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From: Elliot
Date: 11 Oct 2009
Time: 17:14:14 -0500
Remote Name: 24.22.165.28
Hey Reuben -- somewhat unrelated question: I've been trying to openly stutter more over the past few months. I have no trouble when it comes to making random phone calls, talking to random people in the street or in malls. Also with friends I have no trouble stuttering openly. However at work and in my dating life it still feels extremely weird to me to stutter openly (with sound in the stutter), so I fall back into my more hesitant/avoidant use of pausing to avoid stuttering with sound in those areas of life. I am improving slightly in those areas, but it's quite slow (it has only been a few months though). Did you encounter this issue where in some situations you'd stutter openly but there were still areas of your life where you'd almost never use open stuttering because it felt extremely weird? If so, what do you recommend? I see two obvious options: (1) Keep practicing random phone calls, talking to random people, talking to friends, and in other "safe" situations and slowly it will get easier to bring open stutterng into other areas of life. (2) Take some drastic action via a combination of willpower and possible extreme advertising in difficult situations to make this transition, otherwise it's too tough to break current habits. For instance I could explicitly tell my boss and coworkers "I'm trying something new with my speech, so I may sound a bit different.." I guess I know that option 2 will result in faster progress, so my question boils down to: do you have experience with option 1 working too?