Are Nerves Controlling Your Conversations?

Good morning everyone,

How are you doing lately?

As someone with a stutter, I’ve found that nerves can drastically increase the challenge of speaking. We’re going to take a look at some of my personal tips and tricks for how you can overcome this in today’s blog.

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Whether it’s a meeting, presentation, or a casual chat, getting your words out can be pretty overwhelming. For people who stutter, this is especially difficult, as typically, we know exactly what we want to say, however, due to some phantom force, we cannot seem to say them clearly.

Learning how to overcome this ‘obstacle’ can be very difficult, however, there is always a way through. Here are three techniques I use when feeling nervous:

🧘 Controlled Breathing – I use box breathing to help reset my mind and give me the space to focus on the conversation. This involves breathing in for five seconds, holding the breath in for five, exhaling for five and then leaving my lungs empty for five seconds – see my full blog on box breathing for more context 🙂

👐 Open Posture – Consciously relax your shoulders and hold your head high, opening your body and reinforcing a message of calm and control

👋 Use Body Language – I move my hands in steady, circular rhythms to help me maintain a consistent pace and fluency in my speech. Alternatively, you can use gestures like tapping a steady rhythm subtly, nodding your head or smiling softly can all help relax your nerves and increase your comfortability when speaking

Your body language is particularly important when stuttering, helping you to clearly convert your points. For me, I used to rely heavily on body language to help me manage my stutter, monitoring both my own and that of the person I was speaking to to ensure that I had as much control as I could over my nerves and speech fluency.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to move away from relying solely on reading body language and understanding others to manage my speech. While these are important, I wanted to develop a more balanced approach to managing it all. It’s something that I have got a lot better at, but still have a long way to go – it’s a learning process at the end of the day. I’m taking it all one step at a time.

You don’t have to say everything perfectly to come across as confident or competent. Sometimes, the way you hold yourself speaks volumes 💯

That’s all for today’s blog, what do you think? How do you manage your body language while speaking? Would you like to see more blogs like this moving forward on the page?

I’d love to hear what you think 🙂

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