Shadowing Practice: 20 Years of Therapy Summarized in 13 Minutes - Learn English Speaking with Video
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This is over 20 years of therapy summarized in the next 10 to 15 minutes.
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My name is Mark Manson.
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I'm a number one New York Times bestselling author, and for the last 15 years, I've been teaching millions of people practical psychological tips to help them improve their lives.
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Now, when you go to therapy, no matter what you go for, the first and most important lesson that has to get drilled into your brain is that nobody is coming to save you.
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And in fact, the fantasy of being rescued is itself the thing keeping you stuck.
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It's a way of outsourcing responsibility while still feeling noble and justified in your suffering.
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The most dangerous version of someone is going to save me is when you disguise it as a plan.
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Once I get the promotion, once I find the right relationship, once I move cities, then I'll finally be okay.
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Then things are going to start to go well.
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Meanwhile, every year you spend waiting for the right mentor, partner, or opportunity is a year that you volunteer to stay exactly where you are.
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Self-reliance is not some rugged individualism cliche.
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It's the moment you realize that even the people who love you will never want your life more than you do.
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Now imagine how much the people who don't love you give a shit.
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That's right.
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They don't.
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The second lesson you learn in therapy is that not all of your problems are supposed to be fixed.
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You just learn to live despite some of them.
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We've been sold this idea that healing means arriving at some pristine emotional state where nothing hurts you anymore.
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But that's not healing.
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That's just denial with a fucking fairytale ending.
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The truth is that problems never really go away in life.
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They simply get upgraded for slightly better problems.
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And that's actually what growth is.
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That's what improvement is.
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Going from one problem to another slightly less shitty problem.
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The people who seem like they have it together haven't solved more problems than you.
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They've just stopped demanding that every problem be solvable.
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This is particularly problematic in the self-help industry because what happens is
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that as soon as people start learning how to heal and solve some of their problems, they become almost addicted to it.
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They almost go searching for more problems that they can solve.
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They almost look forward to having a crisis that they can bring to a coach or a therapist.
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And ironically, this obsessive desire to improve everything can hold you back just as much as not wanting to improve at all.
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See, there's a strange piece that comes when you stop fighting something and just let it sit there.
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And what you discover is that most of the suffering was your resistance to the pain, not the pain itself.
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Another big lesson that you will learn is that you are not afraid of failure.
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You're just afraid of being seen failing.
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And those are two very different things.
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Because ask yourself, if you could fail with total anonymity, with zero witnesses, zero consequences, you would try everything endlessly.
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Like you wouldn't give a shit.
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You just fucking go.
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You do it.
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So what that tells you is that the fear isn't necessarily about the success
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or failure or how good you are or how bad you are.
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It's about some imagined audience that you think will give a shit.
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Humans are so fucking weird, man.
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Like we rehearse our humiliation in advance.
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We pretend the worst possible outcome is true before it actually is because of reasons.
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And when we do embarrass ourselves, we play it on repeat in our minds, not for years, but for fucking decades.
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The people you're afraid of not impressing, they're actually barely paying attention to you.
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They're too busy managing their own fear of being watched to actually give a shit.
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Another lesson you will learn is that your mind lies to you all the time.
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And so you have to learn to question it.
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See, evolutionarily speaking, your brain's job is not to show you reality as it is.
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Its job is to keep you alive.
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And those are two very different assignments.
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Depression lies to you.
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It tells you that nothing matters when it actually does.
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Anxiety lies to you.
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It tells you that everything is going to go wrong when it actually isn't.
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Insecurity lies to you.
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It tells you that you aren't good enough as you already are, despite the fact that you kind of are.
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But these ideas, they feel so real because they speak to you in your voice, in your mind, incessantly.
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And so the fact is, is that we have thousands of thoughts per day
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and our instinct is to treat every single one like a fucking CNN breaking news alert, when most of them are just, honestly, commercials and spam.
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So the skill is not learning how to think positive.
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It's actually just learning to catch yourself mid-story and asking, is this true?
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Or am I just on autopilot?
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Another thing you will learn is that no matter what you do, not everybody will like you.
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And this is actually a good thing.
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It took me a long time to figure this out, but the people who dislike you are actually doing you a bit of a favor.
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They're self-selecting themselves out of your life so that you stop pouring energy into relationships that were never going to work anyway.
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See, you need people to disagree with you.
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You need people to find you a little bit abrasive who don't totally understand you.
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That friction is the proof that you stand for something, that you have an identity, that your life means something.
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Being universally likable is actually an invisible kind of prison.
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You're essentially outsourcing all of your self-worth to the world around you
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and then desperately trying to live up to everybody else's expectations instead of your own.
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The moment that you accept that some people are going to walk away, no matter what, you finally get permission to show up as who you are.
