Shadowing Practice: 3 habits that boost mental clarity - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I don't know about you guys, but every once in a while, I'll just have a day where my brain is actually working well.
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The gears of my mind are fully lubricated, fully torqued.
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When I'm in a conversation with somebody, I don't have to search for the right words to say.
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They kind of just bubble up to the surface, and I can sling them out of my mouth onto them.
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Or if I'm reading a book, I'm actually able to comprehend what I'm reading.
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I'm actually absorbing the material.
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Or maybe I'm at a party, and I'm just a little bit more confident.
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I have a bit more swagger in my step and I'm way more social than I usually am.
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If you've had a similar experience you probably also know
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that these moments are fewer and further in between than we would probably like.
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It almost seems like once in a while the universe decides to zap us with this extra level of mental clarity.
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It's like a glimpse of our potential.
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It's a glimpse of how social or how confident or how clear-headed we could be if we did the right things.
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And it was actually this very feeling that got me into self-improvement way back
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when I was a teenager Way back when I was a teenager
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and I was kind of frustrated
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that I didn't feel like this all the time I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
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How can I more consistently feel like there's not this brain fog?
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How do I operate at my full potential more often?
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Well, I'm happy to report
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that I haven't figured it out I'm not gonna pretend like
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I know the answer to living at your full potential every single day of the week weak
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because I don't think that's actually possible.
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It's a little bit of a fallacy of perfection, but I want to go over three things that have really helped me clear mental fog,
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and it helps me operate closer to my mental potential than if I didn't do those things.
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But right before we jump into these tips, a word from our, no, I'm just kidding, no sponsor.
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That comes later.
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I just want to say that if you haven't seen my video on how to stop being tired all the time,
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I think that is a necessary precursor to this video because if you are doing things wrong in your sleep,
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diet, and exercise, which are kind of your fundamentals to feeling well, then I don't think doing these additional tips will necessarily help you.
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But if you do feel like you have a pretty good grasp on your sleep,
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diet, and exercise, and you're still feeling mentally sluggish and brain foggy and your life's a mess, uh, then maybe these tips will help you.
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So strategy number one is to practice something I like to call graduated stimulation.
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From my experience a great deal of my lack of mental clarity is stimulation induced
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when i do something that's overly stimulating like browsing social media for hours and hours
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or i get into a youtube rabbit hole just binging videos
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all day long i sort of start to develop a brain
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fog it might be a result of kind of turning your rational brain off for a
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while and just indulging in this primal existence where you're just injecting yourself with dopamine and stimulation like you're a fiend.
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And this is a problem
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because I feel like a lot of us have a habit of doing our internet rounds first thing in the morning.
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We check Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube.
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We kind of just see what's new in the world.
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It's sort of giving ourselves hits of stimulation before we've even done anything, before we've even fed ourselves, before we've cleaned ourselves up.
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This makes it extremely difficult to hop into something more boring,
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more slow-paced, like doing whatever your job is, writing an essay.
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So a way to solve this problem is to practice graduated stimulation.
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To organize your day in a way that sort of ramps up the stimulation as the day goes on.
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So say whatever the most important thing you have to do in the day is like 1 out of 10 entertaining.
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It's not very fun.
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You're kind of dreading it you should do that thing as soon as possible.
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When you first wake up, when you have that mental energy, before your brain is absolutely corroded, you should dive into that one out of 10,
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not very fun thing first.
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And then you can move on to things
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that are gradually more entertaining as the day goes on
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and as your willpower seems to sort of drain and your physical energy levels start to drain, et cetera.
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So with this method, you're not really cutting out these internet rounds that everyone seems to do.
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You don't have to stop really checking your social media, but you should postpone that until after you've done the most important things that you have to do on your to-do list.
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That way it doesn't seem like there's such a huge entertainment disparity between your habitual pleasures
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and the things that you actually have to do.
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If you start from zero, then doing the not so fun thing is actually more fun than doing nothing a lot of the time.
