I’m 15 years old now. My name is John, and I live in Houston, Texas. I was six when I started stuttering, and it gradually ballooned up to 90% of my words. Of course, it hurt me most in school. Sometimes I couldn’t say much of anything, and it was grossly embarrassing. Sometimes, I thought that it would never stop. I wanted to stop it big time.
My mom found Coach Lee’s book, “Stuttering & Anxiety Self-Cures”. She read it and I read it too. We read the 2nd and the 3rd Editions, and the 3rd is by far the best. I began trying the methods and they helped a lot. My mom and I discussed Coach Lee’s methods a bunch. So, we emailed Coach Lee and started Skyping with him. I was 14 then. Every session helped.
I also did a lot of reading aloud and I did my auto suggestions at least once a day. Best of all, I worked on the Crutches. Crutch 1, dropping the first letter or syllable, has helped a ton. So has crutch 10, word linkage. Surprisingly, the sleeper crutch has been 12, smiling. It’s amazing what a difference that has made. Of course, you have to practice them a lot and try to use them ALL the time. That’s the key, using them all the time.
Since it’s been over a month since I had a incident where I appeared to be speech disabled, I prepared to post this success story. I’m not 100% finished working on my speech. I want to teach myself to love to speak in all situations. To help that along, I joined the Debate Team in school, and I’ve done well there, and I am joining Speech Anxiety Cures “SpeechMasters Club”. I’m going to keep expanding my speech comfort zones until they have no boundaries.
I want to say thank you to Coach Lee for an incredible book and for giving us so many hours of his time, which he’s still doing. I know that I’m going to become a really good speaker because of this. I used to think that my stuttering would never end, but now I know different. You can probably do it too.
JOHN, Houston, Texas, June 2020