Reframing Public Speaking With A Stutter

Transcript

Maya Chupkov:

If I Maya chupkov and I'm a woman who stutters welcome to Proud stutter a Show about stuttering and embracing verbal diversity in an effort to change how we talk about it one conversation at a time. Welcome back to another episode of proud stutter today. I am joined by Giselle Gaston our guest co-host.

Sel is a mindfulness coach and producer and host of find your daily calm a podcast. We will be interviewing Our Guest for today's episode Josh Compton professor of speech at Dartmouth College. Welcome both of you to Proud stutter happy to be here Maya. Thank you. Thank you Maya. Thank you. So before we get started sell, I'd love if you can take us through a quick mindfulness exercise before we dive into our interview.

Sel Gaston:

Gladly every morning when you wake up the first thing that you need to do when you wake up aside from opening your eyes is to sit up on your bed.

And do some breathing.

Because the breath is the first thing that we need to be aware of need to be mindful about so set up and when you are already.

Awake alert, and of course you're alive.

You try to stand up and get some sun.

Get that sunlight hitting your eyes.

And once that is done.

Of course, I would assume you're outside.

If if it's possible for you to go barefoot or if it's too cold.

Try to wear some shoes or a slipper. But the thing with the foot getting in touch with the Earth is you're getting in touch with the energy of the Earth and the Sun and the next thing that you can do is most of us are thirsty.

Especially if you are a mouth breather at night.

Or you tend to breathe through your mouth when you're sleeping, so you're probably thirsty get some water.

And then once you've gotten that water, don't grab that coffee yet. It's so tempting to turn on that coffee maker.

Just turn it on Let The Coffee brew but take a five minute at least five minutes walk.

Outside if the weather doesn't permit because it's too cold. There's what 15 inches of snow try to walk where there's no snow or where there's sunlight as well.

Try to get that Mobility because when you're walking.

Ideally outside your eyes will suddenly be alive because it will search and will be scanning the environment getting absorbing all the energy of the Earth the atmosphere and the wind and the Sun and the and and the elements. That's the time you go back home after the five minute minimum walk that you can have you can take then go home grab that coffee and be mindful of that taste of how that coffee affects you so be mindful of

Waking up walking and sipping that coffee.

Maya:

Thank you so much Sal for that wonderful morning Wellness routine. I'm definitely going to try that out.

So Josh, I hope your ready for our conversation after that wonderful exercise. And yeah, let's let's Dive Right In and get to it.

So the question that first comes to mind is what is your earliest memory around your stutter? I can remember as a child having a very pronounced stutter.

Josh Compton:

Maybe one of the earliest memories would be kindergarten when I can recall trying to answer questions in class and not not only the anxiety that would come as I would.

Experience blocks and repetitions, but the pre-anxiety that I would experience.

Knowing that I was about to have those blocks and those repetitions that that compounded as I as I Grew Older as I the pre-anxiety part because I think as a as a as a kid, maybe I wasn't quite as concerned about how people were reacting to my to my voice. But as I as I Grew Older that become that that social element became more of a of a concern and then I used to describe it as my stutter went away. I I became much more fluent. Let me restate that. I I used to think that my stutter went away. What I learned much much later is that my stutter simply went under it. It went undercover. I became an expert in maneuvering around it and doing lots of vocal tips and tricks that became just part of the way that I spoke. So

Got to the point where I wasn't consciously avoiding the stutter. I was just doing it because that's what I had learned and I used to be really really proud of that like that. I had, you know overcome my stutter, but that's that's not what happened. I learned and we're jumping ahead now for decades, but I learned four decades later this concept of covert stuttering everything clicked. I mean I was able to to identify again that the stutter never went away. It just became really good at hiding. And in fact, I know to the day when I learned the term covert stutter, I looked it up on my email. I had read an article about it. It was a threshold moment for me in the way that I started to think about my own voice and my metric for Success language is such a powerful tool to really come to terms with your identity and I think the first time I heard covert stuttering it really just made me feel like there was something out there that described how I was feeling and how I was walking through life and it was almost this Awakening and this sense of I'm okay like this is something that I'm not the only one experiencing covert stuttering is really I learned felt by so many people who stutter and just getting that from language is crucial. Yeah. That's that's exactly how that how that felt that there was a term for my for my voice it it answered a really simple question that I had been having and that was I wondered if I still stuttered and that's a strange question maybe to think about because you would think that simply voicing that question answers the question for you. And that's the way that I was seeing it was that I shouldn't have to Grapple with this idea of whether I stutter or not simply asking it should answer it and that reminds me of I started thinking a lot about my stutter when I arrived here at my at um, Dartmouth I can remember asking my mom on the phone. When when did I stop stuttering?

