Shadowing Practice: A Simple Causal Phrase That Turns Any Data Point Into a Story - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Portals provide a powerful way for you to begin your communication and engage your audience.
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My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
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Today I'm excited to speak with Troy Campbell.
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Troy is the chief scientist at the firm On Your Feet and a former behavioral science professor at the University of Oregon.
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Previously, he was a Disney Imagineer and a researcher at Netflix Insights.
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Troy specializes in blending a scientific mind with an artistic heart to understand consumer behavior, storytelling, and the psychology of human connection.
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Well, welcome, Troy.
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We have chatted on and off for a long time, and I am thrilled to actually have you in studio and the opportunity to chat with you.
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Thanks for being here.
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A long-time listener, first-time guest.
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I'm very excited to be here.
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All right, shall we get started?
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Let's do it.
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I love so many ways you frame things.
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You describe story theory as essentially the word because.
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How does understanding causality improve our storytelling?
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Yeah.
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So pretty much if you ask any theoretician of story,
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about one out of two of them will give you a definition that is more or less the word because.
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They'll talk about causality.
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So if you read the book Narrative by Abbott Porter, he's going to talk about causality.
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If you talk to the comics professor Kate Kelp-Stebbins, she's going to tell you it's causality.
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If you listen to the South Park creators, they'll talk about how in between every scene, what happens in one scene better cause the next thing to happen, right?
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And causality is just this foundation that really allows us to anchor what we're trying to do when we're telling stories,
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which is that characters are changing and there's something that's causing them to change.
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And that cause is what's going to make it a story rather than a bullet point list.
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I just love the idea of thinking about the change.
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And that change is because of something.
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Yes.
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So not all of us are in situations where we have to tell grandiose stories.
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We're trying to pitch our business.
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We're trying to get people aligned to what we're saying.
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Help us understand how we can tell stories in our everyday jobs.
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Yeah.
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What we can do is we can say, you're going to come in to the workplace
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and you're going to share a piece of information like here's an action
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that we want to do or here's a data point that's really important
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and you're going to explain the because behind it
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and once you start saying because and you say
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because a couple times it's going to transform something into a story the current sales of this product are down
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and it's because this thing is happening and a deeper reason is
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because the consumer cares about this and it becomes this real simplified way to tell in my opinion, what is a story, which is explaining why something has happened,
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what has caused a character, a set of characters, they could be your consumers to change.
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It all boils down to that causality.
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And when you frame it that way, it makes it so much easier to think about how do I, as somebody telling the story, structure it?
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I first have to introduce the players, the issue, the cause, and then explain the cause that comes from that.
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So So you start by explaining who the characters are and the components and then the cause that's involved.
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One of the things that you
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and I connected on right away is you like I believe very strongly in frameworks and structure.
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And you have a great structure that I really like, GIA, Goal Insight Action.
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Can you tell us a little bit about that structure and how can we use it?
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Yeah.
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So Goal Insight Action is goal, what your audience cares about.
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We want to always start with relevance.
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It is the data, the expertise, the ingenuity, the causality, the reasons that you're going to bring.
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And action is what your audience can do with it.
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And if you think about this, you'll actually see it so many times in things, right?
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It's how Steve Jobs always communicated.
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He would come up to audiences and, right, of all the people in the world, Steve Jobs could just be like, hey, Apple, we should do this.
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We should have this Think Different campaign.
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But instead he comes up
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and he says the goal we have in the 1990s at Apple is
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that we need to stand out again that we aren't resonating
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and The insight and he says this with his hands like it's always even tough.
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You you're dressed in black.
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Yeah I know my lady said I looked a little Steve Jobs
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And he would be like my insight is that marketing is about values
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and in a world that's really busy how you stand out is focusing on values right
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and then he says
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so the action what we're gonna take is we are gonna have the think different campaign
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which is gonna focus on our core value
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that we believe in misfits we believe in people who believe
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that they can change the world and that structure is just
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so simple it works whenever you're talking about data don't jump
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to your data say the goal we have at this organization is to reach this consumer
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or address this fire problem right now some insight we have about the consumer about this moment is this, and the action that we can take to deal with it is this.
