When I say to people sometimes that I see my stammering as a positive in my life, they can find it a strange notion. Normally people can only envisage stammering as a negative concept. My stammering is my natural pattern of speech, and having a stammer does not limit my speech nor hinder my conversations. … Read more
This month Sam is guest blogger for the Did I Stutter? Project – you may read her blog here
“Iain, I’m going to be submitting a business case for promotion to manager in June. I normally stammer on my name which then knocks all my confidence, especially when meeting someone for the first time. Also, my fear of stammering often stops me from contributing to larger groups. These are going to be increasingly important … Read more
I like to be really transparent. Early after a TBI, I had such magnificently apparent social communication impairments that my verbal blurts were excused. As I recovered in visual processing, attention, balance, auditory processing, and something else I can’t remember (probably memory), I looked a lot less disabled. That made the blurts more noticeable and … Read more
How can we help people who stutter come to understand stuttering as something other than the negative opposite of fluency? We can begin by exploring with them the mechanisms of ableism that position those with disabilities as inferior. People do not exist in a vacuum. Discourses that give meaning to our world pre-exist our births. … Read more
You could call me a supervision junkie. I love it! I always have. To be honest I find it hard to understand those who don’t feel the need for it as for me it is like oxygen. It is one of life’s essentials. Essentially it keeps me, a speech and language therapist of nearly 25 … Read more
We all start out with dreams and ideas about how our careers will go. It’s hard to foresee when, where or why the forks in the road will come, but it is almost certain that they will. This blog post explores two key ways in which supervision helped me to negotiate a fork in the … Read more
Supervision. The word invokes many different thoughts for me. The many supervisors I have had, and the many people I have supervised. And the formality of the word. I got a bit stuck when trying to move past this, so I read through multiple blog posts about having one’s communication shaped, ‘therapyed’ or embraced. These … Read more
Martyn: “Do you ever read poetry?” Me : “No. Of course not.” Martyn: “You might try it sometime. David Whyte1, something like that.” It had been just a short conversation but, as usual, his intuition was spot on. I’d been discussing with Martyn Brown, my Executive Coach at Ashridge2, my progress towards becoming more of … Read more
An aneurysm ruptured in my brain when I was 27. The facts are simple enough. Yet, I find this topic resists such simplicity. I had been an American abroad, touring a show to the International Fringe Festival in Scotland. I was onstage when it happened, though I don’t remember when I stopped singing. I don’t … Read more