And there was this long pause on the phone and she said honey you still do and that was an interesting moment to hear that. Maybe my stutter wasn't as covert as I thought that it was that made me really anxious because again back then my my metric for speaking success was was fluency so so that got me thinking a lot about about stuttering and then my worry became well if I start thinking a lot about about stuttering am I going to start stuttering more is focusing on my stutter going to cause me to stutter more and and that's exactly what happened. I did have a drop in in fluency, so I kind of feel like I no longer had the choice to choose to be a covert stutterer because now it was becoming much and more overt this this kind of twists and and that turns was this constant shifting of my metric for what speaking success looked like what my own voice sounded like well how I felt about my own voice and then all this became nicely packaged for me under this concept of covert stuttering and it was such a relief but also kind of scary too because I've been speaking that at that time for.

But 42 years and so it was a strange way to reframe such a core part of my identity.

Maya:

There are so many layers to stuttering and one layer that I have been thinking about but haven't really talked about yet is mindfulness and how like how mindfulness interacts with stuttering and does mindfulness play a role in helping to helping with fluency or just being more okay with the stutter and so so I'm so glad you're here because you don't stutter but you do have a lot of experience with mindfulness and I'm just curious what you're perspective is and how you might see the connection between stuttering and mindfulness.

Sel:

Well the image that comes to my mind right now and it's not in any way trying to describe what a stutterer is experiencing. But this is what came to my mind right now. It's like the sea a body of water say a sea that's hitting that's quite chaotic on the surface. But if you go underneath if you're a diver if your skin dive suddenly the water becomes calmer.

And it's a perceived calmness relative calmness because it's really not that calm because there's also undercurrence or Riptides underneath the surface. But it's relatively calmer and you could see. Through the water that you could not see from the surface.

I'm not in any way trying to oversimplify the situation because at some point perhaps when I was younger I was also afraid of public speaking my mother would say open your mouth enunciate things like that. That's you you're mumbling again.

So I became conscious of that and what I realized was that after this point what's giving me anxiety are what people would think and say after I give that short sentence or that brief poem but I at some point I said. I'll just make the mistakes where I make them and do it again.

So I also went through a phase where I was very mindful of what they're going to say about me and how I would be judged after I deliver that like right now. I'm having this wonderful experience with you guys to understand the context of what you guys are experiencing because to me you sound fantastic. You sound great. And I had you not had I not been told that you stuttered before or you're what you would call a covered stutter. Maybe I was also a covered Sutter when I was younger but this is a great appreciation that I'm experiencing right now and I'm seeing this realization and feeling this realization that It's probably the pressure that the people are giving on a putting on us. When we say the things we say the way we say it.

Maya:

It makes me think of you Josh and your journey to becoming a teacher of speech and of debate and I am just like how does one with a stutter go into the career of teaching public speaking and debate. I just think that is incredible.

Josh:

So I I used to say or Let me let me back up. I was once asked how I succeeded in my career as a as a speech professor in spite of my stutter. And now I can say quite confidently that I succeeded because of my stutter. My stutter makes me incredibly empathic.

Empathetic toward my students. I know what it's like to not be able to trust one's voice.

To lose confidence in one's voice to speak through the anxiety. And so I I bring that with me to to all of my classes and in all of my interactions with my students and that helps to inform the pedagogy that I teach from when it comes to public speaking in particular and that's a pedagogy of of dialogue good public speaking is is dialogue. It's it's collaborative communication.

Between one and and many it doesn't have to be a performance model. We don't have to to perform as a confident speaker. We don't have to perform as someone with credibility and someone with something important to say we can be that and when we shift from this performance model.

All the metrics that we use like fluency and like bombastic delivery style those things fall away because the metric for good dialogue is understanding all it takes for that, you know is people with open minds people people willing to meet each other and consider ideas. So my public speaking course is as much of a public listening course as it is public speaking because I'm trying to create communities where we make space.

For ideas and understanding it took me a long time to get to that point. I'm I might add to I never would have dreamed that I would teach public speaking. I mean if you were to make a list of the top 10 most likely careers for the stutter. I doubt that speech teacher would crack your top 10, right? Probably not your top 100, but it should there.

It shouldn't be that surprising right if we start to see speech for what it actually is and and communication for what it actually is.

Maya:

So what made you want to get into public speaking?

