Lee’s book has been incredibly helpful! I have been stuttering mildly for the past 24 years, tried different therapists and read different books without much success and Lee’s book helped me make my first stutter-free public presentation two weeks ago! Presentations from me are usually disasters but this time was different and two persons from the audience talked to me after the presentation to tell me it was the best talk they heard this year. I could not believe it, I was so happy.
So what’s so special about Lee’s methods? Lee does not believe in controlling our speech, which was what most of methods suggest. Lee believes in creating fluency memories so that our brain can get used to speaking instantaneously, which means without planning words. Lee believes that we should think about the ideas and not the words we want to say, just like we think about where we want to go and not about which leg we will move next. Once we no longer plan words but just let a brain full of fluency memories speak, it is way easier to speak fluently.
How can we create fluency memories? The main way is reading aloud 1 hour every day and other techniques such as auto-suggestions and self-hypnosis also help. Another important advice during the transition from stutterer to self-cured is to reduce the stuttering memories. To do so, Lee suggests twelve techniques (called crutches) to avoid stuttering on feared words. One technique is voice modulation and another technique is skipping the first letter of the next feared word. This helps reducing stuttering memories until we hopefully become self-cured.
After finishing the book, I was impressed by its content and I decided to write to Lee. He replied and offered to Skype with me. I had two Skype sessions with him and his energy, help and advice have been incredible. He is incredibly motivated to help stutterers self-cure and is doing it for free! He helped dozens of stutterers self-cured and if you stutter, reading this book and practicing Lee’s methods every day for at least a few months is probably the best gift you can offer yourself. I have started Lee’s methods last month and I am not 100% self-cured but I regularly have stutter-free conversations and everyone noticed that my speech has greatly improved. I am still working on it and hope to become self-cured in a few months.