Stutter With Confidence #59 with Raiani Sibien - Taking Back Control Over How We Feel About Ourselves

Stutter With Confidence #59 with Raiani Sibien - Taking Back Control Over How We Feel About Ourselves https://youtu.be/MyUEfoVbS78 I had a lot of fun talking with Raiani, who works at NATO and is one of the founders of the Stuttering Society. We discussed the deep humiliation she felt when mocked by the entire class at once as a child and the fact that she felt like her body and mind “stopped”; her intense avoidance of reading out loud after that experience; how feeling time pressure can increase the severity of one’s stuttering; how a negative reaction from her friend’s mom on a phone call when she was 11 years old led to her dreading and struggling with phone calls for the next 8 to 9 years; the sense of deep inferiority that can infect our mind and soul after these shameful experiences and the subsequent behaviors to avoiding experiencing that pain again; the fact that the vast majority of people in the world are clueless about stuttering and the immense value (for us) in educating them on the fact that we have a stutter; the high school presentation where Mike said “you know” about 300 times in a 15 minute presentation in an effort to fool people into believing that he was a “normal” fluent speaker; the “Stephen Hawking effect” and how people deeply admire someone with a disability who perseveres to still achieve things; Mike’s experience that once he learn to look people in the eye when stuttering, and to face those moments with courage, that the world was far nicer about his stutter than he ever imagined; her perspective that if we respect ourselves others will follow suit, and also the opposite that if we disrespect ourselves we are much more likely to get disrespect from others; and a bunch more. I hope you have as much fun listening as I had during the conversation.