Stuttering/ stammering and golf … Part 3 question and answer
Good question/comment!!
you asked: “how do we practice repeatedly at the work place where there are not many opportunities to ’screw-up’”
You’re right about “practicing” at work. Just like going out on course with your serious golfing friends is not the best time to practice you swing by throwing down an extra ball or two. Again, in golf, you prepare and practice for the ’serious’ rounds on the driving range and/or going out alone on a quiet, uncrowded course. Work is your ’serious’ speaking round for which you must practice in easier situations that have no consequences.
Having said this, in a serious round of golf where you start playing poorly and have no chance of a decent score/winning, the best thing to do is look at it as a ‘practice round’ and forget about the score. At work, if your stammering / stuttering has overwhelmed you and your fluency is falling apart, what are your choices? You can either continue to struggle for ‘fluency’ with tricks and avoidances, but we all know this only makes it worse, or, you can do an attitude re-adjustment and use it to practice those tools, if you have tools, that will lead to better performance/speech.
In our programme, we encourage each other to make a ‘disclosure’ saying something like: “boy my speech is really falling apart today, I’m going to have to concentrate on some things to get it back. just bear with me.” Most times the colleagues are very supportive and understanding and appreciate something being said (rather than you/us continuing to try to hide the problem). If you get ridiculed, it’s time to take a good look if this is a job you would want to keep as such disrespect/lack of support is probably not limited to your speech.
Another thing about practicing is what I said about “feared word/sound” = “feared club”. Just like you have to hit maybe hundreds of balls at the driving range to gain confidence in a club that has let you down, you have to make many many contacts (phone and street) using the word or sound that caused you to block/avoid or use tricks in order to regain confidence. and this will carry over to the work-place to improve your speaking performance.
Tags: golf, stammer, stammering, stutter, stuttering