He is one of the essential faces of the PAF. Journalist Julien Arnaud, who is celebrating his eighteenth birthday as a joker of the 8 p.m. from TF1, was the guest of the show We’re doing TV again, broadcast on RTL, this Saturday, May 18. At the microphone of Éric Dussart, the television host, who celebrated his 50th birthday on February 11, gave touching confidences about his career. Thus, he revealed that he had to tame a speech impediment. “I was shy, I stuttered, you know, when I was a kidhe conceded when his colleague pointed out to him that his job had had a therapeutic effect on him. I realized, a little late, that these are things that helped me to be good on the air.”
“When you stutter a little bit, you integrate the fact of thinking about what you are going to say before saying it, to avoid obstacles. […] We anticipate and this allows us to better measure our flow, to concentrate better on what we are going to say, to ensure that the brain is always one step ahead of the mouth.”said the father, in order to illustrate his point. “Today, this no longer happens to me. With experience, you learn to manage inner calm, to clear the air within yourself”he clarified, before revealing his little secrets to achieve this: “Focus on your breathing, on your sensations, but avoid anticipating things.” An inspiring speech, especially for the many shy children and adolescents who dream of one day doing the same job as him.
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These personalities who have also been prey to stuttering
Julien Arnaud is not the only personality to have broken the taboo of stuttering in the media space. For a long time, François Bayrou also suffered from this speech disorder. “We never quite get out of it”he wrote in March 2014 when signing the preface to William Chiflet’s book Be a stutterer and shut up. “It’s such an unfair feeling when you have floods of words erupting in your head and you can’t bring them out.”he confided in 2011 to the JDD. In 2021, during an interview with Audience, the British-American actress Emily Blunt also returned to the stuttering which, during her childhood, caused her a lot of suffering. For the actress, who “took years to gain confidence” in her, expressing oneself was “a real test”.
Article written in collaboration with 6Medias
Photo credits: Capture RTL