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And the people who stay, those are actually your people.
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And you get to enjoy knowing that for sure.
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Another thing you'll learn is that feelings are not facts, but they are still worth listening to.
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See, it's in our default nature to treat our emotions as some fucking cosmic decree handed down by the gods
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and chiseled into stone.
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But not only is this wrong, it's actually the complete opposite.
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Your feelings are always transitory, often arbitrary, wholly self-serving, and occasionally misguided.
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Basically, feelings are data, but they are not directives.
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They are telling you something is happening that you might want to change or pay attention to, but not necessarily all the time.
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Your job is to simply consider them.
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What you decide to do with them is up to you.
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Me, personally, I kind of treat my feelings like the comment section on YouTube.
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It's good to look and see what's there, but I don't take it that seriously.
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This video is sponsored by Brain.fm.
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So here's something that therapy teaches you pretty early on, that your brain is terrible at sticking to what you want it to do.
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The problem, of course, as always, is focus.
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The fact of the matter is that we live in a distracting world
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and our brains don't just fall into line because we want them to.
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We have to put them in the right environment too.
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And that's where Brain.fm comes in.
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It's actually music built with audio engineered specifically to shift your brainwaves into focus states.
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It uses functional neuroscience to get you locked in faster and keep you there longer.
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Now, I've been using it quite a bit when I write.
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I used it to help me write the script for this video.
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I mean, it works really well.
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Not only do they have a team of PhDs crafting the sonic scapes for you, but they recently had a study published in Nature verifying Brain.fm's effectiveness.
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Brain.fm has been doing this for over a decade.
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Millions of sessions, peer-reviewed research behind the tech.
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It is the lowest friction, highest ROI cognitive tool that I've ever come across, and you can try it one month for free by going to brain.fm slash IDGAF.
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That's brain.fm slash IDGAF.
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Stands for I don't give a fuck.
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Or just check out the link in the description.
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Another thing you'll learn is that sometimes the best thing you can do is let a dream die.
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Holding on to the wrong dream is like staying in a dead marriage.
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It itself may not make you miserable, but it will definitely prevent you from finding happiness.
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The truth is that most of the things we hope for for ourselves at 20, we will figure out that they are completely impractical,
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unrealistic, or flat out misguided by the time that we're 40.
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I mean, when I think about the shit that I wanted to do when I was 20, thank god i let that stuff go i wouldn't be here right now
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if i was doing the stuff i wanted to do at 20
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and that's okay like there's nothing wrong with
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that that's actually how life is supposed to go i don't know
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when we romanticize this idea that
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when you have a dream you're just supposed to like fucking run yourself into the ground trying to achieve it
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that might work for a very few select people of exceptional talent
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but for most of us we're gonna have to jump around three
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or four times throughout our lives to actually figure out where we belong.
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And if you mature at any reasonable rate, you will be fucking thankful you did not become the person you hope to be at 20.
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But I think people avoid this because they often feel like they've invested so much in a dream.
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They've already done so many things.
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They spent so much time and energy.
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But that sunk cost fallacy, it will eat your entire life if you let it.
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Ultimately, grief is the price of letting a dream go.
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And most people would rather stay miserable and stuck than to have to feel that grief.
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You will also eventually learn that your limitations are actually good for you.
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This is the affliction of our age.
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Infinite options creates infinite paralysis, not freedom.
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The person with 10,000 choices and the person with zero choices end up in the same place, not doing a fucking thing.
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The truth is constraints force creativity.
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Every great artist, entrepreneur, and thinker produce their best work inside of a box, not outside of it.
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Saying no to 95% of the things in your life is is what gives the remaining 5% significance.
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So a life without limits is ultimately a life without depth.
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An ocean a thousand miles wide and an inch deep.
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Your mortality is a limitation.
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Your energy is a limitation.
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Your time is a limitation.
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Your lack of talent is a limitation.
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Your upbringing is a limitation.
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These are not faults.
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They are the entire reason anything you do matters.
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Ask yourself, what are you going to do with them?
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You will also eventually learn that your parents did their best and still fucked it up.
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Both of those things can be true at the same time.
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This is where most people get stuck.
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They think they have to choose between their compassion for their parents and the honesty about how fucked up their childhood was.
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You don't.
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They did their best does not necessarily mean their best was good.
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It just means they tried.
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And let's be honest, trying matters.
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It means something.
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One way I sometimes think about it is that
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if they gave 100% and it only ended up being 50% of what you needed, that is not either of your faults.
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It sucks, it's unfortunate, and it probably hurts, and you've probably been carrying around that fucking trauma backpack for a long time, but it's not necessarily anybody's fault.
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Forgiving your parents isn't really about letting them off the hook.
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It's about letting you off the hook.
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It's about stopping the bleed so you can move forward with your life.
