Shadowing Practice: Emotional Intelligence: The #1 ability for leaders | Daniel Goleman - Learn English Speaking with Video
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You know, in the future, I think emotional intelligence will be one of several abilities that we need.
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Another, of course, is cognitive ability, IQ, and maybe AI will take over more and more of that.
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However, emotional intelligence is a human ability and will always remain so.
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IQ predicts how well you'll do in your school years
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and how much salary you can make over the course of a career
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because it says what job you can get into like being a business executive or a doctor or a lawyer.
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But once you're in those professions everybody else is about as smart as you are.
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That's where emotional intelligence kicks in.
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People who emerge as outstanding performers or the best leaders have high emotional intelligence
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and their IQ is not that relevant at that point.
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I'm Daniel Goleman.
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I've written many books mostly on emotional intelligence.
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That's really my favorite topic.
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The book Emotional Intelligence many years ago was an international bestseller.
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I've written now five books on the topic.
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My most recent is Optimal, how to sustain personal and organizational excellence every day.
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Emotional intelligence is a set of personal skills that we learn in life.
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It's a combination of self -awareness, managing your emotions well, empathy,
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tuning into other people, and putting that all together to have harmonious or effective relationships.
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Emotional intelligence has been talked about for centuries.
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Philosophers were talking about, know thyself, that's self -awareness.
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But when I wrote the emotional intelligence book in 95, it was the first time that for a popular audience,
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emotional intelligence had become well known.
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I was a science journalist at the New York Times back then.
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And I'd been covering a decade of research on the brain and emotion.
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And in doing so, I came across a very obscure article called Emotional Intelligence, and I loved the title.
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It was by Peter Salovey, who's just stepping down as the president of Yale University, and his then graduate student, John Mayer.
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And I thought, wow, what a great phrase.
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It seems like an oxymoron.
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You don't put emotions together with intelligence, but actually it's being intelligent about emotions.
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When I wrote emotional intelligence I was actually thinking of bringing it to schools.
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It seemed to me that kids should learn from the get -go how to manage themselves, how to tune into themselves,
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how to tune into other people, how to get along, how to behave well and so on.
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I was a big advocate of what's now called social emotional learning
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and from early on my view of emotional intelligence hasn't really changed much
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but I integrated it with findings from research on outstanding performers
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and I saw
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that different abilities of high performers like being able to manage your emotions fit well in the model
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and now I talk about four domains of emotional intelligence
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and then 12 particular competencies of people who are high in emotional intelligence.
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Self -awareness means you know what you're feeling, you know how it shapes your perceptions and your thoughts and your impulse to act.
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We find in our research
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that people low in self -awareness are unable to develop strengths very well in other parts of emotional intelligence.
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People who are high in self -awareness, however, are able to develop excellence across the board.
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Self -management means when you're upset, when you're angry, when you're anxious, can you manage your emotions?
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Can you keep them from disrupting your focus on what you have to do right now?
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Or having more instance of road rage, of shootings, of people blowing up at other people.
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There's a growing need for people in general to get better at this ability.
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The third part is social awareness, which in one sense means practicing empathy.
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You not only know how the person thinks and how they feel, you care about them.
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This is what you want in your parents.
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This is what you want in your spouse.
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This is what you want in your lover.
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This is what you want in your friends.
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And this is what you want in your teachers, doctors, leaders of any kind, people who have influence.
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The fourth part of emotional intelligence is relationship management.
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Can you handle conflicts well?
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Can you keep yourself calm and listen to the other person?
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Are you being an effective communicator?
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Full rapport means that you feel close, you feel you can work with this person, you can trust them.
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Unlike IQ, which barely budges over the course of our life, emotional intelligence can change is learned and learnable.
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And it's learned and learnable at any point in life.
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Emotional intelligence is not one thing.
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It's like going to a doctor for a physical.
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You get your lipids and your good cholesterol, bad cholesterol.
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You get 15 data points.
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Emotional intelligence is a set of abilities and each of us has strengths and limitations across that spectrum.
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So if you want to improve your emotional intelligence, see where you need to improve first.
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One of the common colds of emotional intelligence is poor listening.
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You know, we think about what we want to say
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and we don't really listen to the other person and we cut them off, we interrupt.
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Let's say you wanted to change that.
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This is a basic of empathy, listening well.
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So if you want to learn to be better at empathy, you might say, my habit, and I've done it thousands of times,
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is cutting people off and interrupting.
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I'm going to make the effort to do it differently.
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I'm going to listen to the person out, say what I think they mean, and then say what I think.
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That is a different behavioral sequence.
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And it comes down to the basics of what we call neuroplasticity, how the brain changes with repeated experience.
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And that's what underlies habit change.
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It's a little like crossing your arms in a new way.
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Cross your arms in the old way, please.
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Now cross them with the other arm on top.
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That feels uncomfortable.
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That's what it's like to change a habit.
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So with listening, you have to first make an intentional effort,
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might feel uncomfortable, but as you persist it gets more and more comfortable until finally it's an automatic habit.
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That will stay with you for years.
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You know, I've gone around the world talking to different audiences, and one of the things I love to ask is,
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tell me about a leader you've loved and a leader you hate.
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And tell me one quality that makes a leader so good or so bad.
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Basically, the leader you hate is low in emotional intelligence.
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They don't manage their emotions very well.
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They blow up at people, don't empathize, they don't tune in and they don't understand how clueless they are.
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The leader you love is high in it.
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Having a boss with high emotional intelligence means you feel not only inspired, not only motivated, you feel supported,
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you feel guided, you feel you have clarity about what's expected from you.
