I Built My Entire Career Around My Stammer. Now the Ground Has Shifted.

I'm 35. I'm a subject matter expert with years of experience in Agile, project management, training, and consultancy. I was born with a stammer.

For most of my career, I didn't talk about it much - because I didn't have to. I had quietly, carefully, built a professional life where it rarely got in the way.

Looking back, that took more engineering than I ever admitted to myself.

The architecture of control

Early on, I gravitated toward roles that were systems-focused (thank goodness for Datix). My work was largely independent. When I did interact with people, I was the expert in the room; which meant they needed me more than I needed them. That dynamic gave me something valuable: time. Patience. People listened, because they wanted what I knew.

When I moved into training, I found a rhythm that worked even better. I would open every course the same way: "I have a stammer." Simple. Direct. And it worked, because the people in front of me wanted to pass their exam. They wanted my knowledge and my experience. So they listened carefully, and they were patient with my speech in a way that felt natural rather than forced.

I had control. Or at least, I had enough of it.

What happens when the control goes

The Agile market has contracted significantly. Like many specialists in this space, I've had to pivot: into freelancing, into new fields, into rooms where I'm no longer the established expert people have already committed to learning from.

And that shift has exposed something I hadn't fully reckoned with.

When you're bidding for work, people aren't patient in the same way. They're assessing you in real time, often in a single conversation, and they have no particular reason to wait. When I'm presenting webinars for other organisations (content that gets recorded and published without my ability to edit) I lose the control I relied on. When I'm interviewing for roles outside my established reputation, words like organisation, development, strategy, portfolio, progression, forecast, the exact vocabulary of senior professional life, can catch in my throat at the worst possible moments.

The safety net I built, thread by thread over fifteen years, isn't there in the same way anymore.

And in that exposure, I've also had to face something harder: my stammer has gotten worse over the past two years. Not just in the new high-pressure situations. In my training rooms too, spaces where I always felt most confident. That's not easy to sit with.

The words I don't say

Here's something people rarely talk about: when you have a stammer, you learn which words are going to betray you. And over time, you start avoiding them because it simple take too long too pronounce.

I find workarounds mid-sentence. I restructure my thoughts, simplify the work on the fly to route around the words I know will trip me up. It happens so automatically now that I barely notice I'm doing it- until I do notice, and then I can't stop noticing.

The problem is that the words I avoid are often the most precise ones. The most professional ones. The ones that would best express what I actually mean. So I reach for a simpler word instead, a vaguer construction, a sentence that gets the idea across but not as sharply as I could have put it.

I have always sounded smarter on paper than I do face to face. In writing, I can use the full range of my vocabulary. I can say exactly what I mean. In conversation, especially under pressure, I'm working with a reduced set- not because the words aren't there, but because I've learned not to risk them.

That gap between how I think and how I come across in speech is one of the most frustrating things I've never known how to explain. Until now.

The gap between who you are and how you come across

I know what I'm capable of. The clients and delegates who have worked with me closely know what I'm capable of.

But professional credibility, especially at senior levels, is built in moments; pitches, first impressions, executive conversations. And when your speech becomes unpredictable in exactly those moments, it creates a perception gap that's genuinely hard to close.

Here's something I only recently learned: a stammer is classified as a disability under the Equality Act. I genuinely didn't know that. I'd spent decades managing it, working around it, building systems to contain it, and it had never occurred to me that it had a legal status. That realisation sat with me for a while.

A stammer is not uncertainty. It is not lack of preparation or intellect. It is a neurological speech difference that affects around 1% of adults. But that context doesn't always travel well into a 30-minute pitch or a video posted online without your input.

And speaking of which, I cannot afford speech therapy right now. The Agile market has done what it's done, and that's just the reality. So I'm navigating this largely on my own, while simultaneously trying to rebuild in a new professional direction.

The AI problem

There's one more thing I want to name, because I think it matters and I haven't heard many people talking about it.

AI-assessed interviews are becoming increasingly common. Recorded video responses, evaluated by algorithms before a human ever watches them. And I have a real problem with this, because AI is not built to understand stammering. Not yet. The pauses, the repetitions, the non-linear rhythm of how a person who stammers speaks, these are not signs of poor communication! But I have no confidence that an automated system evaluating my fluency would know the difference.

I've survived a great deal. I was bullied in school because of my speech. I found a way through. I built a career. I became someone people pay to learn from.

And the thought that an algorithm (with no understanding of what a stammer is or what it costs to manage one) might be the thing that filters me out before I ever get to speak to a human being? That genuinely troubles me. It's a conversation the industry needs to have.

Why I'm writing this

I'm not writing this for sympathy, and I don't have a neat resolution to offer.

I'm writing it because I suspect I'm not alone, and because the professional conversation about inclusion rarely makes room for this particular experience. We talk about bias based on gender, background, appearance. Rarely about the subtle but real disadvantage of a speech difference in environments that reward fluency.

If you're someone who stammers and has built workarounds you're now finding insufficient.... I see you.

If you're someone involved in hiring, commissioning freelancers, or running organisations, I'd ask you to consider what signals you're actually reading when you assess someone's communication. Is it the quality of their thinking, or the smoothness of their delivery?

Those are not the same thing. And for some very capable people, that distinction matters enormously.

I'd welcome any thoughts, experiences, or perspectives from wherever you're sitting.