The Golden Rule of Stuttering 🥇

Good afternoon everyone,

I hope you’re having a brilliant start to the bank holiday weekend 🙂

I’ve had a stutter for as long as I can remember, and it’s pretty safe to say that it has played an enormous role in my life. In today’s blog, we’re going to break down my number one piece of advice for chatting with somebody who has a stutter. I recently shared this on my LinkedIn profile and thought that it could be great to share it with you all too 🙂

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

The Golden Rule of Stuttering – Please don’t finish our sentences for us 😅

This has happened countless times to me over the years, and it can really start to get to you, eroding away at your confidence and making you question your self-worth. For people who stutter, it can be easy to feel as if you haven’t got a voice when all you really want to be able to do is speak fluently.

Usually, I know exactly what I want to say, it’s that sometimes, I simply cannot get the word/words out on the first try. When you finish our sentences for us, it feels as if we are being robbed of our voice, which can be highly damaging. This impacts both a stutterer’s short and long-term management of their speech, and if not handled effectively, it can leave some very real and lasting damage 🤕

Although in 99% of cases it is done with the best intentions in mind, I implore you to please be patient. Each stutterer will have their own techniques for managing their speech, which help allow them to speak clearly – what works for me may not work for the next person, however, that’s completely okay, it’s all a process of finding what works best for you and your speech.

Whether you have a stutter or otherwise, this is your reminder that you’ve got a voice – don’t be afraid to use it! Together, we can make a real difference in raising awareness of the topics that genuinely matter to us as people – helping to create a society in which people can be who they truly want to be. We’ve got this, you wait and see 🙂

That’s all for today’s post, I wanted to test out a shorter style of blog for a change, what do you think? Would you like to see more stuttering-focused posts moving forward? Are there any topics or areas that you would like to see me explore?

Be sure to let me know your thoughts 🙂

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