How Your Expectations Can Sink Your Ship

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Re: on a practical level. . .

From: John Harrison
Date: 13 Oct 2006
Time: 14:44:19 -0500
Remote Name: 71.135.137.179

Comments

Jessica....YOU SAY....Let's say I have to make a phone call to someone I either don't know or don't know very well (meaning someone who doesn't know I stutter). This experience can and does at times knock me right out of my comfort zone and into fight-or-flight mode). Should I think in my head beforehand of my intention vs expectation? Would my intention be simply to get the point across, the purpose of my conversation, in whatever way possible?....I SAY...Precisely. What's more, the people who recover from stuttering build emotional muscle by allowing themselves to experience those awful moments when they cannot speak and discover that they can ultimately get the word out and recover from the unpleasant experience. The flight or fight reaction...which is controlled by the primitive brain (the limbic system and the amygdala) ...operates on the the principle that what doesn't kill you will make you stronger. If you turn and run from the experience, there is always the assumption that it will "kill" you the next time, because you haven't put it to the test. This sounds silly when you think about it logically, but the primitive brain does not distinguish between physical threats and social threats. As far as the primitive mind is concerned, they're ALL physical threats and thus must be dealt with in the same way. So running away when the situation become threatening ends up perpetuating the belief (and experience) that this really is a life-or-death situation......YOU SAY... Would my expectation be to allow myself to stutter instead of hanging up the phone as soon as the stutter emerges?....I SAY... Not quite. That's what your INTENTION would be.....YOU SAY.... What happens is that I expect my techniques and targets to work, and when they don't work, I lose hope and hang up, feeling pretty poorly about myself and my work in speech therapy.....I SAY....This is because you're allowing your expectations to motivate you, rather than your intentions, and because you're not willing to work through your fear feelings. You can't work through them if you're not willing to find out about them and experience them. You have to CHOOSE to feel uncomfortable. If you cannot choose them, you will always be at the effect of them. I could tell you some really amusing stories about myself in Toastmasters. They don't have to do with stuttering, but with going blank in front of an audience. One is about Toastmasters. Toastmasters has something called Table Topics where someone comes in with a list of short questions for people to answer in an impromptu, spontaneous way. In my second year in TM, I was in one meeting where I did go totally blank (my biggest fear) and in the two minutes I talked, I don't think I put together two coherent sentence, not two. I went home and was all prepared to drop out of toastmasters. But after three days, the bad feelings subsided and I thought well maybe, they wouldn't kick me out if I did come back. The humorous side of this was that I was in the Chinatown Toastmasters club in San Francisco, and what probably happened when I talked 2 minutes of nonsense, all the Chinese members went home and decided that maybe they should go back to ESL ( English As A Second Language) class because they couldn't make any sense of what I had said. That was the worst experience in TM, and I survived it. From that day on, the fears about forgetting started to go away because I knew I could survive the worst. If that had happened today, I would have made sure that I also found a way to REWARD MYSELF for standing up and speaking, NO MATTER WHAT THE OUTCOME. This would serve as a reminder that my power stayed inside me, rather than residing in other people or in the situation itself. The sample principle applies to stuttering. Experiencing the fear will, in and of itself, probably not "solve" your stuttering, but it will be an important and positive change within the stuttering system. Thanks for the question. Regards,John


Last changed: 10/23/06