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And we teach organizations the structure, and they love not only the structure, but they love using the words
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because it creates sort of this collective also culture where they can signpost to their audience
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because they've both been trained to receive and deliver in goal inside action.
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And it can just be a wonderful personal habit, but also group habit.
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Goal inside action, I think, is a fantastic structure.
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And what it allows you to do, the goal is often something that's commonly shared or based on a value or your mission that's already shared.
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So you're already halfway there because you're tapping into something that people already believe in and then you're further focusing it.
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And like any structure, I think with a little practice in ingenuity, this can be a really useful tool.
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Yeah.
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And the one thing I would say is like the goal may be the most important part of goal inside action.
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And it's that even if people have that goal, it's not always active in their brain and
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so you need to remind people that
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that is what's important right right um they might even tell you i know
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that already but there it wasn't they really didn't know
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that in the moment and those motives were not activated
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so make sure you always before you're communicating if you can even if it's just one sentence, repeat the goal that they have that you are going to help them with.
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A goal, I like to say, has a focusing function.
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It helps you focus.
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It helps you frame the discussion and highlighting that.
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And assuming people understand it, and maybe some people say, I already got the goal, still state it.
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Very good advice.
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You've developed research on identity, persuasion, and solution aversion.
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I had to practice saying that several times because I slur the words together.
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When an audience is highly resistant to the truth due to solution aversion or flight from the facts, as you like to say,
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how do we as a communicator restructure our message to avoid this?
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Yeah, so solutions can be very aversive.
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And because of these solutions, we will often deny that there's even a problem or that we need to engage in that solution.
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And I often like to think of solutions aversions as coming from two areas.
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So one is our tangible things and one are more identity based things.
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So a tangible thing could be just like, I don't want to stop drinking caramel frappuccinos.
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Right.
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And when a doctor diagnosed me with these blood sugar problems when I was younger, it was like I had a big frappuccino on my forehead
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and like deal with this issue
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or I'm not going to believe any of the science you're telling me about my health issue.
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And one of the things that he did, Dr. Manuel Fernandez, is the very first thing he did is he's like, here's how your diet is not going to be as bad as you think it was.
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So before all the science and all this stuff, he was managing my solution aversion that I'd have to that.
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Now, the second thing, and this is the one that's going to get into one of my favorite kind of storytelling principles, is identity.
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Right.
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And oftentimes really what we want to be as people is we don't want to have our identity threatened
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and we want to do things that feel authentic.
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Right.
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And so if somebody is telling you to change your behavior,
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to be more healthy in your behaviors or you want to
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or they're telling you to be more creative or they're trying to tell you to tell storytelling, they might even think, you know, that does sound like a good idea.
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But that's not who I am.
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That's not me. And
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so one of the things I really like bringing into this situation is something I worked on in my dissertation
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and that I now call the destiny narrative.
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And so the idea behind this is that in all great stories, characters change, but they go through a very specific type of change.
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They change into who they were always meant to be.
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The princess was secretly always a princess.
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The boy on Tatooine looking up at the twin sons longing for more always had the force inside of him.
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And Moana was always meant to sail across the seas.
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And we really, really like this thing, not only in these stories, but it works in marketing, right?
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Unleash your inner goddess.
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There's a warrior inside of you.
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So the idea is that we are changing, but we're changing more into who we always were meant to be or who we already are.
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And it resolves these two psychological motives that are so in conflict all the time, right?
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I want to improve.
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I want to have goal progress.
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I do kind of want to change.
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But at the same time, I want to be authentic.
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I want to be me.
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I want to have some sense of identity consistency.
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And what the destiny narrative does, it allows for you to stay true and have narrative change at the same time.
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So whenever I'm trying to persuade people to change, I don't tell them storytelling is good.
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The very first thing I do is prove to them that they're already a storyteller.
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And so now all you want to do is you want to do more of
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that because you want to do more of who you are.
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You might not be eating healthy, but there are some habits that you have that are already healthy.
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And that's important to you.
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So eating healthy now is more consistent with who you are.
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So much richness in that response.
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So let me break it down from what I'm taking away.
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Solution aversion, resistance, hesitation, concern that people bring can be focused on something very tangible.
