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.

I have never been able to have a life which was free from anxiety and worry. I worry about almost every aspect of life and living this way has caused me a lot of problems including various bouts of ill health from time to time. I needed to find a way of coping with and reducing the amount of stress in my life and in this article I write about how I have managed to achieve this.

So what do I stress about? Well I suppose it is anything and everything. Women and my relationships with them; my financial position – having a lack of money and worrying about how I am going to be able to pay the bills etc. I also have anxiety over my career and my personal friendships. For whatever reason I also used to worry about what other people thought of me.

I am the kind of person who is classed as a thinker. I will be the first to admit that I over-think at times; some people would go as far as to call me a stress-head – others, no doubt, see me as some sort of freak. This thinking is very much in a negative manner and is a cycle which I have found hard to break.

About a year ago I was invited to appear on a national radio show to talk about my occupation which is web promotion and offering stuttering treatment, and also strangely enough helping an organisation to do with becoming a foster carer. I was due to talk live on this radio program at around 2pm. All morning as was my way of course, I was thinking and worrying about how I would come across to other people. I was afraid that I would make a fool of myself and would sound like a bit of an idiot. I also, for whatever reason, started to stress about whether I would be able to remember, under the amount of pressure that I was likely be under, the important aspects of my occupation which people would be interested in.

To say that I was becoming rather nervous would have been an understatement – there were a number of times when I picked up the phone to cancel the whole thing – before putting the telephone back down again. I then called up a good friend of mine who has always provided me with sound advice. I explained about the radio show and about my fears. He stated that I needed to relax and to even look forward to the experience. It would, he continued, be a chance to promote my own services and therefore was something to be grateful for.

He advised me that what I needed to do was to keep myself busy. If I am very busy, I would not have any time to think in my usual negative way. He stated that he believed that I needed to find things that would occupy my mind. He thought that I was spending the majority of the time stressing about this and that. If however I had a much busier life then I would not have so much time to think in this manner.

This is something I had realised a few years before but had in truth not acted on. I thought about what my friend had said and then decided to get stuck into some much needed gardening. Have a guess what? I managed to do very well on the radio; I even enjoyed it.