Shadowing Practice: 6 Steps To Reclaim Your Life, Start Today - Learn English Speaking with Video

If you feel like everyone around you is doing the thing

that you want to be doing and living the life

that you want to be living and you don't know how to get there, this video is for you.

You see, I used to feel like that too.

I looked around one day and realized my everyday reality didn't actually match the potential that I knew I had.

And I truly wasn't proud of myself, but didn't know what to do next.

All of that changed when I did a few simple steps to truly start building a life that I was proud of.

So if you want to figure out what to do next and how to actually build the life that you want, these are the six steps that you need to follow.

The first thing to understand is that it's okay to want more.

When you look around at your life and your reality and realize that it doesn't match your goals or your ambition, this is actually beautiful self-awareness.

The ability to recognize the gap from where you are right

now to where you could be is one of the most important traits a person can have.

A study from NYU showed this exact concept and found

that people who vividly identify the gap between their current state and their desired outcome, and then plan for obstacles,

are significantly more likely to achieve their goals than people who just use positive visualization.

And especially for us women, who've been told over and over that wanting more makes us selfish or ungrateful.

But you having ambition in identifying this gap between where you are and where you want to be, isn't you being selfish.

It's you being self-aware.

And without self-awareness, you run the risk of just being lucky and having life happen to you

instead of you actually going for and getting what you want.

And yes, you might be able to stumble into some great opportunities, but deep down, that is just building more insecurity

because did you get lucky or did you actually do the work

that was required in order for you to deserve the opportunity that you actually got?

The most successful people I know are successful and live the best lives

because they all had a low point where they got extremely self-aware of what they didn't like about their life.

And then they decided that they wanted more.

And the difference between them and other people is just that they didn't sit in the low feeling.

They didn't distract themselves.

They actually did something about it.

So if you're feeling this way, you have to tell yourself this.

Number one, it's okay to feel this way about your life.

You don't always have to be grateful despite the fact that you want something to change.

Number two, it's okay to want more from your life.

And number three, it's okay to decide to do something about it.

And here's how to do all of that.

Next, you have to get crystal clear on what you actually want.

The overall question is this what am I missing?

And get super specific about what it actually is to be able to make it real.

Do you want to make $20,000 more a month, $10,000 more a month, $50,000 more a month?

Do you want to have a relationship where the person actually supports you and cares about you and appreciates you?

Do you want to have great friends?

And is it five friends or three friends?

Are you looking for a good girlfriend that you can talk to

and be able to communicate about all of the challenges that you go through?

Or are you looking for somebody who's a little bit further along the journey than you that you could be mentored by?

You see, answering these very specific questions is so important because whatever areas you identify are going to become your goals.

And if you're too vague in your goals, then you're going to get vague results.

Specific goals equal specific results.

One of my most inspiring examples of this is the founder of Spanx, Sarah Blakely.

She used to sell fax machines door to door for seven years.

But when she set her goals.

She didn't say, oh, I just want to start a business.

Maybe someday it'll happen.

She said, I want to invent a product that I can sell to millions of people.

She got specific on the goal and then specific on the product

and then invested $5,000 of her own savings to build Spanx into a billion dollar company.

But this just isn't a trend or something that worked for Sarah.

This has been studied.

Over 1,000 studies, over 35 years, Edwin Locke from the University of Maryland found

that specific challenging goals lead to higher performance 90% of the time compared to vague do-your-best goals.

So you get your favorite notebook and start thinking through what is exactly missing from the life that you want

and write them down as specific as possible.

Next is step number three, which is to pick the one goal that unlocks all the others.

When you look at your list of goals, you have to get really honest with yourself about this one thing.

Knowing that you only have a limited amount of energy, what is the one goal that if you could put all of your time, all of your energy towards that one thing, it would unlock all the others?

For most people, this is likely going to be tied to their income.

And let's just get honest about this.

Money can unlock your goals.

Money is a common denominator across countless goals for people.

I didn't used to feel this way I used to think

that you should have all these goals and all these different buckets

and pursue all of them at once And then I realized

that I was getting nowhere quickly I spent years and years

and years waking up on my birthday being upset with myself being disappointed

And I can tell you

that all the way up until my mid-20s I spent every birthday crying because I just had this weight of disappointment

And in my mid-20s, I made the decision to go all in on my career

and all in on my ability to make money.

Because those things unlocked so many other goals that were connected to them.

When you make more money and have success in your career, it doesn't just unlock your professional and your financial goals.

It also unlocks your personal goals.

If you want to be able to take a trip to Disneyland with your kids, guess what?

That requires money.

If you want to have an amazing podcast where you bring on really cool guests

and have people who are interesting to talk to, want to talk to you, guess what?

It takes money.

If you want to write a million dollar check to charity, let me tell you that certainly takes money.

And so by focusing and not diminishing how important money is to so many goals,

it allows you to bring clarity to the actions that you have to take in order to do exactly that.

Money helps with health related goals

because you can pay the best doctors for the best treatments in order to look and feel however you want to feel.

It helps with being able to have your family close by.

