How 1 Speech Therapy Session Changed Everything!

Introduction:

This week’s blog post slightly delves away from the typical theme of my blog posts but it touches upon a topic which aims to boost your communication skills.

Speech therapy is something that I’ve heard about but never really taken the steps to undergo. Find out about my thoughts before, the experience itself as well as what I took away from the workshop.

I’ll use the terms “Speech Therapy” and “Workshop” interchangeably as the session was delivered as a workshop but it does incorporate “Speech Therapy” techniques.

As always, before we get into this week’s blog post, make sure to applaud, comment and share.

Happy Reading!

So What is It?

For those who don’t know, Speech Therapy is essentially training that people undergo in order to speak more clearly.

My Prior Thoughts About My Speech:

I’d say it’s good enough.

I’d definitely say that there’s room for improvement though. Sometimes I talk too fast, sometimes too slow, sometimes too many words …

I guess at the end of the day, it’s a skill (one that I have a lot of room for improvement though).

The only real improvement that I myself had thought to make was that I wanted to start speaking slower.

Maybe I should relax a bit myself?

Maybe it’s good to be self critical?

I’m not 100% sure myself to be honest.

How Did It Come About?

While on placement, we all had a session booked in.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember the exact name of the company that provided the service although I do remember that they had London in their name!

What Happened During the Workshop?

So we all broke off into smaller groups and the task was all about reading a piece of text.

This was an iterative process where we would read it multiple times and each time, try and add a new technique (I’ll mention these below) in order to make the speech delivery “better”.

I even have recordings that were essentially a “before and after”, showcasing the improvement throughout the session.

Things That I’ll Take Forward:

This could be broken down into many different techniques but I’ll touch on the 2 main ones:

Pace of speaking relates to importance — I used to have just one pace but now I try and slow down for key information and “talk faster” if something is “less important”.

Emphasis on key words — This somewhat relates to the first point but I feel as though emphasing words really does boost my speech delivery considerably.

Other Thoughts:

I can definitely see an improvement in my speech and it has only been a few months.

I’m honestly so much more confident in my communication!

If course it goes without saying that I try to implement these techniques as much as possible. In fact, you’ll be able to see how my communication improves over time by checking out my YouTube Channel (link at the bottom!). Of course this does present the challenge of overcoming “Camera Shyness” but give it time and the improvements will be there to see!

It’s just interesting about how something can randomly be made available to you and the value you can take from it. This applies especially given the fact that it’s something I’d probably never do!

Final Things:

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. It has deviated away from my typical content but I hope you can take away some value from it.

All my links are here