Sweeney’s Stuttering Update – May 2023

Good morning everyone,

I hope you’re having a brilliant start to the week 🙂

We’re coming up to the end of May 2023 and it got me thinking that it’s the perfect time for this month’s Sweeney’s Stuttering Update! I like to do these updates as a monthly log of my journey to speech fluency, bringing you along on the ride with me! So, let’s see how my stutter has been doing throughout May!

Hello & Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

Over the last couple of months, I have started to see some incredible progress and my speech has started to become more fluent than ever before. While this is a fantastic achievement in its own right, I need to be careful that I don’t get carried away and continue along this pathway to success.

One of the key things that I have been reminded of this month is the steps that I can take to help reduce stress and the pressure that I put on myself, which directly correlates to my speech. On the whole, I am very good at stress and managing the things that are going on in my life, but every now and again, I let things pile up and get on top of me, which happens to us all at one point or another.

An example of this was a couple of weeks ago at work – I was having a particularly busy week and I decided to leave around 4/5 of my bigger writing tasks to do towards the end of the week, which if I’m being honest, I knew that I was never going to be able to get through. As my head was preoccupied until I got in to work on Thursday morning, I didn’t even realise how much work I had left myself, and as soon as I did, it started to make me panic.

Looking back, I can’t really believe that I started to let myself get a little stress with my workload, I was acting like if I didn’t get everything done in those two days then the world was going to explode when in reality, it was completely fine. If I couldn’t get a certain task done, then I could just move it on my list to the following week, as long as the task was done ahead of the deadline, then I was all good, but when the initial panic happened, all sense of reason seemed to fly right out of the window.

This, as I’m sure you can imagine, had a pretty bad impact on my speech at the time, and I started to stutter a little more than usual. It was only when one of my colleagues noticed and mentioned how I was overthinking things that I realised what I was doing. Of course, I was a little mad at myself at the time, but looking back, it acted as a very good reminder for how the way that I manage my own life has a direct impact on the way that I manage my speech.

This all happened a couple of weeks back, and if I am honest, my speech managed to bounce back really really quickly, more or less a day or two after it happens as it goes. All of the work that I had on I managed to get finished, signed off and sent off ahead of the deadline and the world went on as normal.

Thinking back on the whole experience, I could take the perspective of being angry at myself for letting it happen in the first place, but what is that going to achieve? Instead, I can use it all as a learning curve and as a reminder, a reminder that the world won’t burn if a task has to wait one extra day to be completed and a reminder that it’s natural to go through phases where things don’t entirely go the way that you were hoping they would, what happens is how you react and move on from it.

That’s all for today’s blog, what do you think? Do you enjoy seeing these monthly stuttering updates? Are there any other topics that you would like to see me take a look at on the page?

Be sure to let me know your thoughts and answers to the above questions, either in the comments below or through our Facebook page!

Thanks for reading & I hope you have a lovely day!