Stuttering and Stammering

Stutters and Stammers

I’ve written previously about my experience growing up with dyspraxia, which I was diagnosed with at an early age. My dyspraxia made it difficult for me to pronounce and articulate certain sounds (called phonemes), and meant that I had speech therapy until the age of around 8 years old. Later on, in my early teens I then developed a stutter that I never quite got over. I’m sure that these experiences influenced my feelings about being able to speak up in groups, and how it feels to be trapped by an absence of voice.

In this issue, I’d like to take a quick look at stutters and stammers (used interchangeably in the article). Many of us suffer or have suffered from stutters, and whilst many sufferers may grow out of it or learn mitigations and strategies to mitigate it, stutters still affect around 1 in 50 adults, and around 1 in 12 young children go through a phase of stammering. Men are around 3 to 4 times more likely to stammer than women. There are an increasing number of organisations, such as The Stammering Collective, working to challenge concepts of ‘normal’ speech and the pathologisation of vocal differences that this engenders. Particularly given that so many people stutter, we should resist attempts to always frame people who stutter as people in need of “fixing”.

Conditions such as verbal dyspraxia/apraxia or stammering can affect people in early life, or suddenly develop later in life. Here’s a powerful post from George Lewis describing his own son’s experience with speech challenges, as well as that experienced by UK football pundit Chris Kamara, who developed speech apraxia at the age of 64.

Everyone’s experience is different, but for most people who stutter, it manifests primarily as involuntary repetition, but also encompasses involuntary hesitation or pausing before speech, referred to by people who stutter as “blocks”. These repetitions and blocks can vary in severity from barely perceptible to almost completely preventing communication. Whilst there’s no evidence that anxiety causes stuttering, anxiety and stress can certainly make the symptoms worse. Sadly, the fear of stuttering itself can make it worse, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy for sufferers. We may fear our difficulty enunciating specific vowels or consonants, fear being caught stuttering in social situations and the resultant humiliation or bullying – which only serves to exacerbate it. I’ve been told to “spit it out”, and had people imitate my stutter, even in professional settings at work. Suffice to say, that didn’t help.

Here’s a fantastic post by my wonderful colleague from my UNiDAYS days, Allie Svarc, making these points very well, reflecting on her experience with a stammer:

• I SOUND nervous in interviews even if I’m not.
• I SOUND like I don’t know what I’m talking about, even if I do.
• It’s difficult for me to explain things sometimes.
• It’s difficult for me to pick up the office phone sometimes.
• It’s difficult for me to talk in client meetings sometimes.
• Intercoms are terrifying. Networking is terrifying.

If we suffer from a stutter, we may attempt to mitigate it by substituting and rearranging words in sentences, which adds to the cognitive load of speaking up, and therefore means stammerers often need more time to work out how to say something. Stammering is also variable, which means that it can change severity in context – in large groups it can be worse, or on the phone (which is also why I hate telephone conversations, as I can’t hide any speech imperfections with body language or other visible signs). People who stutter also have “good” days, “bad” days and even “stutter-free” days, weeks, or months.

Stutters frequently co-occur with other neurodifferences, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia and dyspraxia. In adults the prevalence of dyslexia in adults who stutter is around 30-50%. There is also evidence that stuttering is more common in children who also have other speech, language, learning or motor difficulties, and I suspect my own stutter was partially triggered by my previous difficulty in accurately articulating certain phonemes, as an effect of dyspraxia.

Treatment for a stutter is usually via some form of speech therapy (you can listen to me having speech therapy at age 5, here), but other strategies are common, such as singing lessons and, as I described above, restructuring sentences to avoid the phonemes that we struggle with. Here’s a brilliant story about Samuel L Jackson overcoming his stutter through liberal use of the word “motherf*cker*!

As well as Samuel L Jackson, many other famous people have suffered from stutters (not surprising, given that it affects 1 in 50 adults), including Demosthenes in Ancient Greece, Roman emperor Claudius, Bill Withers, and King George VI, who went through years of speech therapy, most successfully under Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, for his stammer. The excellent film “The King’s Speech” deals with really well. You can find a very long list of famous people who stutter on The Stuttering Foundation’s website.