Josh:

I took a speech course in college because I had to I remember it was my very first term in college. This is back in 1993 dreading the fact that I had to take this public speaking course and every student had to I remember studying that student handbook and I thought I had found a loophole that was going to get me out of this class. And so I arrived early with the passages highlighted in the handbook that was going to get me out of this. I thought that I would be there just long enough to make my case and then I would be released but as soon as this professor began talking about public speaking from this more dialogue perspective. I was intrigued and I was surprised and excited still very skeptical but willing to give it a try that Professor ended up taking me under his wing and introducing me to the speech and debate program and I found a different side of my of my voice there.

I would later find out by the way that this speech Professor was one of the nation's most winningest speech and debate coaches. He had led his team to something like 18 consecutive national championships and had I known that I never would have even arrived to the classroom to try to make my case to get out of it. I think I would have just been think I would have just been out of there. I I was very lucky. I was very lucky to be introduced to a different way to think about speech and set on a path where I could find a different way of thinking about what makes good public speaking. What makes a good speech that didn't solve everything. I will say that I joined the speech and debate team and I did I was fortunate I was I was really good at it and I want a bunch of awards some State and national titles, but most of those awards were for speeches that I had written and memorized beforehand.

And I had discovered long before that memorization is a way that I could avoid a lot of my my stuttering.

Now those speeches didn't sound memorized they did well because they sounded spontaneous because they were written for the ear and I had learned to write the way that I speak but they were still I still knew it what I was going to say in in those speeches.

I would say that's the second easiest way for me to engage in covert stuttering and that's to memorize and that's just not that's not practical.

By the way, the first ultimate way to covert stutter is is silence. That's the method that I that I used more often. Oh frankly. That's the method that I still use more often when I engage in covert stuttering and that's and that's not speaking up.

But that's that's a work in progress. It's a lifelong work in progress where I'm learning more and more.

To practice what I teach to use my voice in a much more confident way.

So I'm learning along with my students. That's that's how I've that's how I found success in teaching public speaking was to meet my students where they are and go on this term long journey with them and we teach each other and it's it's transformative.

Maya:

I wish I can go back in time and take that public speaking course because I feel like I would have learned a lot especially in my work life over the years the frustration I feel when I'm speaking my jobs over the the years has required me to speak spontaneously. I'm not the type of stutter to memorize things because like I just don't have the energy and I'm too impatient. So I kind of just wing it so many times like probably 70 to 80% of the time what I want to say from my head is not what comes out and I judge myself so much because I know I'm so smart and I know like I can be eloquent. I'm eloquent in my head, but then when it comes out. I sometimes I feel like I sound like an idiot or I sound like I don't know what I'm talking about and in my current job now, there is a lot of those feelings because I'm facilitating conversations and a lot of the people in the room are very like passionate and smart and and like they're looking at me to help facilitate them and there's just so many.

Because it's not about the stuttering. It's also about the disconnect between what I want to say and what comes out.

Josh:

Absolutely, you know for me I have I have two really pronounced moments of anxiety when it comes to my stutter and that's before I speak that anticipatory anxiety. And then in the moment of a block in the moment of when the words not coming and I'm quickly trying to find a word that is going to work that might not be the word that I actually mean but is something that I can can say and that anticipatory anxiety is what I was thinking a lot about whenever cell was talking earlier about about mindfulness. I would have found his steps to be really useful this morning as I was working through because my my stutter that's emerging now as we're talking began hours ago it began last night. It it began weeks ago Maya whenever you extend extended this invitation, I felt like my stutter now began then as I was thinking about this conversation and I was playing over the different ways that it might go and as I was talking aloud and Imagining the type of questions, you might ask well gosh, I guess the stutter goes back, you know 47 years ago, right. There are these discrete moments where I feel a rush of anxiety.

And and nervousness again in the moment of the block but there's also more of this long-term anxiety too this anticipatory anxiety and all of those things affect.

How I think about myself and how I think about my voice and ultimately how my voice comes out. I relate so much to what to what you just said Maya and I and I and I value the advice that that Sel has given about that.

Sel:

I loved what you said Josh about what really matters and what's the most essential thing about communication is understanding? And when your communicating and being mindful of communication, which is of course both ways. They understanding of these two parties these two persons. If it's just two people communicating or one person to a group of people. That's the only thing that matters. The things that you talk about the Fantastic inoculation Theory, which I was glued to for the past hour before I went to this this is going to embarrass my schoolmates 40 years back when they say that those who stutter are probably not smart. Well if my friends are thinking or listening to this think again because they're not the two people who are with me here today. Are the perfect examples thank you and Josh.

