Shadowing Practice: 3 Hard Truths About Finding the Right Person - Learn English Speaking with Video
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How do you solve the love depression that I talked about in the very beginning, looking at the data in your own life?
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Now, to begin with, to do this requires risk, taking risk.
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One of the characteristics that I find that's actually inhibiting falling in love the most,
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and this once again gets back to the literature that I look at every single day and what I write about,
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is that younger people, believe it or not, are actually less risk -taking than people were when they were young who are now my age.
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And this gets a lot to the work of Jean Twenge, a wonderful social psychologist at San Diego State University,
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who talks about how young adults are growing up much more slowly.
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And the way that she measures that is with risk -taking behavior.
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Now, some of it's pretty innocuous and healthy, like driving.
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Some of it's less healthy, like drinking and using drugs, which, you know, everybody says, oh, young people, they're drinking and taking drugs more than ever.
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No, wrong.
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A lot less, as a matter of fact.
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They're also less likely to fall in love.
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They're also less likely to have sex.
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And it has everything to do, she says, of a lower willingness to take personal risk.
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Now, risk is funny because there's bad risks and there's good risks.
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But risk in general is not an unhealthy thing.
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On the contrary, that's characteristic of being an entrepreneur with your life.
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And I don't recommend being an entrepreneur with your life by taking dangerous drugs and driving 100 miles an hour.
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That's stupid.
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But risks with your heart?
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It's another matter.
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That's the most entrepreneurial thing that you can do.
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Years ago, not that many years ago, I was giving a speech on Capitol Hill for a bunch of Capitol Hill staffers, people in their 20s.
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Now, for a little bit of background, Washington, D .C is the world's most dysfunctional dating market.
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I mean, it's everybody's climbing and it's all about power
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and it's just not a healthy way for people to fall in love, I have found.
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And so they were really deeply interested when I was talking about this topic.
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And I said, look, if you really want to be an entrepreneur, real entrepreneur in your life, give your heart away, take a risk.
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That's the ultimate risk of, you know, putting at risk valuable resources in search of explosive returns.
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That's the definition of entrepreneurship.
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I thought it was clever anyway.
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A couple of weeks later, a guy comes up to me on a plane and, because I'm always on a plane.
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And he says, Professor Brooks.
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I said, yeah he says i was at
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that talk you gave on capitol hill about being an entrepreneur with my life
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and to give my heart away and take a risk
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and i said yeah he says
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and i can't get it out of my head i said yeah he said
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so i'm on my way right now to tell a woman
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i've been secretly in love with for two years how i feel i'm gonna spill it
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and i'm like dude it was only a speech you know
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i'm not trying to ruin your life i was kind of worried about that because i'm thinking yeah i mean, this could have consequences.
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And I said, you know, here's my email.
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Let me know how it turns out.
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He said, okay.
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And I didn't hear from him, which seemed like not great.
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Well, I did see him some months later at a party, a holiday party at the company that I was running.
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And he showed up and he said, remember me?
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And I said, yeah.
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And I said, how did it go?
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How'd it go with that woman that you were in love with?
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And he said, he shot me down.
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She wasn't in love with me.
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Not at all.
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She was in love with another guy.
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She introduced me to him.
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It was horrible.
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And I was very contrite.
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I said, I'm sorry.
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I wasn't trying to ruin your life.
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And he said, no, no, no. He said, the reason I came is because I wanted to thank you.
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I said, thank me for what?
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And he said, because, you know, that was the thing I was most afraid of in my life.
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I mean, I just couldn't, I couldn't bear the thought of that happening.
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And it did.
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And I didn't die, and I'm not afraid anymore.
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You get the point, right?
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This makes you stronger.
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Now, to be sure, it is unbelievably painful to be rejected.
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I have studied the pain of social rejection.
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The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain is designed in the limbic system to make you hate social rejection.
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Even in little games when they put people in machines to look at the activities of their brains,
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and they simulate rejection by having a ball -tossing game that you're looking at on a screen,
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and two other people start excluding you from the game, it starts to feel painful in this dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your brain.
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Imagine when somebody says to you, you love me, but I don't love you.
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It's going to be unbelievably painful.
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It's intensely painful, as a matter of fact.
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And I've talked about this kind of pain in past episodes in the past.
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But here's the thing that's how you learn that's the only way
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that you learn what do you learn you learn about what went wrong you learn
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that you won't die you learn more what you're looking for you learn
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that that wasn't the person for you and why that's why it's
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so critically important to get into the cycle of try fail suffer Try.
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Try again.
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Now, I've got a lot of data on how long it actually takes for people to get over their heartbreak.
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And the answer is usually a few months, not a few years.
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It's very unusual that you have a breakup and it lasts years and years.
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On the contrary, you will actually get over it sooner than you think.
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And six weeks from now, you'll be on a date with somebody else going, I can't believe I was on.
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I love that loser so much.
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That's the typical thing that we actually find.
