined as you like to speak fluently, and still fail to get there. Many times I have said to myself "Right. This is it. I am going to do everything I can to get my speech how I want it." I would have some success at first, but eventually I would fail. Even if I did get there, I did not stay there for very long. It is like the goal-setting gurus say - you are at your most vulnerable when you have just achieved your goal. If you do not keep yourself moving, you fall back.

In the past I had had the 'diet' problem - to work for a few months on my speech with some technique or other, get fluent-ish, stop practising, and end up stammering again a few months later. I suppose that my solution was a bit like the 'proper' way to lose weight: I changed my lifestyle a bit. I decided to spend half an hour reading aloud from a book each night to work on the various speech techniques that I had previously been taught. I had some good books to read and I did not mind the practice. Sometimes I would see an improvement in my speech, sometimes not, but I tried not to think about it too much. I just kept reading up. The secret was not to expect things to get better.

It is important not to be put off if you initially fail. This story might help to illustrate my point. It is an excerpt from Anthony Robbin's book Awaken the Giant Within: "How does a stonecutter break open a giant boulder? He starts out with a big hammer and whacks the boulder as hard as he can. The first time he hits it, there is not a scratch, not a chip - nothing. He pulls back the hammer and hits it again and again - 100, 200, 300 times without even a scratch. After all this effort, the boulder may not show even the slightest crack, but he keeps on hitting it [...] over and over again, and at some point - maybe on the 500th or 700th hit, maybe on the 10,040th hit - the stone does not just chip but literally splits in half. Was it this one single hit that broke the stone open? Of course not. It was the constant and continual pressure being applied to the challenge at hand."

It has taken me a long time to get where I am. Next Page is a brief account of what I have done.

Beforehand:
I had tried talking in time to a metronome, speaking in an irate way, prolonged speech, a week-long course using prolonged speech which left me a fluent for about two months, and block modification.

Step 1,1990:
I started reading aloud to myself, using prolonged speech, usually for about half an hour each day. I kept this up, on and off, as much as I could.

Step 2, 1994:
I discovered a book at my local library which described a technique using a flow of air before words. I liked the technique and tried to put it into effect, with a bit of success at first. I changed my daily reading to use the technique as best I could, but it did not quite work for me.

Step 3, December 1995:
I approached my speech therapist, with the book in my hand and asked if we could work on the technique. The first thing we did was to evaluate my stammer, which consisted of long blocks and prolongations, sometimes exhausting one or more entire breaths on a sound or word. I was managing only 30 words per minute and there were lots of signs of tension in my speech and body language.

Step 4, January 1996:
We started work on my reading which, after five years of practice, was almost perfectly fluent. However, I still had a problem with running out of breath, feeling light-headed and dizzy. My therapist noticed that my reading was breathy and pointed this out to me. We worked on trying to eliminate this. A microphone and headphones were useful to pick up the breath sound.

Step 5, May 1996:
My therapist noted a glottal stop in my speech, which I was using in the middle of some words. It is a coming-together of the vocal cords, stopping the flow of air. I had not been aware of these. We tried to eliminate them by keeping the airflow going, even if it was just a silent breath.

Step 6, May 1996:
On watching a video by Sheehan I picked up a point about always trying to move forward when speaking, and I taught myself to stop backtracking over words and letters once I had said them.

When all of these methods were put together there was a dramatic improvement, not only in the number of words I was getting through (55 per minute in the latest evaluation) but also in the relaxed, calm way that I was saying them.

There are a few themes that I can draw on from my experience. It is important not to let the stammer rule your life. I tried not to stay out of situations because of my stammer. In fact, I now seek out speaking situations and use them as opportunities to practise the technique. It is important to avoid using tricks to get around stammering. It is important to take control of the treatment yourself, and constantly to seek out new ways to improve. Most of all it is important to try, keep trying, and not to stop.

From the Spring 1997 issue of 'Speaking Out'