NLP for Speech Problems

Yes, I have a clue about what is happening here. What’s happening here is simple: you’re so excited and often impatient to tell your listeners what you want to tell them that the words come out uncontrollably fast and get mixed up in the speed, because your brain produces the words faster than you can say them.  This is common and the only thing that’s crazy about this is the speed that your brain works at, which I mean as a compliment!  I’ve heard that the human brain processes information at 32 frames per second.  If you turn your hand 90 degrees in the wrist and back, that will take 2 frames per second.  So imagine how fast your brain works if we take the 32 frames per second as real!  But your mouth doesn’t work even half as fast, so there will be an inevitable time delay every time you pronounce your thoughts.  And because while you’re pronouncing one thought your brain already sees three or ten thoughts ahead of the one that you’re pronouncing, there’s absolutely no surprise that you mix words or letters up!

1. Get rid of the attitude that “you have picalepsy” or whatever else.  It is dangerous for your progress and development!  What you’ve done is common: if we don’t understand something, we look for explanation.  Most adults are not comfortable with not having explanations to what they don’t understand, because adults like to be right and know things. So we research things on the internet.  And the research will reveal all sorts of labels.  Your label was picalepsy. Once you found this label and saw that its explanation matched what you believed to be happening to you, you said: “Aha!  This explains and I understand what’s going on!”.  This is exactly the psychological state that puts many people into the comfort or complacency zone.  Once they find an explanation, they use it as an excuse for inaction.  You haven’t fallen into the comfort or complacency zone, because you’ve gone further to ask me for advice. It’s up to you to act on my advice or just read this and say “no, this doesn’t fit with what I believe”.  What you’ll do is up to you. If you start improving your problem, firstly shed the attitude that you have picalepsy, brain seizure, or anything else.

2. Channel your energy to observing yourself.  Start observing exactly when you mix words up and exactly what happens when you mix words up.

• Are you too excited by the content of what you say?
• Do you speak too fast?
• Do you breathe high in the chest?
• And do you see too many pictures of the content of what you say?
• Are you eager to say it all at once?
• Do you feel like you lost control?

• how you feel
• what state you’re in when you mix up words
• whether there is a pattern to when you mix up words
• whether you mix words up only when speaking to certain people
• what influence those people have on you, how their presence affects you, e.g. are you in awe of them, in love with them, intimidated by their authority, etc.

3. Once you start observing yourself, you’ll pick up valuable clues that will tell you the story. And you’ll start connecting the dots.  When you know yourself better, you can improve and tweak things one by one.

4. Visualize the content of exactly what you want to say before you say it.  When you visualise the content, you’ll organize your thoughts. That will automatically slow your processing down. And you will have more time to pronounce one thought at a time.  Then you won’t feel so rushed to tell it all at once. You’ll breathe more deeply while speaking – and you won’t breathe so high in the chest [which I suspect that you do now].

5. You can do breathing exercises to teach yourself to breathe in the diaphragm and then belly.

6. Grounding will also help you.  Read about grounding and learn to ground when you need to.  It will give you a lot of learning and answers to why this happens to you.  You may currently be very ungrounded.  When you learn to ground yourself, the rest will [often] come naturally.

Dear reader, if you know someone who has exactly the speech problem described here, now you know that solving it is no rocket science. Sometimes things really aren’t complicated. If you’d like to get NLP help for your or someone’s speech problems, let’s talk about it.