The first day of the course, the physical day is always the hardest one. We are asking the new students to trust complete strangers as we are rewiring their speech completely. Starting from scratch with the breathing. Two brave new students, one of them only 14 years old, showed great discipline throughout the day. Learning about the physical weapons that our stutter has, and how to counteract them with our physical weapons. By 12 o’clock they already had four hours of breathing & practising with our fabulous coaches.

As many of you will probably already know, the McGuire Programme is now offering online courses due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the many restrictions in place preventing people from meeting up for long periods of time in confined spaces.

Just like everyone else, we waited and waited for as long as we could and that waiting period extended from weeks upon weeks to months and now years. We had to think outside the box and held several meetings over a period of 6 months to see what can we do to still help people who stutter.

Working on our stutter in Nijmegen, The Netherlands

For those who stutter, once we have survived and won enough battles to start “believing” we can actually win and are winning this war against our stutter, we can look at it more as a sport, albeit a serious one.

The last Dutch course was off to a fantastic start with people coming over from various McGuire Programme regions including Holland, Germany via Ireland, Belgium, Romania, Saudi Arabia, UK, and Scotland. We started the Wednesday with five new students and roughly 15 returning grads. The numbers increased throughout the course, totally 45 people who came to work on their speech.

We held our last course of 2019 in Düsseldorf, Germany for the German Region of The McGuire Programme. This was our 14th course in Germany since starting our first course in July 2015.

We had 3 new students from far away places join us and over 20 returning members, who come back to work on their own life goals and to help the new students in grasping their new speaking techniques.