I finally have a better understanding of why I have been so resistant to fluency shaping targets. I shared with a friend how I felt about not attending a recent weekend stuttering workshop that focused on practicing fluency targets.

I have gone to this workshop for the past three years. I enjoyed participating and sharing with other people who stutter, but never really “worked on fluency”.  I was working more on acceptance, which is what I need and think other people need as well. I started talking more about acceptance and thinking about it and embracing it. I have never been comfortable with using targets. I never seemed to “use” them right or found I could stop and use them in the moment of stuttering.

I think perhaps some of the coordinators of the fluency workshop may have had a problem with my resistance to practicing fluency targets. It sort of felt like if I wasn’t working on fluency, then I shouldn’t go to this workshop. That’s the message I got anyway. I had wanted to go, planned to go, but the universe clearly had other ideas.

My friend put into words what I had been feeling  in a real visual way. When I think of a target, what comes to my mind is the game of darts, where you try to “hit” the target or the little round circle in the middle known as the bull’s-eye. If you miss and hit the outer circles, or even throw the dart completely off the board like I used to, you don’t get any points. And you lose. So if you miss the target, you have failed or are a loser.

Ever since I was introduced to the concept of fluency shaping and practicing targets, something didn’t feel right. I never liked the idea that if I didn’t reach a certain goal or target, that I failed in some way. I had been given so many messages of failure as a kid growing up that I certainly didn’t need to internalize failure as an adult.

And that’s what it has seemed like with me and target practice.  If I couldn’t do it or get it, I felt I wasn’t trying hard enough and somehow I was failing to meet expectations.

When my friend and I talked about target use, all of a sudden the light bulb in my head flashed on.  “Hitting a target” implies something negative. Hitting something. If the target is not hit, then we have failed. And I don’t like that word. I had enough of that as a kid. I work with kids. I praise them on their effort all the time. Even when they don’t succeed, they are not failures. None of us are. But when it is implied that if we had tried harder, we might have succeeded, it is hard to not feel like a failure.

I remember when I read the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrnes, I felt the same way. The book’s premise is the law of attraction. If you think positive thoughts about something, then it will happen or you will get what you want. To me, it implied failure if our positive thoughts didn’t lead to the positive result. Like somehow, I failed.

I remember last year I wrote about not wanting to be fixed. I still feel like that. There is nothing wrong with stuttering. I don’t need to hit targets to feel successful as a communicator.  All of us have different speech patterns and we all communicate in different ways. I don’t need to hit the bull’s eye. I am fine with the outer circles and even going off the board a lot.

Is it wrong of me to think like this? And if I do, should I really stay away from fluency-focused events? Even if I like the support and camaraderie?