Stammering and speaking anyway

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Madhavi

Madhavi Roy knew her MBA course would involved lots of talking. Here, she tells us about confronting the fear and how she's now supporting others afraid of speaking up.

There's a specific kind of panic I came to know while studying for my MBA. It's the panic inside my head, half a second before I raise my hand in class. In that moment, I am scanning the sentence I'm about to say, hunting for the vowels I know will trip me up, swapping 'unit' for 'team', 'important' for 'key'. By the time my hand goes up, I have already said the answer three times in my head, edited each version and chosen the one I think I can get through. 

Then I raise my hand anyway.

I arrived at the Indian School of Business for one of the country's most competitive MBA programmes, anxious about how much of it is built around speaking. Cold calls. Class participation. Elevator pitches. Networking. Interviews. Group work. Socialising with 400 new people. In a place that trained us to pitch our way into our futures, fluency wasn't just an asset. It felt like the price of admission.

The fear was not really about my stammer itself. It was about what I believed people would inevitably infer from it.

Strangely, cold calls were the easier ones. Nobody expected polish from a cold call; we were all just figuring it out in real time. Raising my hand was harder, because I had volunteered. I had chosen visibility, and I felt I had to justify that choice by being clear, fluent, useful and impressive. The fear was not really about my stammer itself. It was about what I believed people would inevitably infer from it: that I was less intelligent, less competent, less worthy of being in the room. I wanted to engage, argue, add to the discussion and be seen as someone who had something meaningful to contribute. But on days when I stammered a lot, especially when someone finished a word for me, I would feel myself shrink and think, I could not even give that one answer properly, so what am I doing here?

Naming what I was afraid of

The same fear followed me into the social life. In a new environment you want to be liked, accepted, funny, interesting and remembered well. I could be at a party, feeling happy and excited, and still become afraid of my own voice. What if I stammered on the punchline of a joke? What if people pitied me for my 'impediment'? 

On the worst days, after blocking on a single word in front of seventy people, I would walk out and feel myself recede into a smaller, much younger version of myself — embarrassed, ashamed, exposed.

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Madhavi in front of an audience

A turning point came in a class called Business, Society and Non-Market Strategies. I really wanted to participate, but I was afraid that my words would not be as polished as everyone else's. One night, I told close friends I was going to raise my hand the next day. When I did, before making my point, I stated to the entire class that I stammer and might get stuck on a word. I know now that my stammer is nothing to apologise for, but in that moment, saying it out loud freed me. I still stammered during my answer, but somehow I did not feel humiliated because I had already named the thing I was afraid people would discover.

I learned that competence does not have to sound effortless.

Self-disclosure didn't cure my stammer. Nothing did, and nothing was supposed to. But it freed me from the exhausting performance of pretending to be someone who didn't stammer. Later, when a few students reached out to say that my vulnerability had stayed with them, I realised that the fear I carried was not as private as I had imagined. There were other people in the room who were afraid too: the quiet ones, the students too anxious to speak up, the ones I had stopped seeing because I was so busy comparing myself to the loudest voices.

That is what eventually drew me to the Public Speaking Club. I wanted to support students who were afraid of speaking up, who felt imposter syndrome, who worried about blanking out in interviews or not having the perfect answer. Hosting sessions on public speaking anxiety brought me real joy because I could use my own fear to make someone else feel less alone.

I did not become fluent during my MBA, and that was never really the point. What changed was my relationship with visibility. I learned that competence does not have to sound effortless, and that sometimes the vulnerability we spend years trying to hide becomes the very place from which we are able to lead.

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