This book does not offer much in the way of specific speech exercises, but is instead the author’s personal account of how he learned to accept and deal with his stuttering by changing his mindset towards it.
Anupam is a “covert” stutterer: mild enough that he can hide it much of the time and this book is an excellent retelling of the challenges and anxiety bought about by trying to do so. People who stutter severely enough may wish that they could indeed be covert, but his story tells us that this is not an ideal situation either and is in someways worse, as they are constantly worried about being “found out”.
The key, for him, was to stop worrying about his speech and other peoples’ reactions to it: “making stuttering irrelevant”. Learning to adopt that mindset increased his fluency, which in turn made it easier to care less: thus setting up a positive cycle instead of a negative one.
He also mentions “Observe, Correct and Distract” when dealing with negative emotions: recognize the thought, remind himself that it is correctable/fixable, and then distract himself with something positive. “Acting instead of reacting” is another excellent phrase he uses.
I personally, find this general advice very helpful. I still stutter severely (and always will) but I have managed to reset my attitude towards stuttering and I now accept that there will be “bad days”, but they no longer fester inside.
We may or may not be able to gain control over our individual speech, but we certainly have the power to fundamentally change how we view stuttering. As a friend of mine once said “People take their cues on how to deal with your speech, by how they see you dealing with it”.
In short, I believe this book offers useful advice in how to change our mindset regarding stuttering and how to accept it and indeed even thrive a bit.
Catherine Moroney has been on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Stuttering Association since 2019. She lives in Pasadena, California and works as a physicist/software engineer for NASA.