Shadowing Practice: ACT AS IF EVERYTHING ALWAYS WORKS OUT | Rob Dial - Learn English Speaking with Video

There's a very good chance you've been manifesting the life that you don't want

and you don't even realize that you're doing it.

Because most people don't realize this, but they live life like life is out to get them.

They're waiting for the other shoe to drop.

They're assuming something is going to go wrong and then they call it being realistic.

And then they wonder why they're always anxious and exhausted and stuck in the same patterns every single year.

Well, your brain is literally wired right now to look for proof

that things are going wrong or don't work out for you.

But you can rewire it to be the exact opposite of that.

And so today, I'm going to talk to you about how acting as if everything will work out changes your brain neurologically.

It will shift how your brain shows you information and completely alter the direction of your life.

So if you're tired of negative thinking, if you're exhausted from assuming that you're going to get hurt

or worrying or fail or be disappointed in some sort of way, this might be the most important episode that you'll listen to all year.

Because once you truly understand this and you start living it, your life is never going to look the same way again.

And so when we talk about acting as if, most people misunderstand this phrase.

They think that acting as if means I need to delude myself

or pretend that bad things are not happening in my life.

And it's not that at all.

Acting as if everything always works out for me means that I don't deny reality.

I don't deny pain at all, but I choose the meaning that I give to what's happening.

So it's like saying, you know, I don't know how this is going to work out,

But I'm going to move through my life as if eventually I'm going to look back and say, oh, I can see why that's exactly what I needed.

Because you have to know it will work out for you.

It's a posture.

It's a way of walking through the world.

Think about the opposite of that for a second.

Acting as if nothing works out for you.

I've done that before in my life.

I'm sure you've probably done that.

You probably know people that are like that.

What happens?

You wake up anticipating problems.

You assume that people are going to disappoint you and screw you over.

You go into opportunities expecting rejection.

You talk yourself out of action before you even start.

And when you live like that, you're not only miserable, you're actually training your brain and your nervous system to be hypervigilant,

to be fearful, to be closed off.

You're training your brain to actively search for what is wrong or what could go wrong in your life.

So when I say act as if everything is working out, here's what it would actually look like practically, okay?

You're still going to feel fear.

Fear's not going to go away.

But the difference is you don't bow down to your fears anymore.

You're still going to feel uncertainty in your future, but you don't move away from uncertainty.

You still have many challenges in life, but then you ask yourself whenever those challenges come up, how might this be working for me and not against me?

It's living as if life is happening for you and not to you.

I have said this many times in the podcast, but I honestly believe in my life that everything is happening for me,

and it's happening for the best thing to happen to me in the long run.

And we will be right back.

Hey, I want to interrupt today's episode to tell you about my sponsor.

It is me, myself.

If you didn't know, I obviously have some coaching programs outside of the podcast to help you learn

and grow and become a better version of yourself.

Step-by-step programs and processes to help you become better in your life and create the life that you want.

If you want to learn more about it, you can go to coachwithrob.com.

Once again, coachwithrob.com.

Check it out.

And let's get back to the episode.

And I didn't always think this way.

I was not this way at all for a very long time.

And now that I'm older, I think hindsight is 20-20.

But now I can see everything that's happened to me in my life, especially the challenges and how they were basically brought to me for my life to be able to become better.

You know, I didn't choose to have an alcoholic father

and have my father pass away when I was 15 years old from being an alcoholic.

But that thing, I can see how it has changed my life completely and made my life better.

It was the hardest day of my life and the worst day of my life, but also the best day of my life because it woke me up.

Now, when I look at like my first sales job I ever had when I was 19, that was so freaking hard.

I was a shy kid, didn't know what I was doing.

And they pushed me on stage after I started getting better at sales to do public speaking.

I didn't want to speak to anybody.

But, you know, when I was in that company, I had to be out of my comfort zone all the time

and all the time and cold calls and talking on stage.

And, you know, I had to mess up

and I had to face embarrassment it was hard it's really

challenging then they started pushing me to coach people to mentor the other people

and I had to learn myself

and get myself better in order to be able to help others at a higher level

then I hired a one-on-one coach and he pushed me

and he got me into challenging myself and becoming better

and constantly trying to challenge myself every single day got me into reading personal development

and all of those things from my father to the first sales job, to public speaking, to coaching people, to hiring my first one-on-one coach,

all of those things, all those dots connect to what I do now.