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Whereas if you're binging social media, which is like seven out of 10 fun, four out of 10 fun.
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And then you try to do the less stimulating, boring thing.
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It seems like you're missing out.
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It's like, oh, this is dreadful.
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I've never used that word in a video in my entire life.
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Strategy number two is brain dumping.
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One of the craziest things about the human mind is
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that a bare minimum of 90% of all of our brain activity is subconscious.
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And I say a bare minimum because there's a little bit of argument in the scientific realm about this.
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Some scientists say that this number is as high as 99.9% of all of our mental function happens at the subconscious level,
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which means that as we go about our day, everything that we're intaking, inputting, everything that we're smelling, we're seeing,
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we're hearing is being processed behind the scenes, even though we may not be consciously aware of it.
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This is extremely important when it comes to mental clarity because we really need to monitor what our subconscious knows.
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Because even though we might not be paying attention to it, we still know about it and it still affects us and it leaks into every single thing that we do.
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A great example of this is if you have a business meeting or something you're supposed to remember, maybe an errand or taxes you're supposed to fill out.
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The more things that you have piling up that you need to do, even if you're not paying attention to it, The stress of these things is going to affect every aspect of your being.
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By putting things off, by postponing things, by procrastinating things, we're pretty much delegating it to our subconscious to worry about.
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And if we delegate too many things to our subconscious to worry about, it can often start to become way too much, and it starts to...
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We start to become anxious and stressed and overloaded and brain foggy.
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So I think a great way to deal with this problem
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and make sure
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that you greatly reduce the risk of this happening is by getting in the habit of doing something
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that I like to call a brain dump.
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Every single possible little thing, everything you have to do, everything you're responsible for, everything that you need to remember, you write down.
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You have a giant document where you just let loose.
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And it may seem counterproductive to have a giant mountainous list of things that you have to do.
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You might feel like you will get overwhelmed with this.
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In my experience, it's a lot less stressful to have this giant list than to have
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that list in your head leaking into every single thing that you do throughout the day.
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It's way better to have a physical copy of your anxieties than it is to keep it in your head.
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And try to be as thorough as possible.
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Just doing that will help you ease the burden off of your subconscious.
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You're kind of just emptying your mind onto a piece of paper.
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You're just clearing it of all the filth and just putting it somewhere that's outside of you.
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Now, as constructive and relieving as that will inevitably be,
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I'd highly recommend taking it a step further and then organizing your tasks according to the Eisenhower complex.
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Now the Eisenhower complex is basically just a system for organizing the importance and urgency of your various tasks.
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Things that are both important and urgent you should do first.
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Things that are urgent and not so important you should find a way to delegate
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or do kind of a little bit later
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or at the end of the day when you don't need as much mental energy things that are not urgent, aka not time sensitive, but are still important,
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you should find a way to plan for those things
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and figure out a time where you can slowly chip away at it.
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And things that are not urgent and not important, you just shouldn't do.
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Anything that's on your brain dump that is neither urgent nor important, you should find a way to just rid yourself of the responsibility of doing that thing.
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I cannot express to you how much mental clarity this will
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give you just not having your subconscious overloaded with all of these tasks and responsibilities that you have to do,
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and instead have them present on some sort of external organized template will free up your brain to work properly.
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Now, the third thing I wanna touch on is something that's kind of beaten like a dead horse in the self-improvement community, but I have a few things to say about it,
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and that is mindfulness.
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Mindfulness is basically the act of training your brain to exist not in the hypothetical, but in the real.
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You kind of bring your consciousness from outside of your head and all the busy, anxious, noisy thoughts that's going on in there,
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inevitably, and you bring it into your body, into what's in front of you, what's tangible, the sights and the smells and the feelings all around you.
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It really stops you from overthinking everything.
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And as we've kind of gone over, this overthinking or hyper-cerebralization is kind of the main driver of brain fog.