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But you also, the learning that you get is really the big, big benefit from this.
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There's a really interesting paper on this that, you know, a 2018 study that looked at 160 daters who were in their 20s.
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And then they broke up around the age of 22,
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which is the kind of the modal age to have your first big breakup of somebody that you're truly in love with, it turns out.
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And then it asked them what they learned.
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And it turns out that those who actually believe they learned from their breakup,
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they had much higher relationship satisfaction subsequently and lower relationship conflict in their next relationship.
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In other words, learn, learn, learn, do the postmortem, figure out what actually went wrong, and you will benefit from this.
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But you have to fail as part of the process here so that you can get better.
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That means take a risk and be willing to fail.
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What do they learn, by the way?
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They learn three things.
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Here's what breakups teach you.
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Social cognitive maturity, right?
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That's like, I know why I behaved like an idiot and I won't do that again because I'm matured.
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Number two is romantic agency.
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I know what I want now.
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And number three is coherence.
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You all know what that is because you've been following the show.
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That means why things happen the way they do.
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I know why my last relationship failed and I'm going to fix those mistakes in the future.
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You only get that from experience.
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This is why, you know, people, they tend to do best in marriages, for example, after they've had a few breakups,
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not 50 breakups, not 200 breakups.
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We're talking about a few breakups.
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It's kind of like a mature startup is the way that that works.
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A couple of false starts along the way.
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Mature startups, not mergers, certainly not hostile takeovers.
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Anyway, I'm not going to press that metaphor.
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All right, that's number one.
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Take more risk.
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That's the first of the protocols of how to fall in love and stay in love.
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Number two, don't look for your body double.
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Look for your compliment.
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This is really important.
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Now, you know, I'm really interested in how technology is affecting how people fall in love and stay in love.
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62 % of long -term relationships now are starting on the apps.
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That's kind of how people meet.
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I talk to young people and I say, you know, why don't you just go up and, you know, when you're having a drink after work,
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go up and talk to somebody because they're like, because I don't want them to think I'm a serial killer.
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Yeah.
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I mean, society is very complicated and how people meet actually changes.
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And I've got a lot of thoughts on that.
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It's very important if you can to meet people in real life.
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And usually that's actually not in a bar that's around common interests, whether it's a running club,
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or church, or whatever your thing actually happens to be.
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But probably, for those of you who are watching this and you're in the dating pool, you're probably using the apps because most people are.
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What should you be looking for?
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The answer is not somebody who's exactly like you.
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And one of the problems with many of the apps, the apps are getting better at this,
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and I'm very bullish on what the apps are going to be able to do.
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I'm not anti -technology, but what they've often done in the past is allowed
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you to curate your dating profile to eliminate everybody who doesn't
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have a lot of overlap with you beyond just some basic values to we vote the same way, we listen to the same music,
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we want to go live in the same city, we work in the same industry, everything.
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And pretty soon you're looking in the mirror and that is truly not hot.
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I hope that's not hot to you.
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Why is it that more and more people often say who curate their dating profiles very, very studiously and very, very,
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in a very careful way that they get a lot of dates, but they don't have much attraction.
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And the answer is because there's too much compatibility and not enough complementarity.
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Complementarity is difference and difference is hot.
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That's really where it comes down to.
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And, and again, this is a, this is a neurobiological phenomenon.
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Famous study.
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Many of you have heard about this.
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This is the Wettekind et al study in biological sciences, an old study, 1995.
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This is the famous t -shirt sniffing study.
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And what it was, was in a nutshell really quickly, is that guys on the college campus,
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these experiments always use undergraduate dudes because they'll do anything for 20 bucks.
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They had to wear a t -shirt around for 48 hours, working out, going to class, no showers.
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And then they would take those t -shirts and put them in shoeboxes
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and drill holes in the shoeboxes and undergraduate women who didn't know them or didn't know who they were,
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there's no identifying characteristics on the boxes, had to sniff.
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I know it's gross.
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Bear with me.
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Sniff the t -shirts and say who's most attractive simply on the basis of the smell.
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What do they find?
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That those who are immunologically most dissimilar from them, the women, were most attractive to them.
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Now, there's a reason for this.
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This is called the MHC, the Major Histocompatibility Complex.
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You know, based on smell, you don't know.
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It's an indication to you because your brain knows so much more than you're consciously aware of.
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Who is dissimilar enough from you, such that if you hypothetically have offspring, who's going to have a wider immunological repertoire?
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You want people who have different defenses than you.
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That's called, that's what the major histocompatibility complex actually is, which you ascertain through the olfactory bulb in your brain, among other ways of ascertaining that.
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You can do it through, you know, sight and a lot of other ways as well.
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The bottom line is this, more different, hotter, right but we're not curating for that
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when we're spending too much time looking for the body double we're very narcissistic as creatures i get it
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but the more narcissistic you are and the more
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that you're picking your dating partners as opposed to somebody who actually loves you
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and says i'd be the perfect person for her they're not saying
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it's just like her they're saying it's enough like her
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and then enough different than her as well that's principle number two of the protocol
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Look for difference, not just similarity.
