Shadowing Practice: Atomic Habits: How to Get 1% Better Every Day - James Clear - Learn English Speaking with Video

One way to think about it is just kind of basic math.

Like if you just look at the numbers, if you were able to improve by 1% each day for an entire year and those gains compound, you would end up 37 times better at the end of the year.

And if you were to get 1% worse, you would whittle yourself almost all the way down to zero.

What's interesting here is that everybody wants a transformation, right?

Everybody wants a radical improvement, want rapid success, but we fail to realize that small habits and little choices are transforming us every day already.

For the rest of this talk there are four stages of

habit formation I'm going to take you through each of those four.

So the four stages are noticing, wanting, doing, and liking.

Noticing, wanting, doing, and liking.

One of my favorite things about noticing, one of my favorite strategies for discussing it, it's called implementation intentions.

Many people think that they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.

They think that they need to get more motivated, that they need willpower in order to execute on a habit If I just felt like writing, if I just felt like meditating, if I felt like working out, then I would do it.

But in fact, they don't have a plan for it.

And so they wake up each day thinking, I wonder if I'll feel motivated to write today.

I wonder if I'll feel motivated to work out today.

But instead, you can take the decision making out of it by explicitly stating when, where, and how you want to implement the habit.

It sounds easy to say, let's just start a plan.

Let's, you know, write down exactly what you should do, and then maybe you'll follow through on it.

But of course, we all know that there are challenges that arise.

It's not quite that easy.

So here's a little strategy

that I like to use to make sure you can come up with a better plan of action

And it's called a failure pre-mortem So the way

that it works is you think about the habit the project the goal Whatever the most important thing is

that you want to work on

and I want you to imagine fast forward six months from now

And you failed and then tell the story of why you failed what happened what challenges did you encounter?

What was it that took you off course?

Once you have all

that stuff laid out on the table in front of you

You can start to make better choices about how to develop a plan you can start to have if-then plans

So not only do I want to exercise for 20 minutes on Monday at 5 p.m., but also if I do not exercise because I have to take my kid to practice or whatever,

then Tuesday morning at 7 a.m.

I will go in, right?

You can have ways to adjust for these challenges.

Stage two, wanting.

One of the most overlooked drivers of habits and human behavior is our physical environment.

And this is an interesting insight about our desires.

Your environment often influences them.

We want things simply because they are an option, right?

Simply because they are in front of us at the time.

Thankfully, you don't have to be the victim of your environment.

You can also be the architect of it.

You can decide to design something to make your good behaviors easier and your bad behaviors harder.

So when it comes to habits, if you want to practice your guitar more frequently, put it right in the middle of your living room so you run across all the time.

If you want to read more, when you make your bed in the morning, take the book you want to read, put it on top of the pillow.

When you come back that night, pick it up, read a few pages, go to sleep.

Many of our desires are simply shaped because we have an environment that shapes us in that way.

So the moral of the story is I've never seen someone

stick to positive habits in a consistent fashion in a negative environment.

Maybe you can overpower once or twice, maybe you can have the willpower to do the right thing on one day, but if you're constantly fighting against those forces, it's going to be very hard to follow through.

Stage three, doing.

The important insight here, especially for habits, is that in the beginning, the most important thing is just to shut up and to put your reps in.

Just make sure that you hone the skill, right?

And you can start to think of it, the way that I like to think of it is

that any outcome that you wish to achieve is just a point along the spectrum of repetitions.

So if you have few reps to more reps, and you can imagine an easy goal, moderate goal, hard goal, the more reps that you put in,

the more likely you are to achieve that goal.

Now, what I like to say is you should optimize for the starting line, not the finish line, right?

So often when we think about habits, goals, routines, achievements, it's all about the milestone.

We think about how much weight we want to lose, how much money we want to earn, how many subscribers we want to have, it's all fixed on the finish line.

But instead, if you can optimize for the starting line, and make it as easy as possible to get started and get your reps in, often the outcomes just come as a natural result.

Okay, stage four, liking.

The only reason that we repeat behaviors is because we enjoy them, because we like the reward.

If we don't enjoy the experience along the way, we're unlikely to stick with it.

And that means that you need to figure out ways to bring a reward into the present moment

because good habits have a problem.

And that problem is that for good habits, the immediate consequence is there there's a cost that happens in the moment, but the reward is often delayed.

So you need to figure out how to bring the reward into the present moment to stick to a good habit.

And someone else who's going to be speaking here, Seth Godin, had a very nice little quote about this, where he said, the best way to change long-term behavior is with short-term feedback.

And one way to think about that is that long-term behaviors, sticking with writing for years on end or going to the gym and so on,

they have those delayed consequences.

So you need a way to enjoy it in the moment.

So here's I think you should do get a wall calendar

where you can see every day of the year mapped out on it

And then any day

that you do your task of writing jokes for 15 minutes I want you to just put an X on

that day and You'll have a couple false starts here and there

But at some point you're gonna get a little bit of a chain going right you get four

or five six seven eight days in a row And at

that point your only goal becomes to don't break the chain

Doesn't matter how good or how bad the jokes are doesn't matter

if it makes it into your material Just don't break the chain What's interesting about this is that by measuring your progress, you get an immediate reward in the moment, right?

The reward of like having a great standup routine 40, you know, 40 days from now or 40 weeks from now or whatever is not, it's so delayed that you need something in the moment that makes you feel good.

So if you do those 15 minutes, you can cross that off.

That's a way to get an immediate hit, a little bit of a reward by tracking it.

We often fear that in order to achieve something new, to become someone new, we have to abandon everything that we are.

But in fact, In fact, that's not how it works.

Change can happen plank by plank, board by board, habit by habit, and gradually you can become someone new.

With consistency and repetition, you can actually change not only your results, but actually your identity.

It's because the more evidence

that we have for a belief the more likely we are to believe it

so if you go to church every Sunday for 20 years you believe

that you were religious if you study Spanish every Thursday night for 20 minutes you believe

that you are studious the actions that you take provide evidence for who you are

and it's not that happens matter more necessarily on an individual basis each moment in life matters

but what ends up happening is that over the broad span of time, things that you do once or twice fade away, and things that you do time after time, day after day, week after week,

accumulate the bulk of the evidence for what you believe about yourself.

And so every action that you take is actually a vote for the type of person that you want to become.

100

If you want to become someone new, then you can take a new action and begin to accumulate evidence for that identity, for that belief about yourself.

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And that the more votes that you cast, the more likely you are to win the election.

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You don't need to be unanimous.

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You don't have to be perfect all the time.

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You just need to have the body of work.

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So true change is actually not behavior change, it's not results change, it's not process change, it's identity change.

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The goal is not to become, the goal is not to read a book, it's to become a reader.

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The goal is not to write a book or write an article, it's to become a writer.

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The goal is not to run a marathon, it's to become a runner, to become a type of person, to develop an identity.

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And the way to being something or becoming someone is through doing something.

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So every time you sit down to write, every time you practice that habit, you are being a writer.

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Every time you play a sport, you're being an athlete.

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Every time you practice painting or music or whatever, you're being an artist.

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And habits are not only the method through which we achieve external measures of success, like losing weight or earning more money or meditating and reducing stress.

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They are also the path through which we achieve internal change and actually become someone new.

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They're the path through which we forge the identity that we have, the deepest beliefs we have about ourselves, our sense of self.

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And so if you can change your habits, you can change your life.

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Thank you.

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: Atomic Habits: How to Get 1% Better Every Day - James Clear - Learn English Speaking with Video

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