Ready to start? First, let’s look at the big picture, so you know where you’re going. This is your roadmap to break free from stuttering.
What does break free mean? It doesn’t mean that you’ll never stutter again. Chances are, you will. I still do, now and then. Breaking free means to free yourself from worrying about stuttering and from avoiding speaking situations, and move forward to live the life you want.
Your Roadmap Overview
Let’s review the past few posts. You’ve seen that there may not be a solution, but there is always a way forward. You’ve seen that your first big decision is to stop avoiding speaking situations and start engaging. And you’ve seen that you need to build your resilience, because when you begin to address your stuttering, it’s possible that you may first see your fluency tank and anxiety shoot higher.
So, you’re prepped. Now, let’s get going.
Here’s a roadmap to give you the broad outlines of where we’re going. The next several months of blog posts are going to bring you through much of the same steps I took to break free from stuttering.
The basic roadmap is this:
Relearn to speak
Move forward with small steps
Stack small successes
Become unstoppable
Small steps is the long road to progress. The smaller the steps, the more likely your success. Click To Tweet
Small Steps: Your Way Forward
Simple, right? No, not at all.
This roadmap took me on a two-year journey of facing challenges, many of which I never imagined I could approach, much less overcome.
Some of you might be thinking: “Relearn to speak, retrain your brain — sounds like a pretty tall order!” And it was.
That’s why I created the most realistic approach I could: Small Steps.
I broke my stuttering into a series of small steps. No step was a leap. Every step was so small that it was a slam dunk.
Small steps is the long road to progress. True, it takes longer; but by taking one small step at a time, you’re more likely to gain traction and achieve progress that lasts. No more flash in the pan successes, then splat and back to square one.
The smaller the steps, the more likely your success.
Once you begin to stack small successes, your confidence will grow and you’ll start to build momentum. You’ll love the momentum, it’s intoxicating.
Stack enough successes and you’ll start to feel unstoppable, brimming with the confidence to keep moving forward toward your goals. You’ll smash barriers that once paralyzed you.
Success will become a habit, nothing can stop you.
That's what makes the stuttering journey so fascinating: The further you go, the more you learn, adapt and change. You become your own laboratory. Click To Tweet
One Last Piece of Your Roadmap: Setting Your Goal
That’s the basic roadmap I took to break free from stuttering. Again, I’m not a perfect speaker, but that wasn’t my goal. For me, it wasn’t realistic.
The next post deals with one last question before we get started, but it’s critically important: What is your goal?
In the meantime, think about what your goal should be. Perfect fluency? Something more realistic? As you progress on your stuttering journey, your goal may change — mine certainly did.
That’s what makes the stuttering journey so fascinating: The further you go, the more you learn, adapt and change. You become your own laboratory.
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