Like what is my biggest passion in life, right?

It's imagine if I gave up when things got hard at some point in time, I wouldn't be doing what I do now.

So you have to know like deep down inside of you that everything is actually happening for you,

especially the hardest most challenging moments in your life and

when you really start walking like that your brain will actually literally start to change

and so let's talk about how walking through life as

if life is always happening for you and acting as

if let's talk about how it's going to change you neurologically

and how you shift

when you shift from worst case scenario to hey this is

going to work out for me you have to understand your

brain's a prediction mechanism it's always trying to to predict the future.

So your main job is to protect you through trying to predict.

It's going to try to predict what's about to happen, how safe or unsafe something is, what you should do next in every situation by predicting.

And it uses three main inputs basically.

Number one is your past experiences.

Number two is your current environment that you're in.

And then the third one especially is your thoughts and belief about yourself and the world.

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So if you constantly think things never work out for me.

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I always get screwed.

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Of course, this would happen to me.

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You're feeding your brain data all of the time that says, expect danger, expect loss, expect disappointment.

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And so neurologically, what this is doing to you, your amygdala, which is your threat detection center in your brain, gets more overreactive over time.

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So you're constantly looking for fears and threats.

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Your prefrontal cortex, which is your rational planning, decision-making part of your brain, gets hijacked by emotion and fear.

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And when you're in a state of fear, you're in very, very, very low logic.

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You're not thinking very well.

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Your prefrontal cortex stops working as well.

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And then your nervous system starts living in chronic stress patterns.

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So basically it's stuck in fight, flight, or freeze.

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And so your thoughts are not harmless things.

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They're literally training your brain and your body to expect and recreate the same emotional reality.

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So think about that for a second.

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You're literally training your brain with your thoughts what to expect and recreate the exact same emotional reality that you've always had.

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Now, if you flip it and you decide to do something different and think differently, like when you really genuinely start to practice and think, this will somehow work out for me.

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I always figure things out.

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Like this is going to make sense for later.

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This is happening for me.

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You're training your brain to expect and then to actually look for solutions and support and opportunities and possibilities.

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And so over time, your amygdala, the fear part of your brain, starts to calm down a little bit.

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You don't perceive everything as a threat and live in a state of fear and worry.

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Your prefrontal cortex has more access to logic and creativity and long-term thinking.

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And then your nervous system starts to spend more time in a regulated state, which means clearer thinking, and better decisions.

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And so you're literally becoming a different person when you think differently,

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neurologically and behaviorally, because your brain wires around what you repeatedly think and do.

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You know, what you repeat, you actually become in your life.

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And so your brain changes based off of repetition and emotion.

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And, you know, there's a thing that's called neuroplasticity, which if you've never heard me talk about, it's your brain's ability to rewire itself based on what you keep doing and what you keep thinking.

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So if you think a thought once, not really a big deal.

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But if you think it a hundred times a day, that becomes a program and your brain starts running the program over and over and over again.

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And what programs your brain in the way that it thinks?

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Well, it's what you think about in the patterns that you're stuck in.

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You know, you have between 60 to 90,000 thoughts a day

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and 95% of them are the same as they were the day before.

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So when you keep thinking and rehearsing worst case scenarios, you're reinforcing neural pathways that link to uncertainty,

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which equal danger, which equals shutdown or panic.

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And when you train yourself to act as if everything works out for you, you're reinforcing neural pathways that link uncertainty to curiosity,

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to courage, to action and trust.

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The situations might be exactly the same, but the brain walking into them is completely different.

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And this is why two people can have the exact same life event, and one can say, oh my gosh, this ruins me.

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And the other one can say, this grows me.

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It's the exact same event.

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It's a different brain.

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It's a different life.

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And so you have to understand, like, real quickly, let me talk about how your brain actually filters this stuff through.

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Because if you've never heard me talk about the reticular activating system, now this is going to make sense.

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If you have, this is going to dive a little bit deeper than we normally do in the reticular activating system.

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So your reticular activating system, if you've never heard of it, is a small network of neurons in your brainstem that acts like a filter for your reality.

