I have to say that I hated having a stutter. Hate is a very strong word but in a way it does not come close to the way in which this speech impediment affected my life. I could talk to my partner without too many problems however could hardly speak a word when chatting to her family.

I could not understand why I could talk to one person but not to another and why I could speak when I was drunk but not when I was sober. I did attended various forms of stammering treatments but to no avail.

I read many books about speech imediments, achieving fluency and about how to stop stammering, about a potential stammering cure and spoke to many speech therapists. From what I read and from what I was told, I was made to believe that I was unable to live a stuttering-free life as it suggested you are unable to eradicate a stutter. This was not really the form of stammering advice that I was looking for; I wanted specialised therapy etc.

I was not exactly impressed with the negativity - I am a person who believes in the power of positive thinking.

I then was fortunate enough to watch Bruce Willis being interviewed on the television. He stated that he had had a stutter which had started when he was a young boy, however he had managed to achieve fluency when he was a late teenager. I felt inspired and then decided that the time had come when I needed to try to also achieve total fluency.

I was eventually able to eradicate the stutter. It was far from easy and I was assisted in a big way by a 70 minute self-help stuttering therapy DVD that I bought from The How To Stop Stuttering Centre. I now have a much more fulfilling life and I also have a successful career selling front doors.  

Stuttering can be overcome with hard work and a lot of desire; if I can do it then so could you.

Growing up I had many things to be negative about, I had a stutter, I have a bald patch, I was overweight and am also quite short for a male at five foot four. I was one of the ones who walked around in a depressed state and I used to feel sorry for myself. Even when I write about it now, I laugh about how stupid I used to be.

As I entered into my twenties I was in real need to change the way in which I was living my life. I was quite fortunate in that I had a friend at the company (a front doors supplier), I worked for, who was to prove an inspiration to me. His name was Stuart, and even though this may seem cruel, Stuart did not have a lot going for him. I won’t go into details but lets just say even with the problems I felt I had, I was not jealous of him. I became quite good friends with Stuart and we would regularly have lunch together.

We would meet at around one o’clock and I would be stood there, no doubt looking gloomy, waiting for him to arrive. Arrive he certianly did, always with a beaming smile on his face. I could never quite work out how or why he had this attitude as for me was someone that had very little going for him. Whilst eating our food we would discuss various topics and I soon noticed about just how positive he was about everything. When he talked, he talked with passion, about his work and interests. One day it dawned on me, if Stuart (who from what I know of him, seemingly has nothing going for him) can always be positive, happy and smiling, why can’t I?

This was the beginning of my new outlook on life. An era of being positive, appreciating what I have got and more than anything else, plenty of smiles. I now am happy with my weight, height, bald patch and am proud to say I have now overcome my stuttering speech impediment. I also have a new career which is to do with offering people cheap hotel deals.

I hope this article proves to be of inspiration to at least some of its readers.

I have had many issues with my own weight and have tried many different weight loss programs and diets.

About two years ago I attempted to attain my ideal weight once again however this time I was eager to make sure that the result was a very positive one.

I wrote down all of the reasons I was trying to lose the excess fat. On my list I wrote about how I wanted to look and feel stronger and fitter. This I believed would help my self-confidence and self-esteem which were always fairly low which may have been one of the reasons why I had a stuttering problem. I had had enough of feeling ashamed of my weight and fat belly. I wanted to walk down the street feeling proud and assured plus I also wanted to stop stuttering of course.

I used to also eat when I was stressed and I sure had a lot of worry via work which was in the fostering services UK and DVD duplication industries.

I wanted to lose weight to avoid all the health problems that being obese can cause, as people become older. I am not sure about you but I rarely see a fat person who is in their seventies or eighties. I am hoping to live until a ripe old age and enjoy my retirement.

Next on my list was about the clothes I wear. Basically I am not able to buy the clothes I really want to as they do not really suit a person of my build. There are times when I notice a person walking down the road and I think that they look impressive and that their clothes are nice; I then however realise that they are a lot thinner than me. The clothes may look impressive on them but would not look the same if I wore them.

I also wanted to lose weight in order for me to look more attractive to members of the opposite sex.

The last reason on my list was about my general level of fitness. I love playing football and was a regular in the school football team. I wrote about how I would love to regain my fitness so that I could participate in this and other sports.

This list was something that I would carry on my person throughout the day as it would act as a reminder of why I was trying to lose my excess weight - a form of motivation one might say. I am not saying it was an easy road, however I eventually managed to obtain a weight that I was happy with. I now have a lot more confidence in many areas of my life including work where I now offer Voucher Codes.

