Hello. I stutter.

Still at home, working away. These days I’d say I spend the majority of the working day on phone calls. That’s right, the guy who used to hate the phone now is on it for nearly 7 hours a day.

Ok, not exactly the phone, but Webex. You get it. Sometimes I turn the video on, sometimes not. Sometimes I have run the meeting, sometimes I just listen in. Including this week, my average weekly meeting total is about 32. That’s a lot of listening and talking.

I’m doing pretty well with it all, I’d say. There are so many familiar faces and voices, so I feel comfortable speaking up whenever I need to.

Early on during COVID I did have to set up some get-to-know meetings when I was given more plants to cover for engineering. I had three of these, and I advertised during all three of them. Within the first two minutes I told them that I was someone who stutters. None of them had any issues with it, and they all thanked me for letting them know. Those kinds of wins have been helping me greatly on the phone as well.

Yesterday I was outside on my driveway faffing about with my cargo bike and saw my neighbor. We’d not met formally yet. He was looking at the bike from afar and then came closer. We started up a chat, and before too long I was also telling him (and his wife who also was outside) that I stuttered.

Advertising is definitely one of those huge barriers that seems insurmountable at first. But the more you do it, the more you want to do it. The better it makes you feel in the moment, and the better it makes your speech and stress as the conversation goes on.

Once the restrictions are lifted, I know I’ll have to travel more to visit my new plants. I am definitely looking forward to practicing even more advertising then. Stay tuned.

Just a few weeks ago I was writing about attending a trade show and what that felt like. Don’t worry, I’ll finish up that short series this month. But first, of course, the pandemic. I count myself very lucky to be working in the food industry at this time. We’ve been tasked with producing as much as possible for the next few months, so there’s plenty to keep me busy. And as a corporate engineer, I’m able to work from home. I’m on calls pretty much all day with some breaks — enough to go for a walk or check in on the kids. The kids will start online school next week, so that’ll give them something to focus on for a few hours a day.

What I wanted to address today is how being someone who stutters is helping me deal with the pandemic mentally. None of these three reasons is earth-shattering or new — you can find them on memes or motivational posters or whatever. But I wanted to tie my experiences to each of them.

I will certainly say that it’s taken me years to get to this point. I had to do a lot of work and go through a lot of pain and heartache. It’s still not easy every day, but it’s certainly better than it was five or ten years ago.

1. I can only control so much in my life. For everything else, I must accept what happens

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve stuttered. This will never change, and that’s something I’ve come to accept. There are some days that are a lot better than others, and that randomness is part of the angst of stuttering. I have no idea what the day will hold for me when I wake up. There are some things I can control — my breathing (using my techniques) and techniques like advertising to get the attention focused on my message versus my delivery.

With Covid, I can control my comings and goings, who I go to see (nobody) and wearing a mask if I have to go in public. I can make a grocery list and hurry through the grocery store, making sure to socially distance myself from everybody. I’ve come to accept that this will go on for months. I can’t control that or what others do. I have to focus on doing my part and maintaining control for myself and my children.

In many ways this ties into the item below:

2. My response to stress is up to me

When I’m stressed out and having to speak, it’s always a disaster. This used to happen if I was upset and yelling. Or if I had to give answers on the spot about something I wasn’t prepared for. If I had a lot to do in a short period of time at work and was asked about other things. I’ve learned in these instances that I’m stressed not because of a singular event, but because I’m carrying the burden of several things. And this additional stress has put me over the edge. After many years I realized what I was doing and learned to compartmentalize my stresses. Then dealing with a smaller stress became easier because I could use familiar tools — take a long pause and try to slow my breathing. Calm myself down. Think clearly, and prepare just a few words.

In dealing with Covid, it’s an ongoing stress that wasn’t there even a month ago. It permeates everything — tv, work, friends, family. The uncertainty of it means that everybody is always on edge. It’s hard to prepare and plan for anything because the news changes every 12 hours. Some news is inherently more stressful than others — and not only does the pandemic create stress, but there’s the daily stresses of work and family to pile on as well.

Occasionally I feel the stress of Covid on top of family, friends and work will go past my breaking point. I want to get upset, I want to rant on about how terrible everything is. But I’ve learned that that response won’t do anything for me. So I slow down and focus on just one stress at a time. When I do that, I calm down a lot faster. I don’t “stack” stresses up. If Covid has got me upset and my kid forgets to put away the dishes, I won’t lash out.

3. Focus on the positives, and don’t dwell on the negatives

Stuttering is inherently filled with perceived negatives. Not being fluent. Getting flummoxed. Not wanting to say anything at all. Not being able to make a joke fast enough. Not getting through on the phone. Every day, every hour, you can find something negative about stuttering. Rarely do we focus on the positives. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to change that.

The news these days is mostly negative as well. How fast the pandemic is traveling, how many are infected, what more is to come, and how long we must stay isolated to get ahead of the virus. It can be hard to even think of something positive, but I know that by doing so I can get through the days, weeks and months ahead. I think about how fortunate I am to still have my job and something to do all day to keep me occupied. I think about lunchtime walks and being able to get some exercise and sun. I think about the tools we do have to connect with one another — texting, calling, e-mailing — that make it more bearable. I think about being able to spend more time with the kids — seeing them between conference calls and having more meals with them.