What does this mean for us, whether we stutter or not, in working with people who have a stutter?

• Listen to them the same way you would to someone who doesn’t stutter.
• Be patient. Don’t finish what they’re saying for them.
• Listen to what they’re saying, not how they’re saying it.
• Don’t make a joke of their stutter, point it out, or embarrass them.
• Don’t offer advice. Trust us, we’ve been doing this a long time 🙂
• Try to help them stay relaxed. Don’t pressure them to hurry, because it can make the stutter worse.
• Accept that stuttering is normal. We should treat a stutter not as a dysfunction, but as a form of voice that is just as normal as any accent, and celebrate the richness of our linguistic diversity.

I hope this newsletter issue helps to challenge the medical model of stammering as a disorder in search of a cure, and instead helps us all to create spaces where we feel safe to stutter, stammer, block and tic without judgement. Indeed, because the symptoms are worsened in response to stress, we may even find that we don’t stutter in spaces where we’re safe to do so.

And, through creating these spaces, we make it safe for everyone to speak up in the way that works best for them, whether they stutter or not.

Stickers are back in stock! (And there’s a new one…)

There are three ways that you can get your hands on some of our psychological safety stickers!

1. Buy some at our online shop
2. Attend a workshop
3. Promote psychsafety.com on social media and send us your postal address!

Psychological Safety at Work

Here’s an interesting find! This is a piece by J. Gerald Suarez called “Managing Fear in the Workplace” in the TQL (Total Quality Leadership) Office magazine of the US Navy, from 1993. Dr. Suarez first introduced the concepts from “Managing Fear in the Workplace” at a 1992 Naval Supply Center Summit in San Diego. In this, Dr Suarez shows that while short bursts of fear-driven performance might occur, they rarely result in positive long-term outcomes, and there are different types of fear in the workplace, including fear of reprisal, fear of success, fear of change, fear of speaking up, and fear of not making an impact. Evidently this a strong precursor for developing the concept of psychological safety at work, and a rare find in a military context.

I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to the Toyota Production System, and I love this sketchnote by Mauro Toselli, showing the 3 Ms of the TPS: Muri (overburden), Mura (inconsistency or variability), & Muda (the 7 types of waste). It’s also worth noting that many folks have suggested the non-use, or under-utilisation, of human potential as the eighth waste of Lean.

Here’s an episode of Tim Harford’s “Cautionary Tales” that you might want to listen to. It’s a double bill, with the story of a monkey who became mayor, and a tale of a deadly aviation disaster that occurred due to a mix-up regarding screw sizes. In this, Tim also mentions James Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model of failure, which we covered in a recent issue. And here, Tim has also written a piece about “Misstakes”, highlighting psychological safety in the workplace, including Amy’s work, The Andon Cord, Paul O’Neil, and experimentation. It’s almost as if he may have read our “About Psychological Safety” page! 😀 

Thanks so much to Bernadette Smith for inviting me onto her 5 Things in 15 Minutes podcast focussing on the content in her fab newsletter that covers good news in DEI and inspirational diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Give it a listen and subscribe to Bernadette’s weekly newsletter too.

More Psychological Safety Workshops!

We have a few places left on our upcoming workshops in October and November – you can choose from:

• Intermediate: essential theory and practice to help you level up your knowledge and skills.
• In-depth: examining elements such as cultural impacts on psychological safety, complexity, sociotechnicality, organisational scale and more.
• Practices: From Empathy Mapping to TRIZ. You learn practices and take away canvases and templates too.
• Leadership: Specifically for managers and senior leaders (or folks on that journey): we cover effective management practices, strategic leadership, reporting, 1-1s, work design and flow, managing neurodiverse people and more. 

 Find out more and register here.

This week’s poem

I will cut adrift—

I will sit on pavements & drink coffee—

I will dream;

I will take my mind out of its iron cage & let it swim — this fine October.


Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry c. Wednesday, October 15, 1927.
In The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925-1930