I hope this article proves to be an inspiration to many people; young and old.

OK, so despite your best efforts, via attending speech therapy, you have not been able to achieve fluency. So what are your options now? Where should or could you go to continue your efforts to stop stammering?

Well before I start to write about some potential answers to the above questions I should really introduce myself. My name is Stephen Hill and I am a speech coach from the UK who specialises in helping people who have a stutter or stammer to attain fluency. I am not a speech and language therapist and I do not want to be one. I offer an alternative therapy for stuttering and one that works.

I developed a speech impediment, a stutter, when I was a young boy. I attended, via the local hospital, speech therapy. It was of use, possibly even of benefit, however it never really offered me the solutions to stammering/stuttering that I was looking for.

The majority of the speech and language therapists were nice enough people and certainly tried their best to help me; it was just that the training that they had been provided with was less than adequate.

There was one especially frustrating moment when I was speaking with a not so nice speech therapist. He told me that there was not a cure for stammering/stuttering. I replied:

“Fair enough. So what are you or the profession of speech and language therapy doing to find a cure?”

Speech therapist:

“Ermm, well nothing”

Me

“OK, that’s all very positive! NOT!”

For me the above example summed up my experience of speech therapy; I can only hope that the service has improved since my day!

I was eventually able to realise my dream of overcoming my stutter when I was aged 22 and as a career I now help other people to achieve fluency.

As stated earlier I offer the alternative therapy for stammering and stuttering.

I have a website at http://www.stutter-cure.com which has information about the types of therapy that I offer.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Steve Hill, The How To Stop Stuttering Centre

 

I once had a neighbour who was about sixty-five. I could not believe the way she lived life - she would rarely smile or say anything positive. She is called Nancy.

When I first moved to this particular area, I tried to make friends with the people who lived close to me, this was fairly easy as I sold front doors as well as offering a DVD authoring service for a living which was a kind of excuse for talking to them. When I first met Nancy she kept saying how ill she felt and about how her back was playing her up. I went away from this meeting feeling quite sorry for Nancy.

Around two weeks later I bumped into Nancy again. I enquired as to how she was doing on this bright and sunny day. I wish I had not bothered as I then had to listen to all of her problems. She did not have one happy thing to say. Over the next few years of living by Nancy, I actually went out of my way to avoid her.

I have to admit that I also used to feel sorry for myself. I had a stutter or what some people call a stammer which I had developed when I was a young child. I often used to wonder as to why I was given this problem. It did not seem fair to me as I believed I was a really nice person.

I lived with the stuttering problem until the age of twenty-two and then began to have a change of attitude. Instead of looking at people who I thought were more fortunate than myself, I started to read and hear about people who were far less fortunate.

When people ask me how I am, I always give a positive answer even if I feel terrible. I try and walk around with a smile on my face and am now living life to the full. I have also managed to overcome that horrible speech impediment and to therefore learn the ways to eradicate stuttering.

People like Nancy could do with having the same change in attitude and they may find they have more visitors to their house and that some of their ailments disappear.

Are you looking into the different ways that can help you to lose weight? Have you tried a number of different diets in the past but still find yourself being overweight? Are you fed up with being fat? Are you a person that dreams as to what it would be like to be leaner, fitter and healthier? If you have answered yes to any of these questions then this article could well prove to be of benefit to you.

I am somebody who until a few years ago would have answered yes to all of the above questions. I had tried many forms of diet, I would buy clothes that suited my size rather than the clothes I actually wanted to wear. I was without doubt fed up with being fat and was desperate to find a way of losing weight which would last.

I am by no means involved with weight loss in my career; I do in fact work with the cost reduction specialists, stuttering and foster care services UK sectors.

In my opinion the answer to all of weight problems was quite simple. I do not need any fancy diet, what I needed to do was to think in a logical way. I first of all had to ask myself a number of questions:

Question. Why are you overweight?

Answer: I eat far too much food and drink far too much alcohol. The food that I do eat is basically fat food such as crisps, chocolate, takeaways and microwave food. I also do very little exercise, therefore I do not give my body a chance to burn off some of this fat. I tend to rarely walk anywhere, I prefer to drive.

Question. Why have you been unsuccessful with your past dieting attempts?

Answer: I did not really follow the program. I may have done for the short term but certainly did not over the longer term. I also gave into temptations by eating food types which I was not really supposed to.