I know that Covid won’t go away for many months, but I’m also counting myself fortunate that I’ll be able to blog more and talk about all the conference calls I have to do and the ways I’m getting through them.

Wow. It’s been two years since I started this new job. It’s not new anymore!

Compared to the last company I was with for about 13 years, I’ve advertised to more people in a shorter amount of time. I’ll call that significant progress. I’ve also been less and less stressed about speaking on the phone. Cold calls, answering, calling quickly to people I know for information, all of that.

Just the other day I had to make two cold calls basically back to back to get some information from a vendor. One of them was there, the other I left a message for. I used my tools — thinking about what I wanted to say first, then taking a deep breath and speaking at the pace I wanted — not the one dictated by the other person. In both instances it worked out very well.

In addition to paying attention to breathing, another tactic I’ve used a lot is to just … get it over with. Don’t overthink it. Don’t give the Negativity any time to seep in there and start causing doubt. That doesn’t do anybody any good. This of course takes a lot more practice. You can start with “easier” calls that aren’t mission critical to your home life or job.

The beauty of doing a few good phone calls is that you can remember them — and start forgetting about all the misery you’ve had previously on the phone. The last few thoughts of calls will be of communication and expedient resolution. So why not keep picking that option?

I’ve said recently that my stuttering hasn’t been too bad the past two years since the new job began. But I do still stutter. I always will. I’ve come to accept this.

So what am I stuttering on lately? Or what conditions seem to make it worse? I’d say unpreparedness.

I had to think for a while about this since things move slow enough — or maybe I’ve just figured out better how to control them — so that I’m rarely unprepared. This mostly happens in a meeting when I’m asked about something completely off-topic. The good news is that I work with people who are patient. So if I need to take a moment to say, “let me think,” they usually do. And then I can look something up on the computer or rack my brain trying to recall what the issue was.

I’d say it only gets worse if there’s a peppering of questions by others for me. Then usually what happens is that I’ll stumble for answers as I’m trying to think. Then while I’m thinking and speaking and stuttering, I’m also forgetting the other thing that they need to know. So a few questions in, and I’m already trying to backtrack and fix a mistake I said two minutes ago.

Just writing about this is making me feel stressed! I can feel it unfolding on the phone on a conference call or in a room with a lot of hard stares.

Adding to the stress is usually the slow realization, during questioning, that I may have completely missed something or screwed something up royally. Or that forgetting about something that has now come back to bite me. Stress goes up, my breathing gets way out of whack, and I’m stuttering all over the place.

Breathe.

But like I said. I usually try to stay organized and prepared so that I don’t have to go through an ambush interrogation. The stress stays at a nice low level. I can breathe. I can let my words out slowly. I can focus on the content versus whatever small stutter I do encounter.

Since I work at a manufacturing plant, there’s a need to make sure everybody is aligned every day on what’s going on with production. To that end, there’s a morning meeting. I usually try to sit in on these, just to listen what’s going on, if there’s any issues I can help with (my responsibilities are more long-term, not daily) or if there’s a problem that keeps happening that I can try to wrap a project around.

I’ll often need to talk about project work or something we are trying to do, engineering-wise, during the upcoming year to address long-standing issues.

My usual approach is to listen to the first half of the meeting and then think if there’s something I should add. Oddly, I don’t rehearse this in my head. I just think of what it is, and that’s about it. The last part of the meeting the supervisor will go around the room and ask if the participants have anything to add.

When I was a kid, this was obviously the worst part. Knowing they’d come to me, and I’d have to say yes or no or whatever. But during these meetings, after having done them for so long, I’m not afraid. There’s a feeling that I have to share what I know. I’m comfortable with the group. Everybody is patient with me. We usually laugh during these meetings, so nobody is too uptight.

When they call my name, I always — always — remember to take a deep breath. Then I take another shorter break and start talking. I try not to think about saying the words. I focus on the content. Make sure that I’m being clear and specific with my comments. Because usually if I have to add something, it means that it’ll impact a few people in the room, on the floor, or with regards to production going out to customers.

If there a few items, I’ll have written them down in my notebook. Then after each is brought up, I’ll just continue down the list.

Have I stuttered before during this meeting? Oh, heavens yes. It happens fairly often. But nobody is bothered by it. I’m not, either. I either just power through the word, or take a quick break and try again, making sure to take a breath. I have found that focusing on breathing really helps me not only relax, but with speech in general.

I had a really nice win a few weeks ago with regards to my stuttering. Something that I would do now — advertise — that I would not have done 10 years ago.

We had an all-day meeting at one of my plants. A training. They brought in someone from corporate to go over the principles listed in a book as well as a workbook and some in-group exercises. There were about 25 people in the room. I knew the majority of them. But still, I didn’t know the corporate person, and there were a few strangers.

At the beginning of the first day, he asked that we go from table to table. Say our name, how long we’d been at the company, and then something interesting about us.

So I eventually went. I introduced myself, that I’d been with the company for a year.

I had been thinking what I would share. I have a few interesting things. But I wanted to not only say something that was normally uncomfortable (the physical act of saying it) and also add in the challenge of difficult content.

So I said how I’m someone who stutters.

And that I had started a local chapter for the National Stuttering Association.

And that was that. I didn’t die. I barely stuttered. Nobody laughed or scoffed. Maybe it resonated with someone in the room. Maybe not. But I wasn’t afraid. And I gained a lot of confidence among my coworkers which translates well for the future.