PWSS

Apoorv, India

I am Apoorv.  I’m 30 and live in India.  Hindi is my first language.  I have a Masters in Chemical Enginering.  I began stuttering at age 8 and until I began using Lee Lovett’s methods, I was stuttering around one-third of my words.  I also avoided looking in people’s eyes, as it increased my stuttering.  As a result, I had constant negative thoughts and depressing mental images of stuttering.  I had many sessions of therapy in India.  These focused on breathing and didn’t help.  My biggest problem was first feared words, and breathing didn’t help with them.

Last spring, I found Lee’s book.  I read the 2nd Edition, and it helped a great deal.  I then read the 3rd Edition and it was many times better.  My stuttering decreased 30% or so just from reading his books.  In his book, he invites readers to email him.  So, I did.  To my surprise, he replied and we began Skyping.  He urged me to memorize the Crutches.  I found Crutch 4 (inserting a word or sound and jamming the feared word into them) and Crutch 9 (extreme pronunciation) the most helpful.  After about six Skype, I had stopped stuttering; that is, I hadn’t had a “bad incident” (appearing speech disabled)  in over a month.  That was probably six months ago.

My fears of stuttering haven’t died completely yet, but they are much less.  The main point to me is that I know Lee’s Crutches well enough to avoid appearing to be a stutterer.  Lee still urges me to “stay on the program”, by which he means to keep reading aloud daily and doing my daily mind-training treatments and using the Crutches, when needed, to avoid having a bad incident.

I want to teach myself to love to speak in all venues, and I haven’t done that yet.  I plan to participate in Lee’s online SpeechMasters Club (https://speechanxiety.com/speech-club/) and work on that.  Lee says that I should also just push myself to talk 10% more under pressure than I’m comfortable doing; then, after a while, I’ll expand my comfort zone to the maximum.

I can’t tell you how much Lee’s book and his coaching helped me.  I never thought that I could stop stuttering, but I did.  Lee coached me for free as well.  I can never thank him enough.   I’m not the only one.  If you go to Lee’s Speech  Anxiety Anonymous (https://speechanxietyanonymous.org/), there are around 100 Success Stories like this to read.  They are compelling and prove over and over that his methods work.

Just this month, Lee licensed his methods to a company (Speech Anxiety Cures or SAC), which is staffed with ex-stutterers who beat it using his methods, and that company has developed a whole program of courses, blogs, forums, videos, etc., all to make his methods easier to understand and apply (https://speechanxiety.com/)  If you stutter or resist speaking, just know that you can beat it.  Lee’s methods work, and he is even still coaching for free as I write.  It’s time to push stuttering off the planet. Lee and SAC call it their “Cause”.  What a great idea.  Let’s do it.  

Apoorv, India, May 2020

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