Shadowing Practice: Emilia Clarke: Life Lessons | Bazaar UK - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Hi, my name is Amelia Clark and I'm here with Harper's Bazaar UK to share some of my life lessons.
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Hi, my name is Amelia Clark and I'm here with Harper's Bazaar UK to share some of my life lessons.
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I think what I've learnt about style over the years is the difference between what I appreciate and what suits me,
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which are sometimes two different things, which is why I love a photo shoot, because then I get to wear all these amazing things and the photographer's incredible and they make it work.
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My personal style has evolved.
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It is evolved.
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I feel like it's evolved with time.
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I feel like it's evolved with my obsession with fashion.
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I feel like it's evolved with what designers are doing that kind of is more applicable to day-to-day wearing because, again, I dress up for a living.
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So, like, I'm always in a costume.
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So when I wear my own clothes, it's kind of changed.
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And I think when I was younger, I just sort of tried everything and anything.
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And then as I've gotten older, it's just, you kind of return to the classics.
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But then I get to have fun with, like, bags or shoes or jewellery or my hair or my makeup or something like that.
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but what I wear tends to be pretty, I don't wanna say safe, but probably quite safe.
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The best piece of fashion advice I've ever been given, getting stuff tailored.
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So I'm five foot two, it's a problem because if you buy nice clothes, they're designed for tall people.
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And so when I wear them, it doesn't look good.
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And so when I realized that you could tailor clothes, then it was like a game changer.
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Oh, what we wear matters so much.
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It can transform your mood.
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It can make you feel different.
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And I don't like to think that what you wear is the definition of your confidence because you should be able to wear anything, anything at all.
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If you wake up in the morning and the thing that's gonna make you feel good is wearing your pajamas.
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That's cool.
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Your pajamas with a heel.
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Come on, I'm feeling you.
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The first thing people see when they see you, is your choice of outfit, is what clothes you're wearing.
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And I think it took me a long time to realize that that was important to me and that I could express who
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I was as myself outside of the world of the industry and outside of the world of the characters that I play and I get to be me.
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I've learned a lot about beauty, but I've learned most about beauty from my mum.
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She used to work in makeup, so when I was a kid, she gave me quite a lot of life lessons that maybe I wasn't ready for.
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So she'd be telling me about like, how to make makeup look like you weren't wearing any, and I was like, I'm 13, I want it to look exactly like I'm wearing loads.
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I wanna wear bloomscara.
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And so as, again, as I've evolved, it's just, it's just been a stage with fashion and with makeup.
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It's just been an evolution of like, you find the thing and you go mad for it, and you put too much on or do too much.
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And then as you get older, it's just a progression of taking it off.
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And I think that's a sign of confidence as well, allowing yourself to look like yourself.
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The first piece of beauty advice I've been given, if anyone's heard me do any interview ever about makeup, you've heard me say this 9,000 times, but my mum told me not to pluck my eyebrows.
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And here they are, ladies and gentlemen.
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They're here, they're strong, they're here to stay, they've never been changed, don't pluck them.
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Even if like we see people start to say, like, oh, we're gonna go back to the thin eyebrow.
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No, we won't.
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It will come full circle.
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Believe in your eyebrows.
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My go-to beauty product would be Clinique Moisture Surge.
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I've spoken about this.
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The whole day long, you've got glowy, dewy skin.
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It's kind of amazing.
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That and then just mascara.
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Just loads of mascara.
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Sometimes I feel most beautiful when I get to do like a beautiful photo shoot There are professionals who are making me look beautiful.
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That's fun.
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But I either feel most beautiful the first day I wash my hair, because if you're like me and you only wash your hair twice a week, they're special days, because they're the days when you're looking your best, because you've got freshly washed hair.
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Largely, I feel my most beautiful when I'm having a good time.
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I was with my friends at dinner last night, surrounded by people that I really, really, really loved, and I felt so confident and beautiful in myself, way more than like any fancy event.
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Self-care means to me, complicated.
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It feels like it's a complicated, loaded word because in the beginning, self-care was like a revolutionary thought and then as time has gone on, it's become this kind of loaded,
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hashtag self-care sort of energy, which is confusing because I think self-care can mean a million different things.
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If you're a social person, Self-care can mean going out and having fun.
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And if you're not a social person, it can mean staying in with your tiny, furry, loved pet, like me.
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I think it just means quietening the world around you so that you can listen to yourself, whatever it is that you need.
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Success to me in my career is waking up every day and wanting to go to work.
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If the movie's no good, that's fine.
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If the play gets terrible reviews, that's fine.
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Because you've already won.
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You've already been successful.
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Because you've already got what you wanted and what you need as a human being out of the work that you've been doing.
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Getting to work with creative people, that's what success means to me.
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And that's definitely evolved a huge amount.
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And it's been, I suppose, like a painful experience getting to that moment, because it means the loss of like, what you thought the big dreams were.
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But I don't see that as a failure.
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I see that as, again, success.
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I always knew I wanted to be an actor.
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Yes, always.
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I was like, too precocious.
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Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare.
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Can you imagine having a two year old, and being like, I wanna be an actress.
