Shadowing Practice: How I Got Over My Worst Heartbreak (And You Can Too) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I still remember the greatest heartbreak of my life.
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And today I'm going to talk about it.
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I remember it really well.
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I remember where I was, I remember that I didn't see it coming at all.
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I remember the moments of breaking down sporadically in restaurants with my family
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because I was not coping with the new predicament I found myself in of having been broken up with.
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I remember searching for wisdom on YouTube and discovering that all of the most viral videos on Heartbreak were my own videos.
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This was a moment where talking about what I knew meant nothing.
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Practicing everything I had ever learned and spoken about
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and taught to everybody else was the way that I was going to save myself.
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So in this video, I want to talk about the five things
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that I did that proved to be essential and life-saving in one of the hardest moments of my life.
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I'm not going to be able to go through all five of these in nearly as much detail as I want, but that's okay
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because tomorrow I am starting five days to mend where I
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am going to be with every one of you who is heartbroken right now for an hour a day, taking you through in depth all of the things that can help you move forward.
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I promise you by the end of this week, you're going to feel better.
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It starts tomorrow.
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You can sign up at mendweek.com and it's free.
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So come join us.
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So the first one is I truly had to learn how to cope with the severe emotions
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that I was feeling at that time around pain and loss.
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Now, Now look, whether we are newly in the throes of heartbreak or we have been stuck there for some time, the emotions can feel unbearable.
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Fear, anxiety, grief, depression, regret, all of these things can destabilize our mental health,
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rob us of our joy and make it impossible to fully inhabit our own lives.
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But here's what I learned.
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It is not these emotions themselves that dictate the quality of our life when we're heartbroken.
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It is the relationship we develop with those emotions.
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For me, this meant understanding the difference between emotion and thought.
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The emotions, the deep sense of loss,
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the grief, the pain of this area of my life going away, That alone was awful.
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But what made it far worse was all the story that went with it.
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The story of this was my person and I lost them.
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That was a story.
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That was a thought pattern.
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The story of I'll never meet anyone like this again.
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Story.
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The thought of this makes me not good enough.
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You know, if I had been more this, more that, this person wouldn't have left.
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All of these thoughts took what were already painful emotions and compounded them into something truly unbearable and catastrophic.
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The way that I look at the difference between emotion and thought is if a bee stung you right now,
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you probably wouldn't have a lot of self-defeating thought or story around that.
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You wouldn't say, I can't believe I left the window open and that allowed the bee to fly in and sting me.
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I'm such an idiot.
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Always that person who leaves the window open and you wouldn't do that.
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A bee stung you, it would hurt.
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You'd be like, ow, that hurts.
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It's annoying.
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It's frustrating.
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I need to treat this with something, right?
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You treat the wound.
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In heartbreak, we're so busy thinking and constructing story that we don't actually treat the wound.
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We don't sit with the pain.
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And by sitting with the pain and being present with the pain, we actually give ourselves a chance to move through it.
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The thought is what keeps us in rumination about it and makes the pain turn into suffering.
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On day one of Five Days to Mend, I'm going to show you some ways to really employ this and we'll go through a bunch of examples.
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But let me move on to the second thing that was necessary for me to get through my heartbreak.
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I had to learn techniques to stop thinking about this person.
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Compulsive rumination about an ex is a hallmark of heartbreak.
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And we spend so much time in our heads that we end up fracturing ourselves.
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We wear one mask when we go to work or when we're at dinner with friends.
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Internally, we are in a private world of pain.
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It's easy for everything to remind us of that person we have lost.
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Places, pictures, people, sounds, music.
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All of these things feel like roads that lead back to thoughts of them.
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Even just seeing someone else who's happy can lead us back to thinking about what we have lost.
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It's why at a time of heartbreak, no matter how many good things there are in your life, it can feel like nothing else matters to you.
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That can switch us off to the love we do have in our lives.
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It can switch us off to the friendships that are showing up for us, the things that are happening in our career.
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It can literally shut us down to everything beautiful.
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The truth that really helped me, and I think it will help you too if you can connect to it,
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is that actually the world outside of your ex is far,
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far, far bigger than the world of your ex.
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It's massive.
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There are so many people in the world.
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There are so many experiences to be had in the world.
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We couldn't possibly experience everything and everyone there is to experience in a thousand lifetimes, let alone our short life.
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But the more we start to add new pieces of our life in, the more we start to create new firsts,
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new associations, that person starts to become a smaller and smaller part of our overall map of the world.
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And what it's given way to is this hugely expansive terrain that we now get to explore.
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This doesn't mean that the grief of losing someone goes away overnight, but what started as a grief
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that felt like it was the universe starts to become a smaller and smaller and smaller part of our universe.
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We start to realize that there is so much more to life than this person that we have lost.
