Four Things Stuttering Taught Me About Business.
written by Kyle Sergeant & edited by Andrew Jonasson
illustrations by Andrew Jonasson & Matthew Cryderman
I lucked out. I have parents who never coddled me. They put me in front of every speaking opportunity throughout elementary school you can think of. My parents also put a great deal of emphasis on reading and writing — the two parts of the language trilogy I now gravitate towards to compensate for my oratory shortcomings. If you’re not great at one thing, try to be wicked awesome at something related, right?
As a kid/teenager, I was athletic and played a lot of team sports. This made it easy to make friends who had your back. And life in general has presented me with a lot of great friends who have always had my back.
So yeah, having a stutter has never been a problem for me.
In fact, my stutter has been a learning device — something that has taught me a lot about the inner workings of everyday life like a personal professor who has seen all there is to see and read all the great books they themselves have not written.
So what has a life of elongated “Hs,” silent “Es” and “As,” and hard “Ks” taught me?
Four things.
“T
hink before you speak.” In speech pathology 101, the professor must put that saying up on the board/screen and remind the class to always revert back to it when their stuttering patient goes off track.
It’s a statement my father repeated to me during childhood like I must have repeated, “Are we there yet?” during family vacations.
The benefit of my father’s repetition was that the statement stuck.
As a stutterer, when you think about what you want to say, you don’t just see the words you’re aiming to articulate. You see where the probability for problems to occur is the highest.
For example, a stutterer may have to present data insights and need to say, “Well, we looked at the conversion rate and found that our cost per conversion equaled $10.”
As a stutterer, I know “equaled” is sitting at the end of the sentence like one more drink sits behind the bar, waiting to turn your night into a painful memory the next morning. So how might I combat “equaled?”
“Was,” “totalled to,” “came to” — all would do the trick and get me through the sentence. I know that because of experience.
In business, thinking about what is required — looking at the problem from every possible angle so you understand what has been put before you and what you need to overcome — then thinking about past experiences that might offer insights into how to act is a must.
Not every problem is the same. But bits of a past problem may be in a new one. Therefore, bits of past solutions will be there, too. So use them.
E
ven by thinking and applying my experiences as a stutterer, sentences still come up and stop me dead in my tracks. My entertaining excuse for this is I’m always in the presence of an enchanting woman when it happens.
The real reason is I have a stutter and that’s the way it goes for me.
As a toddler I would have never been a participate on “Kids Say The Darndest Things” because, well, I couldn’t say a darn thing. Meh. It made me think and work hard. It made me think about how to get better and achieve something — in my case, that something was being able to say, “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
Being able to think ahead and analyze a sentence to see the probable problem word(s) and know the word(s) to use to dodge the problem wasn’t something I just picked up. I had to develop the skill. I had to recognize the weakness and develop a strength — so I read more because that’s how you expand your vocabulary.
Business isn’t about perfection. Because perfection is impossible.
Business is about growth. You grow by iterating, by analyzing problems that exist today and attempting to foretell problems that will exist tomorrow. Then you learn and create a new version to overcome the problems, improve the business, grow the business, and create new profits for the business.
N
ot a lot of people are used to meeting someone with a stutter. When they do, it goes one of two ways:
- They are taken back and curious.
- They are taken back, make an ignorant and/or asshole remark (more on that in number four), and curious.
This curiosity is power. My power.
This curiosity means I have a few moments to make an impression.
This is an amazing thing to have during presentations. Yes, I get nervous like everyone does when it comes to presenting — but knowing that the moment I start speaking an inner curiosity emerges in whoever I am presenting to gives me confidence and drive.
The drive I mention is the drive not to let the moment pass. I know I cannot go up there and just spit out facts and figures. I know that I need to tell one hell of a story. I need to keep the moment mine.
In business, you need to recognize your opportunity to do something and get noticed. When you get noticed, you need to earn the right to hold that attention for as long as possible. And you hold people’s attention for as long as possible by thinking, thinking of experiences, and being open to iteration.
I was 22 years old. I needed a job like basic people need a pumpkin spiced latte on September 1st. I applied for a sales gig at a “financial consultancy” firm. I did this at a job fair. And I made it through three interviews and was told all that was left was a conversation with the branch president.
I met the branch president and we shot the shit: I told him a story about me, said I was ready and willing to “make it happen,” and did this while stuttering a few times.
“So, how do you propose we deal with your whole ‘stuttering’ issue?”
It was the first and only time I’ve ever been asked that question in a job interview. I didn’t accept the job offer.
Stuttering isn’t an issue. Stuttering is a challenge. And challenges are there to be crushed.
Being short, being obese, being super tall, being dyslexic, being of a certain gender and/or race — all challenges many people deal with in life. And they’re more awesome for being able to find a way to deal with those challenges and keep rocking whatever it is they rock. You want to surround yourself with these people.
Our times change at a rapid pace. With this comes new problems for businesses. These new problems require different perspectives to formulate new solutions.
Bad people — closed off to interesting ways of being and thinking — are useless to you as an individual and a business.
Good people create awesome success stories. Find those people. Work with those people. Keep being that kind of good person.
Because Good Business is Great Business.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate it a great deal.
My Creative buddies and I at Story + Planning have an e-newsletter. We call it Creating Uniquity. It’s delivered weekly, read by people from New Zealand to Memphis, and full of inspiration we find each week.