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And one really interesting thing about mindfulness is that although it is best practice to do it every single day, you don't really have to.
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Once you start learning the mechanics of exiting your hyper-cerebralization and entering the present moment,
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you start to view the world through a different lens, a more objective lens, one that kind of accepts reality as it is.
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And this can change your viewpoint permanently.
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If you find that you're someone who overthinks everything, you're prone to anxiety, you're prone to overthinking, mindfulness is kind of a no brainer.
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So for like two weeks, just practice mindfulness for five minutes a day.
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There's a million tutorials on YouTube as to how to do that, but I think it's kind of a no-brainer.
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So to recap, practice graduated stimulation.
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Figure out what the most important things that you need to do in the day are, and do those things first.
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Postpone your social media binge as long as possible, and gradually ramp up the entertainment value of each activity that you have to do as the day goes on.
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Secondly, practice brain dumping.
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Take everything that's overloading your subconscious and put it onto a physical medium, a giant word document of every single thing that you have to do,
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and then organize that brain dump into the Eisenhower complex.
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Thirdly, practice mindfulness.
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Learn how to exit the noise of your head, learn how to stop hyper-cerebralizing everything,
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and enter the present moment where things are a lot more clear, simple, and calm.
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If you do these three things, I would be shocked if they didn't work for you
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because these three things were some of the most important things in giving me mental clarity on a more consistent basis.
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And I really hope they work for you as well.
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As a bonus, I highly recommend checking out the book Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, one of the great founding fathers of Stoicism,
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a philosophy that has helped me tremendously in not just mental clarity, but in my whole life.
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And I'm actually listening to that book for like the third time using today's video sponsor, Audible.
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For those of you who don't know, Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audio books,
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After your first six months, it's still only $7.95 a month, So to take advantage of this incredible offer, hit the link in the description below,
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head to audible.com slash better ideas or text better ideas to 500 500.
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Once again, head on over to audible.com slash better ideas or text better ideas to 500 500.
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Learn something new, expand your brain, and as usual, have a great time.
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If you liked this video, make sure you hit like, because when you hit like, the algorithm blesses me by shoving my bald head into other people's home pages,
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helping them out, which also helps me out, so it's kind of a win-win for everybody.
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If you're lurking here, and this is the thousandth time that you've seen my face, not only should you consider hitting subscribe,
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but also the bell icon so that you don't miss future videos.
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Other than that, that's all for today.
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Thank you so much for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video.
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What You'll Learn
This video helps you build three key speaking skills: first, natural conversational flow by mimicking how the speaker connects ideas smoothly. Second, confident expression as you practice phrasing thoughts like "the gears of my mind are fully lubricated" with ease. Third, pacing control—learning to slow down for emphasis and speed up for excitement, just like the speaker does when sharing personal stories.
Listen For These Sounds
Notice the connected speech in phrases like "every once in a while" (where "once in a" links to "wuhn-sin-uh") and "kind of just bubble up" (the "of" reduces to "uh"). The speaker also uses elision in "I don't know about you guys"—the "t" in "don't" is soft, making it sound like "don' know". These small links make your speech sound more native, so listen closely and repeat!
Say It Like a Native
To mirror the speaker's rhythm, focus on stress: emphasize words like "boost", "clarity", and "potential" to highlight key ideas. Use the shadowing technique—play a short clip, pause, and repeat it immediately, matching the tone and pace. For extra practice, try a shadowing app to record yourself and compare. Remember, the speaker's casual style ("I'm happy to report that I haven't figured it out") uses contractions and pauses—copy these to sound more natural. Whether you call it "shadow speak", "shadow speech", or "shadowspeak", the goal is to mimic until it feels effortless. With daily practice, you'll notice your brain "gears" working smoother too—clearer thinking, clearer speaking!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | haven't figured · have really helped · haven't seen |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | exercise, which are · media, which is · someone who overthinks |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being processed · would be shocked · is filled |
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.