My name is Iddhie. I’m 15, and I live in Sri Lanka. My first language is Sinhala, but I’m comfortable in English. I began stuttering around age 10, and it got really bad around age 12, and under pressure I stuttered on roughly half my words. This caused me to have many unbelievably embarrassing attempts to speak, especially at school with classmates and teachers and worst of all when asked to speak in front of the entire class. I had a year of treatments by therapists, but I didn’t stop stuttering. I was determined to stop stuttering. So I surfed the internet looking for solutions and I came upon Lee Lovett’s name.
I bought Coach Lee’s book, the 3rd Edition and read it. I also joined Speech Anxiety Cures and began reading what was on its website and watching coaching videos. I studied the book as best I could, and I reduced my stuttering by around 60%, but it was still a problem.
So I then emailed Coach Lee and asked him to coach me and he agreed but he asked me to have my mom email her approval to him and he asked to have her attend the first session with me, which she did.
Coach Lee emailed me a bunch of other documents to study, Affirmations, a Crutch Chart, memos explaining better how to practice Crutches and many other such documents. I studied them. They were very helpful.
What’s fascinating about this program is its emphasis on mind training. That is, we repeat the positive thoughts that we want to have (like “I love to speak”) 20 times in each mind training session, and we do two sessions a day. We try to visualize ourselves talking fluently to large groups or authorities. It’s amazing how much this helps change the way you think about talking.
At this point, I have been working on Coach Lee’s methods for about six months, and I’ve had around a dozen Skype sessions. The last time that I appeared speech disabled was around two months ago. Before I read Coach Lee’s book, pretty much everyone I knew thought of me as a stutterer. In the past two months, even after attending school at school not by computer for two months, I have not been stuttering. I even volunteer to talk in class now.
Maybe best of all I don’t have fearful thoughts of speaking hardly ever now, and when I speak I’m not having to struggle to say words. Maybe I use one of Coach Lee’s methods to say 1-5% of my words when talking under pressure. When not under pressure, I don’t struggle at all. In neither case do I appear to have a speech disability.
So of course this makes me very happy BUT I am not finished with Coach Lee’s program. I still want to learn to LOVE to speak everywhere. So, I’ll keep doing sessions with Coach Lee for a while and I’m going to try to speak more and more when I feel pressure and gradually teach myself to love doing that. Many others have accomplished this with this program.
I have really done all the communicating with Coach Lee. My mom only sent him a couple emails and only attended my first coaching session. So, I”ve done all this pretty much on my own. Coach Lee says that he’s really proud of me and that I’m his second 15 year old to do this program pretty much without parental help. If you want to hear me speak, go here: https://youtu.be/-2Y0NIBST3s
I can tell you that if you stutter you don’t have to do it anymore. If I can study Coach Lee’s book and reduce my stuttering by over half and eliminate the rest of it with a dozen coaching sessions, I’ll bet that you can do it too. So, if I was you, I’d get his book and join his program, as he says, “the world’s only community of EX-stutterers”. That’s a great place for a PWS to learn.
IDDHIE, 15, Sri Lanka, Dec. 2021 Three months stutter-free