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Number three, don't fear breaking up.
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Don't fear the breakup.
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I've talked about this a little bit before, but if you're paralyzed by the possible pain, you won't do what you need to do.
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So this really is tied to step one of the protocol.
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You know, if you're going into business and you're horribly, horribly afraid of having a mishap in business, you're going to make bad business decisions.
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Now, if you're not afraid at all, You're also going to make bad business decisions.
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But all of us are a little bit afraid.
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I'm not worried about that.
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But people who are paralyzed by fear almost always make non -entrepreneurial decisions.
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And that's fatal when it comes to romance.
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Don't fear.
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Now, or let me be a little bit more specific about this.
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Have courage, even if you do feel fear, because that's really what it's all about.
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Feel the fear and act anyway.
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Say, bring it on.
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Bring on the risk.
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when a relationship dissolves
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that they they have a tendency to to rate mental pain at a pretty significant level
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it's it's slightly more than three on a one to seven scale of mental pain severity people actually looked at
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that measured that
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but it falls it falls much faster than you think your brain is designed to make you think
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that when you're in pain is never going to go away.
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The reason for that is because your brain wants you to avoid doing things that are painful to you.
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These things are threats.
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But you know beyond your just basic troglodyte limbic system that there's lots of things that you need to do.
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And that means you need to understand that whereas your limbic system is saying this pain is permanent, it's lying to you.
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It's transient.
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And therefore, you will walk into a situation in which there is possible pain.
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What do we know about
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that three on a one to seven scale it goes down on average by about 0 .07 points on
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that scale each week so
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if you're a 3 .5 in pain after a breakup on average
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you can expect to feel a little bit better each week where after six weeks
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you're going to feel less than half as bad about it
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and by that point less than half as bad is a pretty normal level of pain in your life
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and you're probably going to be dating again and that's within six months
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Let's get started.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “3 Hard Truths About Finding the Right Person”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: risk, learn, breakup, pain. This video has 223 sentences and 2596 words to shadow. The speech runs for 13:32. The speaker talks fast, about 192 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| breakup noun | /ˈbɹeɪk.ʌp/ | The act of breaking up; disintegration or division. |
| painful adjective | /ˈpeɪn.fl̩/ | Causing pain or distress, either physical or mental. |
| entrepreneur noun | /ˌɑn.tɹə.pɹəˈnɝ/ | A person who sets up a business; generally, a person who owns and manages a business and assumes its financial risks. |
| mature adjective | /məˈt͡ʃʊ(ə)ɹ/ | Fully developed; grown up in terms of physical appearance, behaviour or thinking; ripe. |
| protocol noun | /ˈpɹoʊtəˌkɑl/ | An amendment to an official treaty. |
| capitol noun | /ˈkæp.ɪ.təl/ | Any building or complex of buildings in which a legislature meets. |
| characteristic noun | /ˌkæɹ(ə)ktəˈɹɪstɪk/ | A distinguishing feature of a person or thing, a part of mental or physical behavior. |
| rejection noun | /ɹɪˈd͡ʒɛkʃən/ | The act of rejecting. |
| ruin noun | /ˈɹuː.ɪn/ | The remains of a destroyed or dilapidated construction, such as a house or castle. |
| contrary adjective | /ˈkɑntɹɛɹi/ | Opposite; in an opposite direction; in opposition; adverse. |
| undergraduate noun | A student at a university who has not yet received a degree. | |
| startup noun | /ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/ | The act or process of starting a process or machine. |
| cortex noun | /ˈkɔɹtɛks/ | The outer layer of an internal organ or body structure, such as the kidney or the brain. |
| anterior adjective | /ænˈtɪɹ.i.ɚ/ | Nearer the forward end, especially in the front of the body; nearer the head or forepart of an animal. |
| topic noun | /ˈtɑpɪk/ | A subject; a theme; a category or general area of interest. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. |
| break up verb | To break or separate into pieces. |
| get over verb | To overcome. |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
| come down to verb | To reach by moving down or reducing. |
| come up to verb | To approach. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- That's the most entrepreneurial thing that you can do.
- How'd it go with that woman that you were in love with?
- She wasn't in love with me.
- I said, thank me for what?
- What should you be looking for?
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 | have found · i've been · have studied |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be rejected · is designed · is allowed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | those who actually · women who didn · those who are |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 83 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: rejection /ɹɪˈd͡ʒɛkʃən/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/, satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, attraction /əˈtɹækʃn̩/, indication /ɪndɪˈkeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: entrepreneur /ˌɑn.tɹə.pɹəˈnɝ/, characteristic /ˌkæɹ(ə)ktəˈɹɪstɪk/, anterior /ænˈtɪɹ.i.ɚ/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/
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 breakup, painful, entrepreneur.
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.