10 Day workshop – Day 3

Our morning started with the obvious routine of jogging and meditation, today we learn how to focus our mind(we have done 50 minutes of meditation exercise) and how to eliminate or bypass negative thoughts that comes while stammering.Post breakfast session we started with summarising the last day’s activities,in the meantime local PWS joined us (today two new membr came to attend the workshop).As everybody was pretending to be so fluent that we were trying very hard to hide our stuttering, sachin sir take note of our unbearable struggle to get the fluency show out, he gave the group a task to speak in our natural stammering or rather worst stammering. Sachin sir show us a videos on Julia Irani where we learn in spite of her stammering she was able to Communicate her message clearly. we learned that if we accept ourself as we are and do not bother about people expectation 80% of our struggle goes. Next we parted all in a gruop of two and partners had t took each others stammering videos,the modus operandi was to stutter freely and give us freedom to vent out our stiffed emotions that were keeping agonising us for so long.we observed our partners stammering behaviours and had to give him positive and negative feedback, once the person take heed of one negative shades in speech, we again took the modulated/corrected stuttering videos.after taking our lunch, group aimed to learn and practice bouncing, prolongation and pausing.we started with bouncing, a task was given to group where we had to complete a Hindi movie (Sholay) story while practising bouncing. later we learned how to manage and control the time pressure situations the idea behind it was to give us complete serenity, calmness, stillness while deciding on a course of action, subsequently we followed with pausing and prolongation techniques with support of some practice activities, then we wind up the day with the thought of keeping our soul spirited and cheerful as we were feeling from last two days.

Kishore Bisht
(Kishore, thanks a lot for summarising everything so well. I am just adding a few more things, just in case anyone is interested:
We played “Boom out” energiser. Some of the interesting observations from video interview exercise were:
1. Most of us were more fluent than usual while facing the camera.
2. Two of us had done it for the first time. They always had a fear of watching themselves on the screen. But, now they discovered that in spite of dis-fluencies, they did not look all that bad..
3. All of us, in spite of initial reservations, were able to take the critical feedback from each other.
4. Some of us proved to be good at asking deep and unpredictable questions.
5. Most of us displayed a tendency to answer as soon as the question was shot.
6. Most of us were surprised to see our secondaries and body language caught on the tape. In the second round, most of us were able to improve on this.
(Participants: Sandeep R, Sandeep K, Vineet, Aman, Niraj, Kishore, Raja, JP and sachin )

Post lunch: we discussed and practised three techniques: Bouncing, prolongation, pausing. To illustrate the difference in mere fluency and good communication, a clip from Rocket science and from Eckhart Tolle on Oprah show were shared and discussed.