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Yeah, I've never wanted to do anything else, to the point where I feel like my life would have been a bit easier if I had gone, maybe I'll try university, or maybe I wanna be an astronaut.
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No, that would have been more complicated, but you see what I'm saying.
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I've thought many times, maybe I'll just give up acting, and I can't, I just can't do it.
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The best piece of advice I would give to someone starting out in the industry is, are you sure?
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If there is anything else, I mean this from the bottom of my heart, if there is anything else, if you are a young actor who's like coming up to, am I gonna go to drama school?
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I think I wanna be an actor.
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Is there anything else in the world that you could do that would bring you joy?
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Not that like I could be an accountant, I'm really clever, but like that you would want to do, do that because there's so much joy and there's so much love and there's so much amazing things to be found in this career and I've had some of the best moments of my life doing it, but I've had some of the worst.
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And you've got to be there for the worst.
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And you've got to ride through the worst to get to the best.
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And so if you don't love it with your heart, mind, body, soul, there is nothing else on earth that I could possibly do, then that would be my biggest piece of advice because most of acting is being unemployed.
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And that ain't glamorous.
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So if there's anything else that you can do, do that.
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But if there isn't, and this is what you want to do, then always follow the creativity, never follow the money.
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What draws me to a project is always the people involved.
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So director, basically, I'm just completely director led.
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Like if it's a director I wanna work with, you sort of don't need to read the script.
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I just want to learn as much as I can.
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And I wanna learn from as many different people as I can.
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And good different directors, everyone has their own individual style, their own individual like creativity.
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So that's what I am looking for in my next job.
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My friendships are the loves of my life.
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It's the most underrated yet impactful relationship you can have in your entire life.
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Like the fact that I've known my friends for minimum 14 years.
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Yeah, I value friendship above everything in this entire world apart from my dog.
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But again, he's a friendship.
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It's a friendship.
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It's a furry friendship.
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How would my friends describe me?
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I don't wanna know.
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Completely bonkers, overly generous.
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And like that sounds like a humble brag.
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It's not a humble brag.
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I think it can make people feel uncomfortable.
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I just like to give stuff to people, just really like it.
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And sometimes people find it a bit much.
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Oh my goodness, what have I learned about love?
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Love is a kind of testimony to the power of being a human.
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I think that when you truly love someone, it's sort of being able to truly understand forgiveness and compassion and openness.
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And the fact that love can encompass all of those things is kind of miraculous.
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And then you just get the hot, sexy love, which is like a meteor and pheromones and amazing.
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That's nothing about any of those things.
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That's just about the moment that you're in.
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And you're never more present than when you're falling in love with someone for the first time.
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And it's kind of incredible.
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But I think compassion, forgiveness and love are all sort of rolled up into the same thing.
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And that's when you get to see how beautiful it is to be a human.
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I, this is really funny.
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I don't know if you do like the love languages thing, but according to the love languages, mine would be acts of service.
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So if someone were to buy me a diamond ring, I'd be like, thanks, babe, appreciate it.
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If someone were to come round because there was a cockroach, my biggest phobia.
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Just disgusting things.
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But if I were to call someone and be like this, and there's a cockroach in my house, and I'm paralyzed and I can't move, and they were to come around and get rid of it for me, that would blow my mind.
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I'd be like on the floor.
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What have I learned about confidence?
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Oh, it's a trick.
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It's a mind Jedi trick.
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You can convince yourself that you are confident.
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Nerves, right?
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Let's say you're about to go on stage.
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Let's say you're about to do like a speech.
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Let's say you're about to do a presentation to your company.
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Frightening.
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The things that you feel, your heart pounding, your palms sweating, your like everything that your body does when you're nervous and feeling under confident, your body has the capacity to give you the most profound, most powerful performance enhancing drug known to man.
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and it's coursing around your body.
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And as soon as you understand that that's what nerves are, it's just your body preparing you to be the best that you can possibly be.
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That was like a life hack that kind of switched things up for me.
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Whenever I got nervous, I would kind of remind myself that if I was feeling all of those things, that meant I was doing exactly the right thing, it was exactly where I was meant to be.
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And then also I found that if you write down your achievements, that can really help with your confidence building, the little mini wins.
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and you do that every day and you catalog them, you can reverse the narrative in your head that says that you're not confident, that you're not good enough, that you're not all of those things that make us feel underconfident.
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I've always felt very unworthy and like low confidence, not meant to be here, imposter syndrome.
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And the way that I've counteracted that throughout my career is simply by giving less of a, about how other people see me.
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Because as soon as you remove that power from someone else and you give it to yourself, then you have the ability to stand up for what you believe in, and you have the ability to understand what you yourself are worth.
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Criticism is a difficult one.
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It's, because it can feel like a failure, but I'm in an artistic environment.
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My entire industry is based on criticism and praise.
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That's it, that's the whole thing.
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Our shows, our films, our TV shows, our books, our scripts, our whatever, live and die by how it's received.
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So you've got to get okay with being criticised real early and try and determine whether that criticism is valid for you, whether it's useful, whether it's unuseful, and where to put it.
