A SPEECH Coach has started a podcast to raise awareness and help reduce to stigma around stammering.
Jon Hubbard from Wythall has lived with a stammer for most of his life, triggered by the death of his father when he was six years old.
It wasn’t until the age of nine he realised he was different to the others.
He said: “I noticed I would repeat words more than the other kids, or I’d have difficulty saying what I wanted to say.
“I was one of the lucky ones, I was never really ‘bullied’ throughout school, but there were plenty of jokes at my expense.”
The fear of speaking grew as he got older, so much so he developed a ‘Covert’ stammer.
This is where a person will go to almost any extreme to hide the fact that they are not fluent.
Jon added: “You avoid and switch words, avoid situations where you might have to speak.
“Whether it be something as simple as ordering what you can say rather than what you want in a restaurant, to completely avoiding events for the fear of having to speak.”
The final straw came when Jon went to pick up his daughter from school and he couldn’t tell the teacher which child he was there to pick up.
“The look the teacher gave me when she asked which child was mine, I had a huge block so just pointed and said: ‘that one’. I don’t think I’d ever felt so low about my speech.
Jon realised had to make a change once and for all, and he joined the McGuire Programme in 2018. He has never looked back.
Once he completed the course, he became a Certified Primary coach supporting new students before lockdown and has just passed exams to become a course instructor.
He’ll be instructing his first course later in the year and decided it was the right time to launch his podcast, The Stammer Inn.
He said: “It’ll be a challenge but I want the podcast to be a place for all things stammering and help others going through what I did.”
Visit @thestammerinn on Instagram for more information.