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And so your senses take in way more information than you can consciously hold in your mind.

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You know, there's sounds, there's colors, there's feelings, there's faces, there's opportunities, there's threats, there's all these things.

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And your reticular activating system decides, okay, out of the millions of things happening right now, what's actually important enough to send to my conscious awareness?

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And here's the key.

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Your reticular activating system is programmed by what you repeatedly focus on and believe.

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If you believe that the world is out to get you, then you'll see every single place where you're going to be a victim.

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If you believe that everything is working out for you, then you will see challenges as being there to help you and help you grow in some sort of way.

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You'll see closed doors as you being guided in a better direction versus something to make yourself a victim of.

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So, you know, the reticular activating system, perfect example that everybody always uses is like, if you go out and you buy a car, you don't really see that car very much until you buy it.

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And then once you buy it, you suddenly see that car everywhere.

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It's always been there.

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It's just your brain didn't care before and now it does.

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Before Lauren got pregnant, I never saw babies.

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I like never saw pregnant women.

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But now I'm like, holy s*, they're everywhere.

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Like I didn't realize how many pregnant women there are.

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I just didn't notice before because it wasn't something that I was focusing on.

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And then once my wife gets pregnant, I'm like, oh my God, there's all these other women that are pregnant out here.

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So you decide who you want to be.

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You decide how you're going to show up.

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And that's the reticular activating system.

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It's not that the world has changed in any sort of way.

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It's that the world that you live in, in your mind has changed.

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It's the way that your brain operates and the filter that it has has changed.

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Your world changes when your perception changes.

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And so, you know, how your beliefs train your reticular activating system, let's dive into it real quick.

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If deep down you believe nothing works out for me, people can't be trusted, I'm not good enough, your reticular activating system will highlight the betrayals and the failures

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and the rejections and all the places where you're not good enough, and it will downplay all of the support or the wins or the possibilities in your life.

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you will keep finding evidence how life is against you if that's what you think.

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Because that's what you're searching for.

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It's not because it's the full truth.

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It's because that's what you're searching for.

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But because your brain is literally filtering out the world to confirm what you already believe.

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Now imagine that you start believing that everything is trying to work out for you.

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Everything always works out for me in the end.

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Your reticular activating system will start to work differently.

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And it will begin to highlight synchronicities, to notice opportunities, to spot helpful people that are in your life, to see solutions where you only solve problems before.

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You become someone who ends up just getting lucky more often.

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It's not luck, it's your filter.

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You're training your brain to notice what serves your growth, ignore more of what doesn't,

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and then connect the dots where you might have missed them in the past.

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And that's why acting as if everything always works out for you isn't just motivational, like it's actually perceptual and neurological.

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And so what you think, you create.

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So if you think that the world's out to get you, you'll see the world's out to get you.

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If you think that everything always works out for you, you will start to get everything to work out for you.

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And now people can get really weird with this and they think, oh yeah, well, they can go real, try to go real magical,

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and say, oh, like, if I just think about money falling from the sky, I'm just going to be rich.

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I wouldn't say that, right?

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Other people go full skeptic and they say, hey, that's nonsense, hard work's the only thing that matters.

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The truth is kind of in the middle of both of those.

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A little bit spiritual, a little bit practical.

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So the grounded way of thinking about it and understanding is your thoughts in life shape your emotional state.

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Your emotional state shapes your actions and your actions will shape your results.

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So no, you don't sit on your couch

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and manifest a new life by meditating on a couch cushion for five or eight hours a day, But also you just don't grind away a new life

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while thinking and feeling like a failure every single day And

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so if you look at that like if we take two different

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Take the exact same let's take a scenario right

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and I'll give you script a and script B right

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so let's say you launch a new Project a new business and it fails script a would be nothing works out.

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Your thought would be, of course, I knew this was going to fail.

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This proves that I'm not cut out for this.

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Your emotions then would be shame and discouragement and embarrassment.

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Your actions, you would withdraw.

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You'd stop trying.

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You'd avoid risk, maybe numb out the world.

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And your result is you would get less feedback, less skill, less opportunity, and your future would then remain small.