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The third thing that saved me in my heartbreak was being hyper aware
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that there were things that were going to make me feel better
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and there were things that were reliably going to make me feel worse.
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My brother talks about this as the difference between the hangover recovery method and the athlete recovery method.
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The hangover recovery method is you went out drinking, you feel awful the next day, and then when you're in that mode, what do we do?
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We watch trashy TV, we eat greasy food, maybe even we start drinking again to try and feel better with the hair of the dog.
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The athlete recovery method is very different to that.
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I remember in the height of my heartbreak going into a jujitsu class
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that I'd been doing for years
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and the professor was there at the time I went up to him his name's Cobrinha
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and I said I uh I'm going through a really bad time right now I'm like massively heartbroken
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and I was like at the time you know when you're in
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that kind of heartbreak you're just searching you just want anything to feel better.
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And he said, you have suffered an injury the same way we do here on the mats.
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You got an injury.
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In this case, it's your heart.
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Your heart's been injured.
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Okay, great.
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So that's injured, but that doesn't mean we can't train every other part of our body
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because that's what you would do here.
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You train everything else so that as this heals, when it does heal, everything else is ready to go.
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So be hyper aware of the things that you know are going to make you feel worse,
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whether it's alcohol, whether it's drugs, whether it's not sleeping, whether it's hooking up,
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you know, trying to have a rebound relationship.
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You know that these things are reliably going to make you feel worse.
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You have energy right now, right?
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There's a kind of energy to heartbreak.
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There's energy there.
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It wants to go somewhere.
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Our job is to direct that energy to the things that are going to make us feel better, not worse.
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And look, one gym session, you know, drinking enough water today, getting more sleep tonight, doing a meditation,
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the right journaling prompts when you're heartbroken, which on MEND week next week I will show you, they're not going to make us feel better instantly.
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But the accumulation of these things starts to change the game bit by bit.
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It also has the added effect of making us proud of ourselves.
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And becoming proud of ourselves is a wonderful antidote to the self-loathing and the self-esteem damage that we can get during heartbreak.
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By the way, when we do MEND Week this week, it's not just going to be me going live for an hour a day, maybe longer on some days.
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You know me, we'll see.
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but I'm also going to be giving you access to Matthew AI free of charge for these days
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that we do this together because I want you to have 24 7 access even
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when we're not live together to me and my brain so
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that if at 2 a.m you're struggling with your heartbreak
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and you're having these anxious
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or ruminating thoughts you can still talk to me you can still have
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that conversation that you need that is going to reassure you and make yourself feel better.
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I'm also creating a special part of my Love Life app specifically for everyone going through heartbreak right now
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that you'll be able to access for free during five days to mend
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so that you can go through this with other people in a private safe space.
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The fourth thing I had to do in the worst heartbreak of my life was reclaim my confidence.
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Heartbreak is like the death of our ego.
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It is a catastrophic blow sometimes to our sense of worth.
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And what happens in heartbreak is we start telling ourselves stories that further damage our confidence.
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If I had been more sexy, more attractive, if I had had a better body, if I had been taller, if I had been more impressive,
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if I had been more charismatic, if I hadn't been so insecure, they would have stayed.
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Be careful of trusting your thoughts in the moments where you're already vulnerable.
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They will lead you to catastrophic places.
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They will feel like the truth, but they are a truth that is generated by your worst fears.
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What wrecks our confidence is the story that that's all we are.
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That we're not also someone who can own themselves.
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We're not also someone who can take charge.
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That we're not also someone who has really amazing qualities, who does believe in themselves in these ways.
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We're all those things.
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So the secret to confidence is not being bulletproof.
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The secret to confidence is integration.
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It's realizing that Your insecurity,
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the catastrophic thinking is telling you you are only this bad thing and that's why they didn't want you.
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Instead of saying, of course I'm not only that bad thing, I'm all these good things as well.
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When you realise you are many things, you simply get to choose which of those things you are going to lean into.
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And that is the beginning of confidence.
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The fifth thing I learned was to let go.
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When we go through a breakup, we have this instinctive urge to make it work,
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to win them back, to try to control the situation somehow.
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Even try and control the outcome of it all.
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You know, I'm going to find someone really quickly.
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I'm going to find someone better than them.
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I'm going to do, like, whatever way we go, whether it's getting them back or trying to move on fast or whatever,
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it's, we're working so hard to control the situation and there's a beauty in being like yeah I got heartbroken.
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I am heartbroken and I am not going to try to control the outcome of all of this.
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I'm going to do the next right thing.
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I'm going to you know if I'm feeling like I need one more conversation with them.
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If I'm feeling like it's, you know, we've been together for a very long time
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and I want to recommend that the two of us get therapy together to see if we can work it out, even just to see if they're open to it.