You can pay to have them fly to you or spend time with you at an event or take family trips.

Money changes everything.

And when I started focusing on my career and my competence, I'll be honest with you, it was slow at first.

I got especially motivated in my early 20s

because I would show up to these dinner parties

when I was dating my now husband and I would be introduced as his girlfriend, the one that didn't have a career, didn't have any sort of success.

I looked like the things that I feared people thought about me, which was that I didn't have any value to add, that I wasn't doing anything, and that I was just some form of arm candy.

100

And this crushed me inside because I knew that my potential was something entirely different.

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But the business that I was working in at the time was a complete failure.

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And I was learning lesson after lesson after lesson that was painful and mortifying to me at the time.

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At the time, it was so clear to me that my reality did not meet who I actually was.

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You see, I wanted to be able to say, I'm Natalie and I have done XYZ tangible things that are successful and cool and interesting.

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And I got so fed up with this that I had one dinner conversation that became my burn the boats moment.

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I told myself that the next time that I showed up to dinner with this group of people, I would have an entirely different life and have launched something and built something that I could actually be proud of.

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And I did exactly that.

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How?

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Because I focused on my one big goal that unlocked all of the rest of my goals.

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So when you're picking your one goal to focus on, it's okay to be vulnerable.

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Look at your goals and identify the one.

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Focus on just that one goal that can open up countless doors for you.

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So once you have your goal decided on, step four is to set a six-month target.

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It is not cool today to be obsessive, but let's make obsessive cool again.

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Because the people who are obsessive about getting the life that they want, getting the body that they want, having the relationship that they want, making more money, guess what?

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They actually get it.

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And so who cares if some of your friends don't think it's cool that you're all in on something?

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They aren't cool.

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Tell yourself that when you're in the process of feeling like you need to be a little bit more casual, a little bit more subtle, a little bit more subdued when you're around people who don't support you.

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Get comfortable being completely obsessive and let the casual behavior of others not have an ounce of an effect on you.

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You see, in order to make progress towards your goal, you should be using a specific goal-setting framework that forces you to be accountable for your progress.

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My goal-setting framework breaks down how to set your goals in three categories, personally, professionally, and financially across one years,

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three years, and five years out if you want the framework

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that i've used myself and across thousands of people find me on instagram at natalie dawson

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and comment ppf in my dms so

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that you can start building the life of your dreams

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and the secret to why this works is instead of just

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saying someday you're giving yourself a deadline like a six-month target ask yourself who are you going to be

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or what are you going to be doing in six months set a very specific deadline

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and one of my favorite hacks to this is scheduling yourself

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for an event at the end of the six month mark

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because when i did that

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that deadline forced me to show up in a different way it was a reminder for me for six months

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that i'm going to be in this room and

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when i get to this room i want to be able to say i've done xyz thing

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or introduce myself saying i've launched this business in order to

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launch the business there has to be a website i have

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to have business cards there needs to be an instagram i have all of this work now

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that I'm forced to do because I have a deadline.

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I remember I went to this women's event a few years ago and for months prior I worked out differently.

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I spent more intentional time building my blog, showing up on Instagram consistently because I wanted at

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that event to show up as a different person who had actual stats and not be the person that I had been.

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And the deadline of the event is what kept me accountable.

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An NYC study found that people who attach their goals to a specific time, place, or event are up to three times more likely to follow through,

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and that the successful completion of difficult-to-implement project tripled when participants committed to a specific time, when, and where.

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The big truth is that when you have a date set on the calendar, you stop theorizing about your goals and actually start making progress towards them.

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So set yourself a six-month timeline for your goal.

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Pick an event like a speaking event, a conference.

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You could even come to our next Elite Edge event.

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And over the following months, you're going to see yourself show up differently

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because you've created a milestone that's coming up in the future for you to prove that you're showing up differently.

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The next step is to do the work because the work is the separator.

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When you're in this six-month grind of doing the hard work to accomplish your goal, it's going to suck.

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That's the truth.

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It's going to be challenging and there will be people in your life who won't support you, but part of the work is accepting that.

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Something

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that can really help get you through this is documenting your

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grind you can journal record yourself take photos yes this time is going to be hard

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but when you look back on these six months

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and you can see your progress that becomes your proof to yourself

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and to others that what you're actually doing is working

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and a side benefit is this can help you build a personal brand as well

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which can unlock even more goals of yours in the future

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because of the six months struggle

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and the working extremely hard is a great proof point

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that gives you the earned experience

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and authority to help other people later do exactly what you

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did without proof of doing the work it's just theory

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so just remember that the six month season of your life will be hard

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but if you document the process it can become one of your greatest assets later i always think about this

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when it comes to personal trainers

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if the personal trainer did not get a before picture

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and they just show somebody who is super fit you think

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that they were just born like that you think

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that it wasn't hard for them you think

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that it was maybe genetics why because you didn't see them before

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but when you do see a before picture

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and the person was 30 pounds heavier had a similar body type to you all of the sudden

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when you see the after you start to believe

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that you yourself can have that as well you become inspired by it

