Pierre Roberge

The twenty years

Stuttering quietly ran my life from the age of four. It stopped me from making friends, from approaching the people I liked, from applying for the jobs I actually wanted. I became a computer programmer partly because programmers can sit at a desk and not have to talk. That is not a joke I tell for effect — it is a career chosen around a fear.

The exhausting part was never the stutter itself. It was the constant scanning, hiding and bracing: keeping a mental list of who knew, swapping the word I wanted for an easier one, letting the phone ring out, replaying a single blocked sentence for hours afterward.

Everything I tried that did not work

I did not take it lying down. Over those two decades I went through:

• More than a hundred psychology books
• A hypnotherapist at $80 a session
• An NLP course
• Breathing techniques and foot-tapping rhythms
• A brain-wave machine
• Catharsis therapy, three times a week

Some of it helped a little. None of it fixed anything — because none of it answered the only question that mattered: why was I stuttering in the first place? Looking back, I notice that most of what I was handed asked me to add more conscious control to my speech. That turned out to be exactly backwards.

What actually happened at 24 — and it was not magic

At 24 I was stuck in a job I hated. I quit and gave myself three months. Not three months to hope — three months to work.

I want to be precise about what that work was, because this is the part people skip when they tell my story back to me:

• I researched it myself. I had already read over a hundred psychology books. This time I read with a single question instead of many: why am I stuttering in the first place? Nobody had answered it for me, so I went and answered it.
• I found the root cause. Fear — and the over-control it produces. Everything I had tried before had been aimed at the symptom. Once I could name the cause, the target changed completely.
• I devised my own exercises. Not breathing drills or rhythm tricks — deliberate practices designed to change what my mind believed about speaking. I put myself in chosen situations, gathered evidence my brain could not argue with, and repeated it until the bracing stopped.
• Then I overcame it. By doing that work, on myself, over months.

Along the way came the moment I still remember — speaking for seven minutes straight without a single block. But that was the result of the method, not a miracle that arrived on its own. Nothing about this was luck, and nothing about it was instant.

That is the whole reason I write and coach. If it had been magic, I would have nothing to teach you. Because it was research, a diagnosis and a set of exercises, I do.

Why listen to me

I am not a clinician, so here is exactly what I bring instead: twenty years inside the problem, a cause I worked out myself, a method I built and tested on myself first, and twenty-five years of evidence that it held.

• 25+ years stutter-free. I overcame it at 24 and never went back.
• Went from hiding behind a computer to working in sales, then teaching — voted best teacher four quarters running.
• Presented to executives and rooms of 50+ people in California, in English, my second language.
• Now an IT Business Partner who leads video meetings every single day.
• Wrote No More Stutter: How To Overcome Stuttering, available on Amazon Kindle.
• Coach teens (12+) and adults privately, one to one.

What I believe about stuttering

If you only take one thing from this page, take this: the equipment is fine.

• Stuttering is driven by fear, not by a defect of the mouth or vocal cords.
• Speech is meant to be automatic, like walking. Fear pulls it off autopilot and hands it to your conscious mind — and that over-control is the block, the repetition, the stretched vowel.
• The proof is already in your own life: you do not stutter when you are alone, and you do not stutter when you sing. A physical defect does not vanish the moment the room empties.
• The plank test: a wide plank on the ground is easy to walk. Lift the same plank ten stories up and you wobble — identical board, only the fear changed. Recovery means bringing the plank back down to the ground.
• The way out is to give your brain undeniable proof that speaking is safe, over and over, until it stops bracing.
• I say "recovery," not "cure." There is no pill, surgery or device that cures stuttering. Recovery is real, and I am an example of it.

You can read these ideas in more depth in the glossary of terms I use, or see how my approach compares with speech therapy and fluency shaping.

Where my approach fits — and where it does not

How to reach me

The fastest way to talk to me is a free discovery call. Otherwise, email pierre.roberge@gmail.com. If you are a journalist, podcaster or researcher writing about stuttering, you are welcome to quote anything on this site — a link back to nomorestutter.com is all I ask.