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There's something I like doing or don't like doing, and you're threatening me because you're saying I should or shouldn't do that.
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And a great way to address that is to immediately address that resistance.
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It's not as bad as you think, or you're well-equipped to deal with this.
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So address the emotion, the concern, before you layer on all the things that need to be done.
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And as you were saying that, I was reflecting on my parenting and how poorly I did because I would always lead with, here, all the things you have to do.
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And, oh, by the way, you can do it.
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Vice versa would be helpful.
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And then the other part with the identity piece, and part of what I heard you say there, what's so important is this notion of consistency.
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You're showing that you're already there or you have that ability and having people reflect on that.
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So as we go to persuade, motivate, inspire, thinking about those areas of resistance, that challenge or solution aversion,
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and then thinking about the tangible and identity issues that play out can help us restructure the narrative to motivate people more.
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That's fantastic.
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One of the things that you teach and talk about
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that has fundamentally changed the way I teach and think about my communication is through the lens of portals.
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When you talked about portals, and I'd like you to define for all of us what they mean, it really changed the way I think about how I start and how I move through my communication.
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Can you educate us all on what you mean by portals and how we can apply that?
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Yeah.
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So my definition of portal is about how to begin an experience.
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And the idea is that a portal is a way to transition people into an experience, where the point of it is,
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is that you are getting them ready for the most important parts of the experience.
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So you might start with a bang but you really don't.
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You just need to slowly transition people into it
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and a lot of this is based upon Walt Disney Imagineering
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and they actually use the word portal to describe how to begin experiences.
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So when you are walking into the Disney park
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you go through a tunnel and
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that tunnel even says like you're leaving the current space you're in
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and you're going into fantasy tomorrow in the past and that transition time inside of that tunnel
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and knowing the direction in which you're heading allows you to sort of start transitioning
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and then when you go on each of the rides they have these ways in
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which they ease you into the story that that is different for each ride.
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So in Buzz Lightyear, that is a ride where you're gonna be on the ride
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and you're gonna be shooting this little laser gun.
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So the portal into that is a cartoony intro in
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which Buzz Lightyear gives you a pep talk and they show you the targets.
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It's silly, high energy, very focused, right?
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And you can think of like a creativity warmup.
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They're like, we're gonna be really active later in this meeting, so we do that.
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But the portal into Haunted Mansion is very different
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Because Haunted Mansion is a passive ride in which you're going to go through a haunted mansion, and you're going to look around, and you're supposed to look for details.
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And so the way that introduces you is you walk through a graveyard noticing silly little jokes on the tombstones,
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and then you get in the stretching elevator where your ghost host literally tells you to look in different directions.
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And so it's facilitating you into those things.
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And what they're doing in these portals is they're doing three general psychological things that are overlapping but distinct.
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One, it's creating anticipation for what's to come.
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Second, it's getting you in the mindset shift and the specific mindset you're supposed to be in that.
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And the third is it's previewing the narrative for that experience.
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So it's not telling you the whole story, but it's giving you enough into the narrative that you're ready to be going.
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What Melanie Green would call narrative transportation.
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I think this is such a powerful idea.
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Many of us in our communication, especially high stakes communication, we focus on what's the message we want.
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We don't think about how do we bring people to that message.
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And there are lots of ways to do it.
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You can think about the calendar invite you send out.
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That can be a beginning.
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As you mentioned in a meeting, you can have some kind of icebreaker activity to warm people up as long as it's somehow connected to what comes.
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What drives me nuts is where you do some kind of icebreaker and then the next task is totally unrelated.
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Yeah, I mean- It's whiplash almost.
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It's, yeah, bad.
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The point of it is we need to activate the right parts of the brain
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or the right memories for the task at hand.
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And that's the point of a start.
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Yeah, and I liked, you know, I played with the three components of what a good portal does to make it alliterative.
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It's the AAA, it's anticipation, it's approach.
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And then I couldn't come up with anything besides altitude.
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It tells you what level we're coming.
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So, and you can do this, not just at the beginning of your communication, but often in meetings, you might need a portal to bring you into another topic or area.
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I challenge everybody listening to think about how can we look at this idea of portal,
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setting people up to be successful in a way that really helps.