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You give your best in your best state, in the optimal state, not in a desperate, stressed out state.
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Research at the Yale School of Management has found that emotions are contagious, and they're most contagious from the leader outward.
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The leader is most often the sender of strong emotions, either negative or positive.
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This very research by Seagal Barsade has shown that if the leader is in a negative mood,
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very anxious, for example, people on that team will catch that mood and performance goes down.
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If the leader's in a very positive mood, I feel really good, I feel enthusiastic,
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then people catch that positive mood and their performance as a team or as a group goes up.
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So the leader's state is actually much more important on the ability of people to do good work than many people realize,
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particularly many leaders actually.
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But if you have a leader that you hate, for example, and sadly too many people do, then you really don't give your best.
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In fact, you're more likely to leave as soon as you can, particularly if you're talented.
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So a leader with low emotional intelligence is actually draining the organization in the long term.
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They may get results for the quarter by driving people, by stressing them out, but they're burning them out and they're going to lose good people.
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So in the short term they may look good, in the long term it's a disaster.
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I once took a bus up Madison Avenue in New York City on a very hot, humid day.
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People had a kind of bubble around them like, don't touch me, don't talk to me.
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I had the bubble too.
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I got on the bus and the bus driver shocked me.
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He looked at me and very warmly said, welcome to the bus.
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How's your day going?
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And then I realized, sitting on the bus, that he was carrying on a conversation with everyone on the bus.
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You're looking for suits, are you?
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Well, there's a great sale up here on the right at this department store.
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Did you see the exhibit in the museum on the left?
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On and on and on.
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Then people would get off that bus and they'd been transformed from kind of grumpy to pretty upbeat.
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It was kind of magical.
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And years later, I saw an article in the New York Times about that bus driver.
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His name, it turned out, was Govan Brown.
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He had fans.
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People would wait for his bus.
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He got 3 ,000 letters saying what a great bus driver he was, not one complaint.
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And he, it turned out, was the pastor of a church.
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And he saw the people on his bus as part of his flock.
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He was tending to his flock.
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He had a purpose that was far greater than that of the New York Transit Authority,
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which is something like getting as many people to where they want to go on time as we can.
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He had a splendid sense of what he was doing.
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It gave a greater meaning to what he did, and he did it superbly.
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I've always felt that the more emotional intelligence in society, the better.
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I think we would have parents who are more effective in raising kids, who are kinder.
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We'd have more compassion for each other in our interaction with friends and loved ones as well as with strangers.
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I think we would care more about the environment, which is why I've been happy to be a kind of evangelist for emotional intelligence,
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if you will.
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I'm not the originator of the phrase.
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I think I made it more famous.
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I just think it would make a better world.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Emotional Intelligence: The ability for leaders”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: emotional, intelligence, leader, bus, emotion. This video has 145 sentences and 1816 words to shadow. The speech runs for 11:40. The speaker talks at a natural 156 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 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
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| emotion noun | /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/ | A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data. |
| awareness noun | /əˈwɛɹ.nəs/ | The state or level of consciousness where sense data can be confirmed by an observer. |
| mood noun | /muːd/ | A mental or emotional state, composure. |
| tune noun | /tjuːn/ | A melody. |
| habit noun | /ˈhæb.ɪt/ | An action performed on a regular basis. |
| empathy noun | /ˈɛmpəθi/ | Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person. |
| performer noun | /pɚˈfɔɹmɚ/ | One who performs for, or entertains, an audience. |
| topic noun | /ˈtɑpɪk/ | A subject; a theme; a category or general area of interest. |
| phrase noun | /ˈfɹeɪ̯z/ | A short written or spoken expression. |
| uncomfortable adjective | /ʌnˈkʌm.fɚ.tə.bl̩/ | Not comfortable; causing discomfort. |
| bubble noun | /ˈbʌbəl/ | A spherically contained volume of air or other gas in a liquid, commonly a soapy liquid. |
| anxious adjective | /ˈæŋkʃəs/ | Nervous and worried. |
| excellence noun | /ˈɛksələns/ | The quality of being excellent; brilliance |
| optimal adjective | /ˈɑptɪməl/ | The best, most favourable or desirable, especially under some restriction. |
| cholesterol noun | /kəˈlɛstəɹɒl/ | A sterol lipid synthesized by the liver and transported in the bloodstream to the membranes of all animal cells; it plays a central role in many biochemical… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. |
| come across verb | To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition. |
| come down to verb | To reach by moving down or reducing. |
| get along verb | To interact or coexist well, without argument or trouble. |
| get off verb | To move from being on top of (something) to not being on top of it. |
| go around verb | To move or spread from person to person. |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I've written many books mostly on emotional intelligence.
- Can you handle conflicts well?
- Are you being an effective communicator?
- How's your day going?
- You're looking for suits, are you?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've written · has been talked · hasn't really changed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | People who emerge · people who are · people who have |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | has been talked · is learned · been transformed |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 36 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, I've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/, enthusiastic /ɪnˌθjuːzɪˈæstɪk/, empathize /ˈɛmpəˌθaɪz/, thinker /ˈθɪŋ.kɚ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, anxious /ˈæŋkʃəs/, shock /ʃɔk/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/
- Long words — get the stress right: uncomfortable /ʌnˈkʌm.fɚ.tə.bl̩/, cholesterol /kəˈlɛstəɹɒl/, automatic /ˌɔː.təˈmæt.ɪk/, intelligent /ɪnˈtɛlɪd͡ʒənt/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/
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 emotion, awareness, mood.
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.