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If I feel like I need to write them a letter explaining how I feel
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and explaining that I think they're making a terrible decision, you can do that.
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There's nothing stopping you doing that.
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Do the thing that you feel you need to do or can do and then make peace with whatever happens next.
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It's almost like you have to do the thing that you could do.
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I think about anxiety this way.
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Do the thing that you can do and then be really disciplined about getting on with your day.
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in this case be really disciplined about doing the thing you can do and then getting on with your life
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and having the humility to know
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that you have no idea what is coming you know we
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we don't always know what is best for us what is
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the next best thing to happen we think we do in
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in this case usually we think the best thing is
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that our ex has a turnaround and comes back for us and that we end up together.
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But nowhere is it written that that's true.
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That may not be the best thing.
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We don't necessarily know what's best.
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Sometimes we have to let life unfold. That means letting go.
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And if we've been stuck on someone for a while, we have to explore why that is.
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What is happening here that I've gone past the acute stage of heartbreak.
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And instead of just occasionally feeling the remnants of grief, which happens over time, I'm still locked in this story about this person.
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We have to explore what's going on there and why we aren't allowing ourselves to move forward with our life.
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And for those of you coming to Mend Week with me, we're going to do that on day five.
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It's going to be an incredible five days together.
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It's going to be really healing for the people involved.
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I can't wait.
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I know that this was one of the worst times in my life
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when I went through it
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and I'm really honoured to be able to be there for you who in one way
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or another are going through one of the worst times in your life too.
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I will see you tomorrow for day one of MEND Week.
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MENDweek.com is the link.
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Thank you for watching.
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Leave me a comment and I'll see you soon.
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Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How I Got Over My Worst Heartbreak”. This video has 198 sentences and 2569 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:52. The speaker talks at a natural 152 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| heartbreak noun | /ˈhɑɹt.bɹeɪk/ | Overwhelming mental anguish or grief, especially that caused by loss or disappointment. |
| 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. |
| mend verb | /mɛnd/ | To physically repair (something that is broken, defaced, decayed, torn, or otherwise damaged). |
| heartbroken adjective | Suffering from grief, especially after a failed romance. | |
| grief noun | /ɡɹiːf/ | Suffering, hardship. |
| catastrophic adjective | /ˌkætəˈstɹɑfɪk/ | Of or pertaining to a catastrophe. |
| sting verb | /ˈstɪŋ/ | To hurt, usually by introducing poison or a sharp point, or both. |
| heal verb | /ˈhiːl/ | To make better from a disease, wound, etc.; to revive or cure. |
| injure verb | /ˈɪn.d͡ʒɚ/ | To wound or cause physical harm to a living creature. |
| reliably adverb | In a reliable manner. | |
| rumination noun | /ˌɹuːmɪˈneɪʃən/ | The act of ruminating; i.e. chewing cud. |
| unbearable adjective | So unpleasant or painful as to be unendurable. | |
| hangover noun | /ˈhæŋoʊ̯vɚ/ ~ /ˈhæŋɔʊ̯vɚ/ | Negative effects, such as headache or nausea, caused by previous drunkenness due to (excessive) consumption of alcohol. |
| athlete noun | /ˈæθ.liːt/ | A participant in any of a group of sporting activities including track and field, road running, cross country running and racewalking. |
| antidote noun | /ˈæn.tɪ.doʊt/ | A remedy to counteract the effects of poison. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| get on with verb | To proceed with; to begin or continue, especially after an interruption. | |
| go away verb | To depart or leave a place. | |
| break down verb | To stop functioning. | |
| get through verb | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | To overcome; to endure. |
| go out verb | To leave, especially a building. | |
| go past verb | To elapse. (said of time) |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- You'd be like, ow, that hurts.
- We don't sit with the pain.
- In this case, it's your heart.
- You know me, we'll see.
- That we're not also someone who can own themselves.
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 | have been stuck · have lost · have suffered |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | been broken · have been stuck · be had |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | person who leaves · someone who can · someone who has |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 68 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, we're, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: athlete /ˈæθ.liːt/, loathe /ˈloʊð/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, rumination /ˌɹuːmɪˈneɪʃən/, reassure /ˌɹi.əˈʃʊɹ/, trashy /ˈtɹæʃi/, accumulation /əˌkjuːm.jəˈleɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: catastrophic /ˌkætəˈstɹɑfɪk/, rumination /ˌɹuːmɪˈneɪʃən/, hangover /ˈhæŋoʊ̯vɚ/ ~ /ˈhæŋɔʊ̯vɚ/, charismatic /ˌkɛɹəzˈmætək/, destabilize /diːˈsteɪbɪlaɪz/
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 heartbreak, emotion, mend.
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.