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Now, let's say script B, when you actually look at it, this failure that you had, and you actually do think everything works out for me, the thought is, okay, this didn't go as planned,

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but I know there's a lesson or some sort of redirection here.

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The emotion is disappointment, but still with curiosity and determination in some sort of way.

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The action is you look at the data, you ask for feedback, you experiment again, you refine, you get better, and then you eventually, the result,

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you grow, you improve, and you eventually hit something that does work.

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It's the same event in the person's life, but it's a different story.

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It's a different nervous system response and different behaviors.

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So when I say what you think you create, I'm not saying you just magically control reality.

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What I'm saying is the lens that you see the world and reality through, the state that your brain and your body operate in, the quality of the actions that you take,

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All of those change based off of what you think about.

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And so over time, that will create a completely different life for somebody.

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And so you have to understand, it's not about just saying affirmations all day long.

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It's about changing your identity.

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You're moving from, I'm the type of person that bad things happen to, to I'm the type of person that always finds a way to work things out.

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And the identity shift changes everywhere, everything in your life.

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It changes your posture.

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Like you walk a little bit more open.

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You breathe a little bit deeper.

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You're less collapsed and sunken over.

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Your energy will be different.

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People will feel safer around you when you start to think this way because you're not stuck in a fearful state.

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You'll feel more grounded.

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You'll feel less frantic and full of worry.

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You become someone that other people actually want to be around.

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It'll change your decisions.

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You'll take more aligned risks in your life.

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You'll leave situations that are clearly wrong for you

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and you'll stop begging for crumbs and start building your own table that you want to sit at.

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And so in your relationships will change.

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I mean, everything will.

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You'll be less clingy and controlling.

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You'll be more honest and authentic.

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You'll trust that the right people will stay and the wrong ones will eventually fall away.

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And you become somebody who trusts himself, trust that they can handle the hard things, and trust that even if they fail, they're going to get back up and know that it'll make sense later.

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And that's what's powerful about the whole situation.

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And so really, it's quite simple.

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You have to adopt a new default.

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You can do that through questions if you want to.

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Your questions guide your perception.

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You just need to ask better questions.

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So when something happens to you and say, if saying like, oh my God, why is this happening to me?

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Think, how might this be working out for me in the long run?

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That's going to change your perception.

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Why is this happening to me?

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Victim.

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How might this work out for me in the long run?

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Now I'm trying to find some actual true meaning behind this thing.

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Start to think about that for a second.

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If you act as if, and you start to become the type of person that you want to become, you will step into being that person.

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So you've got to think to yourself, if the world's always working out for me, if I'm trying to step into the person that I want to be, what's one thing that I can do today that that version of me would do?

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And then you pair your new beliefs with bold, aligned action.

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Of course, your life is going to change.

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You're going to do things you've never done before.

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You're not going to sit back.

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You're not going to do nothing.

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You're going to do things that used to scare you.

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You're going to send the email.

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You're going to have the hard conversation.

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You're going to launch the business.

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You're going to leave a situation that's clearly wrong for you.

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And action by action, step by step, you're becoming the type of person by acting as if you are

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that person and acting as if everything is always working out for you.

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And so as I wrap up, I want you to imagine something.

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I want you to imagine that from this day forward, your default belief became in the end, things always work out for me because I always show up, I always learn, and I always get better.

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Imagine how differently you would handle setbacks and walk into opportunities.

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and show up in relationships and talk to yourself in the mirror.

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Just think about that.

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So for the next seven days, when something goes quote unquote wrong, just pause and say out loud, this is working out for me somehow.

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And then ask yourself, how might this be working out for me?

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And then you just take one small action each day that the future you would need to take.

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And you wake up two, three, four, five years down the road, and you are a different person because you acted like a different person.

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Hey, thanks so much for watching this video.

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Based off of what you have been watching recently, YouTube has seen the algorithm of what you like and thinks

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that this video is the one that you're going to enjoy the most out of all the videos I've ever made.

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And if you want to make sure you never miss another video, hit that subscribe button right there and I'll see you on the next one.

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 Practice: ACT AS IF EVERYTHING ALWAYS WORKS OUT | Rob Dial - Learn English Speaking with Video

About This Lesson

Key Vocabulary & Phrases

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What is the Shadowing Technique?