Maya:

Can you talk about the difference between the powerful pauses and speeches and the pause that might come from just a experiencing a block or a stutter and how you navigate that

Josh:

Pauses in speeches can be successful but silence that keeps you from speaking the silence that keeps you from ever speaking up. That's the dangerous silence, right? And and that's what I I'm trying to avoid. You know, I used that type of Silence to keep myself from from speaking up much too often. So so I see the value of those in speech silences. Those can be Beautiful moments and I see the the really real harm of Silence that keeps you from ever speaking keeps you from ever ever speaking up. I've been studying communication for for 30 years now. I've been I've been studying my voice for as long as I've been I've been speaking, but I'm I'm relatively new to the academic study of the stuttering voice and the academic study of of my voice I just feel like I have a lot of catching up to do you mentioned inoculation Theory? That's the theory that I that I specialize in I've been doing research in this area since I'm since since 2001 and basically it's this theory that says that that we can become resistant to persuasion in much the same way that we become resistant to viruses and that's through pre-exposure to weakened forms of that persuasion. So if I encounter some of the challenges that I'm going to face preemptively beforehand and I'm helped to understand why those challenges aren't as formidable as they might seem then I can develop resistance to those when I face them later. One of my favorite studies that I did with some colleagues in Australia was we developed inoculation messages that helped college students inoculate against public speaking anxiety.

And so this was combining all of my interests as to one big study. We basically two weeks before they were to give their their speeches. We gave them inoculation messages that that in short said look, you know, most of us get anxious before before speeches and even if you feel confident now, there's a good chance you're going to begin to feel more anxious as you approach this speech and so here are some things that you might start to worry about you might worry about something called the transparency effect. And that's the idea that we feel like everybody can see our anxiety. We feel like they can they can they can see this this nervousness and there and they're judging us for it. But research shows that most audiences actually can't detect how how nervous speakers are or maybe you're worried about something called the spotlight effect. And that means that all eyes are on you that they're focusing on every single word that you're saying every single move that that you're making that's giving your audience too much credit they or that's giving you too much credit to think that that you warrant their full attention, right audiences minds are going to be wandering. They're not going to be focused on every single thing that you say they want to learn from you. And so we go through all of these anticipatory anxieties and then show them why those might not be as intimidating as they might might seem and then later when they give the speech we found in this study that they experienced less overall public speaking anxiety.

And the anxiety that that did remain they were able to re-channel it towards something more productive something like speaker energy. So we inoculated we developed we made a flu shot only not against the flu against public speaking anxiety. That's just one example. I I extend this Theory into politics and and health campaigns and public relations any time in which there's future challenges. You can inoculate in a way that's going to build confidence and build self-efficacy and build resistance to that change.

So next up is the inoculation against stuttering stigma against the perceptions that audiences might have about stuttering speakers and if we can inoculate stutterers ourselves, can we inoculate against some of the self-talk that we engage in about our own our own voices and I have reached out to someone who knows a lot more about the stuttering research than I do Chris Constantino at at Florida State and we are in early stages of of creating this this study to see how we can help stutters and audiences reframe and reconceptualize what we think about about stuttering and you better believe that I'll not only be writing those inoculation messages, but I'll be reading them. I'll be trying to self inoculate to and I'm super excited about about what we might find as we are. I've

Sel:

Josh that's fantastic. This is where it all comes together. I think that these the way I see it you never mentioned about resisting the fear the anxiety the self talk

You talked about bringing it to the surface allowing it to be heard at some point or some degree to be seen and to be told to you.

That's in mindfulness in meditation as well. It's called allowing.

When you allow these things like when I'm anxious or angry when I meditating I would ask myself anger anxiety. Why are you here? And you have that conversation? Sometimes it answers back it gives me.

All the reasons why they're there and the reasons also why they're about to leave and that is fantastic. This is where it all comes together.

Maya:

Thank you Josh, and I think that is a wonderful place to end. Thank you both so much for being on proud stutter and we will see you next time.

And that's it for this episode of proud stutter. This episode of proud stutter was produced and edited by me my chupkov. Our music was composed by Augusto Denise and our artwork by Mara Ezekiel and Noah chukov.

If you have an idea or want to be part of a future episode visit us at www.proudstutter.com, and if you like the show, you can leave us a review wherever you are listening to this podcast want to leave us a voicemail check out our show notes for the number to call in more importantly tell your friends to listen to until we meet again. Thanks for listening be proud and be you.