We were four people at this meeting.
We spent some time talking about volunteering stuttering and several techniques to do it. Not all of us do it and we were curious about how the others do.
This evolved into talking about “covered practice”, meaning, are there any situations for which you rehearse ahead of time? Some of us do it for some situations such as practicing a speech or a presentation you are going to give in front of a lot of people. It helps because we don’t have to worry about what we are saying and there is one less thing to worry about when we are trying to focus on reducing anxiety and being more fluent. However, this is completely the opposite for others. Sometimes, rehearsing is counter productive; we are more fluent when we are more spontaneous and don’t have to remember the words that we rehearsed.
This meeting took place the week after the Oscar’s were announced and the movie “Stutterer” was awarded Best Live Action Short Film. We decided to stream it and watched it right there on my iPad. We had a nice discussion about it and we came up with topics to discuss at our next meeting. We plan to show the movie on the big screen at the next La Salle meeting. Please join us if you can!