Foreign Languages and Approach-Avoidance Conflicts

[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]


Re: Confidence and Relaxing in Speech

From: Kevin O'Neill
Date: 15 Oct 2012
Time: 12:08:04 -0500
Remote Name: 24.18.229.12

Comments

I don't like to focus too much on confidence, because it's a chicken-and-egg problem: confidence increases your fluency, but fluency may be a prerequisite for confidence. (I do believe however that confidence is affected by many factors -- your health, your relationships, exercise. Also confidence may be situation-specific, e.g., you may feel very differently with friends vs. at work. It's worth keeping a journal and noting correlations with speech.) Other stuff you can work on more actively: avoidance vs. acceptance, and resistance vs. relaxation. For my personal relaxation program, getting hard exercise 3-4 times per weeks REALLY helps (running, biking, weights, etc.) and yoga/meditation is very helpful for relaxing and paying attention to your breathing and thought patterns. These are techniques that have to be practiced on an individual basis to be effective, which is probably why we don't have many studies that prove their effectiveness for stuttering (yet). I try to practice techniques to tap into the "panic feeling" that comes right before stuttering and causes tension or avoidance, which gives me a lot more control to note that pausing or slowing down is sufficient to speak without stuttering. Finally, I keep coming back to voluntary stuttering as a practice for relaxing with the idea that you stutter, it's okay, and over time you can learn to manage it.


Last changed: 10/22/12