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We're in a creative industry.
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The only reason why we should be doing what we're doing is because we love it, and it's because it sets our world alight, and it's because we're trying to express ourselves in whatever creative way that we want.
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And so if you're determining the worth of that on a criticism from someone else who doesn't get what you do or doesn't like what you do or whatever it is, or a praise from someone else, it's the same thing.
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If you believe the praise, you sort of got to believe the criticism, so you kind of don't really have a choice to believe anything other than how you feel about it.
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Which brings me back to my definition of success, which is the making of it is where I find my success.
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What empowers me?
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Snoop Dogg-a-dog empowers me.
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Beyonce empowers me.
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My dog empowers me.
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My friends empower me.
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Being happy empowers me.
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Music often is the thing that empowers me, like a hype.
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Like I've got my hype people, I've got my mates, and when I need them to be my hype people, that's what they are.
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And if they're not there, then Beyonce normally is, like not in person, I don't know how I wish I did, but as in her music is there.
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Watching stuff that I love, watching a TV show or a film that I adore or a play, that completely empowers me.
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It sets me alight.
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Anything that reminds me of my own creativity and what I really enjoy and what I really like, then I get hyped, I get empowered.
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What have I learned about feminism?
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A lot, because when I was a kid, I didn't know what feminism was.
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And then again, you go through all of the like, you're at uni and you're like understanding what feminism is and then you become like a hardened feminist.
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Like you read all the books and then, you know, your life happens and you suddenly be like, oh my God, I'm not doing the feminist thing or I'm a bad feminist.
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And then so then I thought myself to be a bad feminist for a really long time.
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And then I realized I'm a woman and I have compassion for other women and I want to help other women.
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I want to be able to have choices.
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I want every other woman in the world to be able to have choices.
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And I also want to be able to not have the answers, which I think that's the tricky thing.
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And I think that's the kind of crux point that feminism is at maybe now, is a woman's ability to be ambivalent, to not know fully what she wants or who she is, what she likes or what she doesn't like.
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That's what freedom as a woman feels like to me, to be able to be a working mother or not a working mother, or have a child and not have a child, or not know how you feel about any of those things and for that to be okay.
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I've been fortunate enough to work with lots of incredible women in my life, and it's less the advice that they've given, but more watching how they are, how they work professionally, that has been impactful to me.
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Emma Thompson is a fabulous example.
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The way that she exists as a woman on set is the most beautiful thing to behold because she has an endless supply of kindness and care for other people.
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But also when she's performing, when she's on, when she's on the camera, it's like, the switch is incredible.
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And then also Janet McTeer once said to me, why stand when you can sit?
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Why sit when you can lie?
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Which I've always taken.
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So essentially, if you've got a chance, you could do a lot of waiting around on sets.
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If you're stood up, but you have a chance to sit down on a chair, sit down on a chair.
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And if you're sat in a chair and there's a bed near you, go ahead and lay down.
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You can lay down, it's fine.
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That was a good piece of life advice.
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And be kind, always, always, always, always, when in doubt, be kind.
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You can't go wrong.
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Well, I really hope you've enjoyed my life lessons.
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Feel free to ignore or follow any of the things that I've mentioned.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Context & Background
In a recent interview with Harper's Bazaar UK, actress Emilia Clarke shared valuable life lessons centered around fashion, beauty, and self-expression. Her insights delve into how personal style evolves over time and the significance of feeling good in what you wear. This dialogue not only provides a glimpse into Clarke's journey with fashion but also invites English learners to reflect on their own choices and self-awareness. Learning from such dialogues can enhance your conversational skills and foster confidence, especially when engaging in discussions about personal topics.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "What I wear matters so much." - Acknowledging the role clothing plays in self-perception.
- "It's okay to wear pajamas with a heel." - Encouraging personal style choices that make you feel good.
- "Getting stuff tailored was a game changer." - Emphasizing how adjustments can enhance the fit and appearance of clothing.
- "Believe in your eyebrows." - Promoting confidence in one's natural beauty.
- "It's just been an evolution of fashion." - Recognizing how personal style changes over time.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively use the shadowing technique with this video, follow these steps:
- Watch Carefully: Begin by watching the video without trying to repeat anything. Focus on Emilia’s tone, pronunciation, and rhythm.
- Break it Down: Segment the video into short clips. Concentrate on a sentence or phrase at a time. Emilia’s speaking pace is moderate, making it easier to mimic.
- Listen and Repeat: Play a segment and pause after each sentence or phrase. Use the shadow speech technique to repeat what she says, mimicking her intonation and expression. This helps improve pronunciation and fluency.
- Practice Daily: Incorporate this practice into your daily routine. Try to shadow 10-15 minutes daily. Utilize phrases like "What I wear matters so much" in discussion to enhance your IELTS speaking practice.
- Record Yourself: After a few practice sessions, record your shadowing. Compare it with the original audio to identify areas of improvement.
Using shadow speaks not only boosts your listening comprehension but also enhances fluency in spoken English. By seamlessly integrating phrases from the video into your conversations, you’ll build confidence and improve your language skills effectively.
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.
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