How to Stop Repeating Yourself with Pro90d

If you've ever struggled with stuttering or stammering, then finding yourself on the 6th segment of our 7-part series called 7 Common Speaking Challenges is the perfect place for you.

This segment deals with repetitions. I have found from personal experience, that this is something that you can stop and get rid of with tactical and strategic approaches. The most obvious coaching observation on stuttering and stammering is that this is a pattern and a habit that can be broken.

Through self-study or 1:1 coaching sessions, we replace these patterns and habits with more powerful and new ones that help you ground yourself in a new speaking identity. The first step towards fixing a repetition is awareness. You must become aware that you're doing it.

Become aware that you are speaking, become aware that you are repeating, and become aware of the loops you are repeating. Once you become aware, you do what we call breaking the loop, you break the pattern. Pattern interruptions are the first step towards fixing repetitions.

So the next step, once you are aware, is to immediately stop yourself and, instead of going back to repeat what you were trying to say, instead figure out a different way of saying what you want to say. And it does not necessarily mean changing the words around.

It just means saying it in a different way. First, you become aware. Then you break the loop and reroute your train of thought. We call it the ABCs style of change that you adopt. When you change the style and the way that you're going to say it, we offer a whole set of what we call proactive speaking skills in Pro90d, just like ABCs.

These shortcuts help you learn to speak in a way that people pay attention to. You change the physical way that you speak, and your brain recognizes speech. Another shortcut is mimic. You don't have to copy their accent, but you do have to copy their rhythm. You copy their style of speaking. This develops into something smoother, more rhythmic, and more fluid. It sounds better, it feels better, and your audience pays attention to what you are saying.

Mimicing is a substition of another way of speaking and speaking identity with your own, and it eventually becomes yours. We go into in-depth discussions of mimicry about how this happens, why it happens, why it's good, and how you actually learned how to speak and do many of the things you already do. You pick up mannerisms and characteristics, and many of the things that you and I do now, are simply modeled. That's what we call observational learning, learning by mimicking and modeling and observing other people do it. Modeling is one of the most natural ways to change the repetition challenge.

On a tactical level, there are times when you may actually need to change the way you're going to say something. This is called substitution. I'm going to substitute what I was going to say to communicate what I need to say.

When you're speaking freely, not thinking about the words that you are using, it's not something that I've rehearsed. But, when I have a message that needs to be communicated, and you're repeating things over and over where you're blocking or whatever it is, you first become aware of what you're doing, then you stop it, and then you change it through modeling and substitution.

Ultimately, there are times when it's very, very appropriate to change the way you're going to say things, to use different words, and to communicate with different phrases. When you give yourself the freedom and flexibility to say different things in different formats, you feel more relaxed, more in control, and freer.

And when that happens, the tendency is that you won't block, repeat, stutter, stammer, or get stuck as much. This isn't the only way. To learn more about this strategy, jump into the program, enroll today in the propriety smooth speech system, or what you might see as Pro90d Day, the ultimate smooth speech system.