Thinking and Speaking

Hunter Garrett
Post #5
Obstacle

        During my time throughout school, I was always able to speak slowly, clearly, and was easy to understand.  However, as my knowledge expanded and my thinking capability increased over the years, I noticed that something began to happen to the way that I speak.  I first noticed this in my first year of high school where I realized that I was now talking and reading really fast.  I did not even know about this at all until people from my classes told me about it, and then I was puzzled as to why this was happening.  To make matters worse, the problem didn't stop there.  Throughout the rest of my years in high school, it got worse and worse until I started stuttering whenever I spoke out loud.  This created a huge obstacle for me because it restricted and hindered my ability to communicate properly and effectively especially with my teachers and friends at school and my family at home.
        I discovered that apart from this speech problem, my thinking style had also changed.  I noticed that I was now thinking very rapidly and intensely all the time which was something that I never really did before I started high school.  It then dawned upon me that the reason why I was speaking so rapidly and was stuttering so much was because of the way that I was thinking.  After logically analyzing this cause, I discovered that whenever I spoke, the thoughts in my head flew by so rapidly that my mouth was unable to keep up with them.  By the time I was finished reading the first sentence, I was already blazing through the second one in my head.  If I wanted to tell someone something, my thoughts would be immediately beyond what I was currently saying.  This resulted in me stuttering because my thinking and speaking was out of sync with each other.  My speech lagged behind my thoughts which resulted in words coming out slurred and difficult to understand.  I realized that I was talking and reading super fast because I was trying to keep up with my thinking pace.  I began to notice how terrible my speech was becoming and I knew for a fact that even my friends and teachers at certain times couldn't understand a thing of what I was saying.  It got to a point where I had to repeat myself constantly to try and say my thoughts in a more clear manner so that I could be understood.
        In order to correct this issue, I needed to articulate my speech properly with my thoughts and not try to blaze through everything.  I forced myself to speak and think slower to prevent this problem from worsening even further.  These corrections yielded no results at first, but after I continuously made an effort to control my thoughts and speech, I did start to see improvement and a reduction in my stutters.  Eventually, by the end of my last year in high school, my stuttering was nearly gone and I was no longer reading and talking as fast as I originally did.  My family and friends now have a much easier time understanding me, and while I do still tend talk and read quite fast everyday, it is in no way as fast as it was before.  It does still bother me that I am unable to speak as well as I did many years ago since I now permanently think fast, but this is a huge step in the right direction to speaking properly again.  This obstacle was extremely annoying and was something that always concerned me everyday.  However, I now realize that it has made me learn to control my thinking and speaking pace.  I now make an effort to try and articulate and pronounce my words clearly alongside my thoughts to try and communicate clearly and effectively.   If I had never experienced and dealt this problem before, I would have never learned how to adjust my reading and speaking speed which is an ability that is needed greatly in order to be able to communicate properly and effectively.