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It is selfish in the best way.
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And by the way, your parents were also raised by supremely fucked up people who also happened to do their best, and it was not nearly enough.
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I remember right after I finished college, I got really mad at my dad for something
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and was kind of giving him a bunch of grief about not being there enough or something.
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A week later, he told me this story about how his parents, my grandparents, didn't even attend his graduation.
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They just gave him a phone call and said, good job, son, and then hung up.
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I was like, okay, yeah, this was an improvement.
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Thanks, dad.
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And finally, you will learn that only a few people in your life will matter in the long run.
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Over the course of your life, you will probably meet thousands of people.
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and hundreds of them will strike you as really interesting or fun to hang out with or fun to get to know.
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And you will over-index on the opinions of those few hundred people.
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But the truth is, is that only a handful, maybe a dozen people at most, will actually meaningfully change the trajectory of your life.
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And so when you find those people, you really have to prioritize them.
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Because all those others that you think care about whatever the fuck you're doing, they're just background noise.
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As a rule, we tend to overinvest in the quantity of our relationships because intimacy is difficult and terrifying.
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Knowing five people deeply means five people can actually really hurt you.
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Therefore, it's easy to distract ourselves with fake friends, more contacts, more networking opportunities, you know, friends of friends,
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cool parties, awesome events to fucking Instagram ourselves at, and of course, keeping all of our options wide open.
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But on your deathbed, you will not think about your follower count, you will not think about your networking contacts,
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and you will not think about anybody who liked a single post you ever put online.
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You will probably think about five or six faces.
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So act accordingly now.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “20 Years of Therapy Summarized in 13 Minutes”. This video has 186 sentences and 2416 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:21. The speaker talks fast, about 196 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| limitation noun | /lɪmɪˈteɪʃən/ | The act of limiting or the state of being limited. |
| grief noun | /ɡɹiːf/ | Suffering, hardship. |
| heal verb | /ˈhiːl/ | To make better from a disease, wound, etc.; to revive or cure. |
| misguided adjective | /ˌmɪsˈɡaɪdɪd/ | Of a person: lacking proper guidance; misled or mistaken in one's actions or thinking. |
| outsourcing noun | /ˈaʊtˌsɔː(ɹ).sɪŋ/ | The transfer of a business function to an external service provider. |
| friction noun | /ˈfɹɪkʃən/ | The rubbing of one object or surface against another. |
| distract verb | /dɪˈstɹækt/ | To divert the attention of. |
| miserable adjective | /ˈmɪz(ə)ɹəbəl/ | In a state of misery: very sad, ill, or poor. |
| infinite adjective | /ˈɪnfɪnɪt/ | Indefinably large, countlessly great; immense. |
| abrasive adjective | /əˈbɹeɪ.sɪv/ | Producing abrasion; rough enough to wear away the outer surface. |
| affliction noun | /əˈflɪk.ʃən/ | A state of pain, suffering, distress or agony. |
| anonymity noun | /ænəˈnɪmɪti/ | The quality or state of being anonymous (nameless or unidentified). |
| autopilot noun | /ˈɔtoʊˌpaɪlət/ | A mechanical, electrical, or hydraulic system used to guide a vehicle without assistance from a human being. |
| brainwave noun | Any of many rhythmic fluctuations of electric potential between parts of the brain, especially those seen on an electroencephalogram. | |
| chisel noun | /ˈt͡ʃɪzəl/ | A cutting tool used to remove parts of stone, wood or metal by pushing or pounding the back when the sharp edge is against the material. It consists of a slim… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| come across verb | To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| hand down verb | To transmit in succession, as from father to son, or from predecessor to successor. |
| jump around verb | To move erratically by jumping. |
| look forward to verb | To anticipate, expect, or wait for, especially with a feeling of approval or pleasure; to be excited or eager to. |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- You're just afraid of being seen failing.
- Ask yourself, what are you going to do with them?
- It's about letting you off the hook.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been teaching · I've been using · has been doing |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being rescued · be fixed · We've been sold |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who love · people who don · people who seem |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | We've been sold · haven't solved · They've just stopped |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 40 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: deathbed /ˈdɛθˌbɛd/, thinker /ˈθɪŋ.kɚ/, thankful /ˈθæŋkfəl/, therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: limitation /lɪmɪˈteɪʃən/, friction /ˈfɹɪkʃən/, affliction /əˈflɪk.ʃən/, cliché /kliˈʃeɪ/, humiliation /hjuːˌmɪliˈeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: limitation /lɪmɪˈteɪʃən/, miserable /ˈmɪz(ə)ɹəbəl/, anonymity /ænəˈnɪmɪti/, autopilot /ˈɔtoʊˌpaɪlət/, impractical /ɪmˈpɹæktɪkəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like limitation, grief, heal.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.