Jeff Burgess Motivational Business Manager
Author

Almost everyone has a childhood memory from which there is no escape. It could have been from being in, or even witness to, a car accident. Or the loss of a parent, aunt, or uncle. Most of those memories are private, deeply buried within one’s psyche.

My terrible childhood memory was, unfortunately, public. Now, some sixty years later, I still have horrific memories from being that terrible stuttering kid in town. I could barely open my mouth without someone in the classroom or park beginning to mimic me.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-Burgess was my outside-the-house name.

The public humiliation hurt a lot. There was one kid, David Meister, who went out of his way to torment me. I could have been at Lee Park in Skokie, playing basketball with others. Had David seen me playing from two blocks away, he would happily hurry over to the park and humiliate me with “Bu-bu-bu-bu-Burgess”.

Hard to believe that it seemed like a warmer place than inside my own house.

Perhaps for the kid with the stutter, there were no safe zones. Simply opening your mouth was a potential liability.

It’s hard to believe, but the park was a safer place than inside my own house. My mother’s primary concern about my stuttering was “What will people think?”

Even more brutal was her snapping her fingers while I was stammering, saying, “Come on, get it out!” Yes, I know. Mother of The Year.

Stuttering Therapy, Family Pressure, and Early Survival Skills

She would throw me in the car every Wednesday after school to take me to speech therapy with Dr. Elaine Dunn in Evanston, just one town over. I am unsure how she found Dr. Dunn; whether it was a referral or, perhaps, that her office was kitty-corner from Evanston’s main shopping street.

The latter may have been the more correct answer, as I was often waiting twenty to thirty minutes for her after my speech therapy and saw all the shopping bags in the back seat.

My dad was busy during the week, running his own company. For some reason, I seemed to stutter less when I was with him. My dad was a warm, caring person, as anyone within the company would have agreed.

While I had friends growing up, they were limited to those who accepted me as I was. My stuttering occurred slightly less around them, likely because of their acceptance. Not being afraid to open my mouth helped. Perhaps I was on to something. It was unfortunate that it took me until my sophomore year of high school to figure it out. I could have had a somewhat easier time during grade school and, especially, junior high.

If only I had realized so very long ago that my stuttering was connected to my brain, which, as far as I can remember, roughly as a four-year-old, ran at 100mph. My mouth had no chance of keeping up with my brain. Therefore, I was tripping over all my words.

Slowing Down: The Turning Point in My Stuttering Journey

By the time I graduated high school, and during that extremely short period at Illinois State University, I finally learned how NOT to have my mouth do that impossible task of keeping up with my brain, and instead, slow down my cadence. It was more or less making my brain keep up with my mouth, instead of the other way around.

Speaking need not be a race; yet that is precisely what I was doing – trying to be the first or next one to say something. Then, saying it so fast, I would trip over my own words. I would have given anything to get these ten years back as a do-over.

Annunciation mattered so much more than speed.

It was a shame I needed to self-advocate for this to happen, but everything happens for a reason, and I WAS THAT REASON!

The less and less I stuttered, the more confidence I gained in speaking. Confidence really was everything. When I entered the computer world at age twenty-two, I had the ever-so-slightest stutter here and there. Even Jud Beamsley, the Tek-Aids founder and CEO, noted it when the first attempt was made to move me into sales.

But, damn the torpedoes, it was full speed ahead regardless. Soon, I was speaking to everyone who would listen, from Fortune 500 Chief Information Officers to addressing customer events at brand-name venues, such as Old Trafford Stadium in Manchester, UK.

Building a Career Beyond Stuttering: Confidence, Growth, and Speaking Out

Over time, after I founded the company, I was invited to meet with our largest customers to present our product offerings to their operations and sales teams, enabling them to better support and present our solutions to their customers. I was also fluent with bank presidents, other CEOs, and on technical roundtables in Saudi Arabia. Speaking English, of course!

My unqualified advice to anyone with any kind of speech impediment is just to slow down. What you have to say is important. My mistake was thinking I had to say it faster than the next person. No wonder those words tripped all over my tongue. And, I could honestly say, “It Worked For Me.”

I went from being a kid afraid to open my mouth to becoming the person who talks to anybody. As much as my business motto was always “Sales is 99% confidence, and 1% bullshit,” perhaps my speaking motto could have been, “Speaking is 99% confidence, and 1% slow the fuck down.”

Hopefully, no one will ever have to go through what I went through, other than the success that came out of it, although all that success still doesn’t whitewash the painful memories, even fifty-plus years later.

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To learn about this entire journey, pick up a copy of 𝙄𝙩 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙚𝙙 𝙁𝙤𝙧 𝙈𝙚: 𝙈𝙮 𝙇𝙞𝙛𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙞𝙯𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙊𝙥𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘽𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙎𝙪𝙘𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨 today!

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