My name is Sergey. I’m 26 and I live in Moscow. Russian is my language, and I do my best in English. I am a software engineer.
I began stuttering at age 3. I had problems mainly with strangers, authority figures and people at work. All my life until now, I have had speech incidents that humiliated me. I am a team leader at work, and I must lead meetings for three to five hours every day, six days a week. When I stutter it almost kills me. I thought that I’d never be able to stop. Everywhere I looked for solutions others said that stuttering was incurable, but I kept searching.
In 2023, I was searching for stuttering solutions on YouTube and I found Lee Lovett’s channel and began watching his videos there. I then went on Amazon and found his books. I loved them. This led me to World Stop Stuttering Association. I joined it and began watching as many of the thousands of coaching videos as I could. I also watched the Master Class videos. I couldn’t attend WSSA’s SAM Meetings on Saturdays, because we work Saturdays. Still, from the books and WSSA’s program, my speech improved every week.
In late 2023, bought some coaching sessions from WSSA and Coach Lee Skyped with me every other week for a couple months. After some Skypes, I had not had appeared speech disabled in over a month, which Coach Lee calls 1st base. I was also nearly on 2nd base (not planning words), as I had reduced word planning to around 20% of my words. That’s my next goal.
I also want to learn to love to speak everywhere, but that may take a while. I plan to stay on WSSA’s program until I can say, “Stuttering was a blessing in my life.” I love this program, because it really is life changing. I can’t recommend it enough. It proves that stutterers now have the option of stopping stuttering and even learning to be really good speakers. This improves life more than I can ever say.
Sergey, Russia, January 2024