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You know, at the beginning of this show, I try to do that where I give a little bit of introductory idea to help people orient to what it is.
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I really appreciate that.
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And Troy, I've appreciated everything.
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We'll be right back to finish our conversation.
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And now back to our conversation.
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As you well know, we always end by asking three questions.
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One I make up just for you and the The other two I've asked everybody, and I'll be curious to get your answers to that.
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Are you up for this?
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Let's do it.
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All right, so question number one.
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What's the best piece of communication advice you've ever received?
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So the best piece of communication advice for me, it really was tailored well to me, came from one of my advisors in graduate school,
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Dr. Peter Uble, and let me set this up.
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So I gave my talk on my dissertation and I went in and he sat me down and he said Troy
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You are one of the most joyful people I've ever met your name even rhymes with joy You sign your emails
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enthusiastically Troy every time and your dissertation is literally about why people enjoy things and And for 20 minutes,
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I never saw you smile once.
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Right?
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And telling somebody to smile is not always the best advice.
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But for me, it was.
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Like, part of why people like engaging with me is that I really love these things.
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I'm the behavioral scientist who worked at Disney Imagineering.
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People want that energy and that joy.
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I'm literally delivering them on science.
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And so it's great advice for me but it's also like who you are
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and what you are delivering when you can match
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that it works really well yeah
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so striving for congruence between how you feel about something
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and how you deliver are really important and and i'm glad you got
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that advice because you do uh radiate joy
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and excitement um question number two who's a communicator that you admire
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and why so one person who i really really like in
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that space is bong joong ho he is the director of the oscar-winning film parasite
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and also other films like The Host and Snowpiercer.
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And he is so good at using direction.
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So in the movie Parasite, if you've seen it, the rich people live on the hill
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and the poor people live literally down the hill and in the basement.
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And he uses that up and down constantly for storytelling purposes.
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In Snowpiercer, it's a movie that takes entirely place on a train.
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And so one direction is always the back of the train.
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one direction of frame is always the front of the train.
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It's a metaphor, but it's also spatial, and it's so wonderful.
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And after watching a video essay by every frame of painting on the movie Snowpiercer, I was just like, I should just be using space for everything I do.
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And so I used to be a person who walked around on stage, but just to bring energy.
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Now I walk, and when I move between parts of my story, I now am in a new position.
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I'll assign different parts of the stage.
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Sometimes when I'm being more avant-garde is like this is this is the scientific mind part
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and this is the artistic heart part
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and this is just me in the middle troy telling you how I actually feel right
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and there's the ability to use space to tell story is amazing
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and it's just so wonderful to watch movies
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because I get new ideas all the time I like
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that idea of observing other forms of communication to teach you how to be better
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but that use of space is really important because you're signaling and and sending lots of information.
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Human beings are wired to pay attention to space and location.
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And doing that consciously, I think adds a lot.
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And I really appreciate that you do a nice job of bringing science and art together.
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Final question.
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What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
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Yeah, so since we've been talking about, a lot about storytelling, I'll do mine that's based on that.
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And it's cause, character and change, right?
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And just those together is really simple.
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If you're like, oh, I need to make this data presentation more important.
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Okay, what are my characters?
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What's causing them to act?
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What can we do to then change?
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If you're stumbling on just like a story about your own past,
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it's like, okay, what caused me to change my mind about something, right?
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And all of a sudden you have a story.
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It's just three little tiny bits of things that can do so much.
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Cause, character, change.
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You know, I'm going to love it because it's alliterative.
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So interestingly, I don't know that the order of that matters
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if you're trying to get it to initiate a story or move a story forward, but you need the three ingredients together.
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Yeah.
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And so our brains understand narrative causal structures and they don't need to be told in order.
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And my friend James Antony does a lot of neuroscience research
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and how he finds how people connect things and remember things and pair things in the brain based upon causal connections.
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So if you're watching something, you can watch, you know, an episode of Friends and there you put all your OK,
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this character is in this plot and I'm connecting it here and I'm connecting these plots.
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Or you can watch an episode of like How I Met Your Mother that's often told out of order.
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But your brain can put that all together.
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Your brain is obsessed with understanding characters.
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It's a social you're a social creature.
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and it processes things in logics.