Question. How much do you want to lose this excess weight?

Answer. A huge amount.

Question. So why do you not follow the dieting programs to the letter?

Answer. I am weak, I suppose.

As you can see, the answers to my weight issues are in the answers to these questions. Quite simply I need to:

Be more disciplined

Be more determined

Be stronger

Walk and exercise a lot more

Eat far healthier foods

Cut down my intake of alcohol

Stick to the above for the long term

A couple of years ago I started to implement my new logical form of diet and I am happy to report that I am now at a size that I am happy with.

Are you looking for techniques that can help you to eradicate your stutter? Has speech and language therapy or pathology been unable to help you to the levels that you require? Is second best no longer acceptable? The above three questions are ones that I would regularly answer in the positive during the eighteen years when I had a stutter. I was constantly looking for that miracle “stuttering cure”.

Now I am fully aware to call it a stuttering cure is not exactly what some people would call the “correct English” but I basically was looking for a way or a set of techniques that could enable me to “stop stuttering”. At there time there were not that many stuttering therapies out there, or at least not ones that were worthy of the name.

I always find it strange when I read about the so called National Associations for Stuttering or Stammering. For some reason they seem to always advise people to attend local speech and language therapy. Well that is a great referral! What is the point of asking people to attend speech therapy, something that has been unable to help them in the past? Speech therapy does not work for people who stutter, well not to the levels that they desire - again to stop stuttering completely and let’s face it anything else is to accept second best.

I searched high and low in my quest to find the solutions to stuttering. I read many a book, asked many a question and studied many of the “best talkers”.

I put in a massive amount of effort, hard work and dedication as that is what is required. The majority of people are fully aware and accept that there is not one magical pill that can cure a stutter. What is required is a desire to succeed and a willingness to work hard to ensure that the techniques become second nature.

There is now a seventy-minute film which has been produced by a DVD replication company in association with The How To Stop Stuttering Centre which has full explanations of the techniques required to achieve fluency. 

Are you one of the many people who suffer with the speech impediment known as stuttering or stammering? Does your stutter/stammer cause you to become very frustrated at times? Have you attended speech therapy in the past in the hope that it would help improve your speech? I am a person who has overcome a stutter and I now help other people to achieve fluency. In this article, I write about the frustrations and emotions that people who stutter have to deal with.

When I had a stutter, it created many different forms of emotions within me. The stammer was not exactly something that I was proud of; this is why I was less than eager to discuss it with other people. My family, especially my parents, even to this day are unaware of most of the difficulties that stuttering caused me, during my time at school and in my late teens. I rarely confided in my parents as to how bad things were for me. I was not the type of person that liked to talk about their problems; especially when it came to the stutter. I would instead just go to my bedroom and attempt to forget it.

I also felt rather sorry for myself. I feel that I am a good human being; I am kind, I am honest, I am loyal, I am friendly and I am caring - I could therefore not understand why I had to have this most frustrating of speech impediments. There were many people in my class who in my opinion deserved to have the stutter much more than I did, however in truth I would not wish a stutter on anybody.

I was a person who felt like a second class citizen due to the fact that I had this speech impediment. I was not able to socialise with the ease as what everybody else seemed to, and had many traumatic experiences in the classroom when attempting to read out of a book for example.

Even though I had a stuttering problem, I could at times talk quite well. I could not understand why I was able to talk to person A but not person B. This caused me many frustrations.

When I was about sixteen, I started to drink alcohol. This had a major impact on my speech as I could talk perfectly well when I was drunk. This proved to me that there must be a chance of me being able to overcome the stutter.

Speech therapists and negative national associations, have for years attempted to convince me to accept my stutter and have told me that there is no cure for stuttering. How can this be right, if I was constantly drunk, I would be fluent, there is a cure in itself. Of course it is not right or healthy to be constantly drunk but I am sure you know what I mean.

I found certain tasks very hard to accomplish when I had the stutter. Making and answering telephone calls was especially hard for me. I look back now and can not believe that I coped with working in an office environment for six years, at a time when I had the stutter. I remember traveling to work feeling sick in my stomach through the stress and fear.

Ordering drinks and food at the bar, introducing people to each other, attending meetings and job interviews were other aspects of my life which were made all that more harder by my inability to talk fluently.

My advice to people who have a stuttering problem is to not give up, believe in yourself and your own ability to one day achieve fluency. Do not listen to negative people who try to convince you that there is no cure for stuttering. Most of the people who say this to you will have never had a stutter and will have no idea how our brains work.