Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Stuttering
Tiger Woods
Marilyn Monroe
Stutter, a provocative and imaginative new book by Marc Shell shares wisdom and hope for all who suffer from this socially crippling tendency. A recovered stutterer himself, he talks freely about the social difficulties it causes and how remaining silent rather than expressing himself gave him the sense of being imprisoned. Four years ago he started on the McGuire speech-recovery programme and can now articulate by controlling his breathing and by talking more assertively in a deep and breathy tone. He now gets comments about the sexiness of his voice and although it's been described as sounding like a 'terrible old actress', he prefers to imagine it's more like a laconic Gary Cooper.
Those who have overcome stammering are in the good company of many famous people, from Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, King George VI, Somerset Maugham, to Tiger Woods the golfer. Indeed there have been many stutterers who have used this disadvantage to their benefit. While finding great difficulty in expressing themselves in conversation, some have turned successfully to literature and become novelists, poets or writers in other fields.
The McGuire therapy is based on the principle that stuttering is a fear of stuttering. The more difficult the word is felt to be, the more fear there is that the word will not come out properly, so there is a greater tendency to stutter. The McGuire technique encourages the participant 'to come out' loudly and proudly speak with a stutter and to do so without shame so to remove the embarrassment. By facing up to the stutter and letting it exist takes away some of the pressure and fear, so they learn to get the words out more freely. By removing or reducing the fear content of stuttering, while also pausing to formulate words more clearly and speaking more deliberately, the stutterer can learn to converse more normally.