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but without the before and without understanding what the process was in order to get the body

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that they wanted it can feel meaningless

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because it's just another fit person who was just born

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that way and that brings us to the last step

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which is the ultimate payoff for being able to help others i can tell you firsthand

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that when you reach the point where you can take your experience

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and confidently share it with hundreds of thousands of people there is no better feeling than

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that inner confidence and your earned authority and that's the only reason

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that i'm able to make a video like this

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because i've done the work

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when no one was watching i documented my steps i paid attention to the process

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and now i get to share that

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and help other people do the same there is literally no greater gift

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that you can give to people

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and there is no greater sense of personal accomplishment than becoming the person

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that you actually want it to be

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and then using your example to help others this is how

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you can actually make an impact on the world you can't make an impact

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if you're still stuck as the version of you that you were six months ago.

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My life completely transformed when I learned this lesson early in my 20s.

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I was in college and I literally wanted to change the world by helping other people, but my boss at the time clearly pointed out that if I couldn't help myself,

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how on earth was I ever going to be in a position to help other people?

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And he was right.

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At the time, I wasn't able to help myself.

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I was barely making minimum wage, I wasn't confident, I couldn't communicate well, and I didn't have a clear direction where I was going.

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And because he was able to redirect me, I spent time and focus on how I could set myself up for success

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so that then I could be in a position to help others.

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It's just like when you hop on an airplane

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and they tell you that you have to fix your mask first before assisting others.

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You can't just go around the plane helping everybody else when you yourself aren't even conscious because you didn't help yourself first.

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So you setting an example, you making your life a demonstration of financial success, of health success, of relationship success,

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of company success, of then other people's success is ultimately the goal.

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But you can't just start with other people's success

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because no one wants to listen to somebody tell them something

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when that person that is saying it hasn't even demonstrated that they themselves have what they want.

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So if this resonated with you, try out these steps and set yourself up with a six-month deadline.

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And if you want to use Daily Edge as your foreseen event, the link is in the description.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “6 Steps To Reclaim Your Life, Start Today”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: goal, month, specific. This video has 217 sentences and 3037 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:17. The speaker talks fast, about 213 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 88% 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
unlock verb	/ʌnˈlɑk/	To undo or open a lock or something locked by, for example, turning a key, or selecting a combination.
deadline noun	/ˈdɛdˌlaɪn/	A time limit in the form of a date on or before which something must be completed.
obsessive adjective	/əbˈsɛs.ɪv/	Prone to cause obsession.
vague adjective	/veɪɡ/	Not clearly expressed; stated in indefinite terms.
accountable adjective	/əˈkaʊntəbl̩/	Obliged, when called upon, to answer (for one’s deeds); answerable.
ambition noun	/æmˈbɪʃ.ən/	Eager or inordinate desire for some object that confers distinction, as preferment, honor, superiority, political power, or fame; desire to distinguish one's…
grind verb	/ˈɡɹaɪnd/	To reduce to smaller pieces by crushing with lateral motion.
countless adjective	/ˈkaʊntləs/	Synonym of uncountable.
inspire verb	/ɪnˈspaɪə(ɹ)/	To infuse into the mind; to communicate to the spirit; to convey, as by a divine or supernatural influence; to disclose preternaturally; to produce in, as by…
someday adverb		Sometime; at some unspecified time in the future.
trainer noun	/ˈtɹeɪnɚ/	A person who trains another; a coach.
selfish adjective	/ˈsɛlf.ɪʃ/	Holding one's own self-interest as the standard for decision making.
confidently adverb	/ˈkɑnfɪdəntli/	In a confident manner; with confidence; with strong assurance; positively.
denominator noun	/dɪˈnɒmɪneɪtə(ɹ)/	The number or expression written below the line in a fraction (such as 2 in ½).
diminish verb	/dɪˈmɪnɪʃ/	To make smaller.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
show up verb	To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically.
break down verb	To stop functioning.
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
follow through verb	To execute or complete a commitment.
go around verb	To move or spread from person to person.
go through verb	To travel from one end of something to the other.
look around verb	To inspect a building or area.
open up verb	To open.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

It's you being self-aware.
The overall question is this what am I missing?
Do you want to have great friends?
At the time, I wasn't able to help myself.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to feel · used to sell
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who vividly · people who just · three, which is
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	who've been told · has been studied · have done
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	who've been told · was required · could be mentored

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 60 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, you're, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: ambition /æmˈbɪʃ.ən/, selfish /ˈsɛlf.ɪʃ/, diminish /dɪˈmɪnɪʃ/, visualization /ˌvɪʒ.ʊ.ə.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, accomplishment /əˈkɑm.plɪʃ.mənt/
Long words — get the stress right: confidently /ˈkɑnfɪdəntli/, denominator /dɪˈnɒmɪneɪtə(ɹ)/, separator /ˈsɛpəˌɹeɪtəɹ/, visualization /ˌvɪʒ.ʊ.ə.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, accomplishment /əˈkɑm.plɪʃ.mənt/

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 unlock, deadline, obsessive.

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.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?