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And so we can have characters in logical causations.
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You're just going to reach the brain so well.
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So well put, as was everything that you shared.
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Troy, thank you for your time.
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Thank you for your insights.
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And thank you personally for impacting the way I communicate.
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Awesome.
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Well, it has been great to be on this.
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And I love what you do here.
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I love that you also create some of the best type of content that we can deliver to our students, right?
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You can start a class with a clip from your podcast
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and really get a ton of information and get the students excited to engage in something.
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Well, thank you.
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I appreciate that.
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Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
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To learn more about creative ways to communicate, please listen to episode 156 with Scott Dorley.
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This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.
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Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to the Podium Podcast Company.
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Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Be sure to subscribe and rate us.
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Also, follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.
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And check out Fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.
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Please consider joining our Think Fast, Talk Smart learning community at Fastersmarter.io slash learning.
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You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, my AI coach, and book club opportunities.
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Again, that's faster smarter dot IO slash learning to become part of our think fast, talk smart community.
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86 sentences
Chunking: the secret to fluency?
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “A Simple Causal Phrase That Turns Any Data Point Into a Story”. This video has 356 sentences and 4521 words to shadow. The speech runs for 24:29. The speaker talks fast, about 185 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
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| portal noun | /ˈpɔːɹtl̩/ | An entrance, entry point, or means of entry. |
| troy adjective | /tɹɔɪ/ | Of, or relating to, troy weight. |
| causality noun | /kɔˈzæl.ɪ.tɪ/ | The agency of a cause; the action or power of a cause, in producing its effect. |
| storytelling noun | The act and skills of presenting stories and tales. | |
| insight noun | /ˈɪnsaɪ̯t/ | A sight or view of the interior of anything; a deep inspection or view; introspection; frequently used with into. |
| aversion noun | /əˈvɜːʒən/ | Opposition or repugnance of mind; fixed dislike often without any conscious reasoning. |
| tangible adjective | /ˈtæn.d͡ʒə.bəl/ | Touchable; able to be touched or felt; perceptible by the sense of touch. |
| podcast noun | /ˈpɑdˌkæst/ | A program, especially an audio program, produced on a regular basis, delivered over the Internet in a compressed digital format and designed for playback on… |
| communicator noun | /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪtə/ | Someone who, or something that communicates. |
| haunt verb | /hɔnt/ | To inhabit or to visit frequently (most often used in reference to ghosts). |
| dissertation noun | /ˌdɪsəˈteɪʃən/ | A formal exposition of a subject, especially a research paper that students write in order to complete the requirements for a doctoral degree in the US and a… |
| strawberry noun | /ˈstɹɔˌbɛɹi/ | The sweet, usually red, edible accessory fruit of certain plants of the genus Fragaria. |
| mansion noun | /ˈmæn.ʃən/ | A large luxurious house or building, usually built for the wealthy. |
| alliterative adjective | In the form or style of alliteration. | |
| causal adjective | /ˈkɔːzəl/ | Of, relating to, or being a cause of something; causing. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| stand out verb | To jut out, protrude (from a surface etc.). | |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| come up verb | To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly. | |
| come up to verb | To approach. | |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. | |
| look around verb | To inspect a building or area. | |
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- All right, shall we get started?
- How does understanding causality improve our storytelling?
- Are you up for this?
- What's the best piece of communication advice you've ever received?
- What can we do to then change?
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 thinking · we've been talking |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you think about this, you'll actually |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have chatted · has happened · has caused |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | been trained · were not activated · were always meant |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 105 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, authentic /ɔˈθɛn.tɪk/, thrill /θɹɪl/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: aversion /əˈvɜːʒən/, dissertation /ˌdɪsəˈteɪʃən/, mansion /ˈmæn.ʃən/, anticipation /ænˌtɪs.əˈpeɪ.ʃən/, intentional /ɪnˈtɛnʃənəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: causality /kɔˈzæl.ɪ.tɪ/, communicator /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪtə/, dissertation /ˌdɪsəˈteɪʃən/, ingenuity /ˌɪnd͡ʒəˈn(j)uːəti/, ingredient /ɪnˈɡɹiːdi.ənt/
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 portal, troy, causality.
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.