Shadowing Practice: How NOT to Let Your Past Control Your Future - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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What if the biggest thing standing between you and the life that you want isn't your discipline, it isn't your circumstances, or even your ability?
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What if it's the life that doesn't even exist anymore?
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Most people don't realize how much their future is being dictated by experiences that happened 5, 10, even 20 years ago.
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An old failure decides which risks that you take, an old betrayal decides who you trust, an old version of you decides what you believe and what you're capable of today.
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And if you don't learn how to break that cycle, you can spend the rest of your life unconsciously recreating the past that you're desperately trying to escape.
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So this episode is how to finally stop.
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Here's the thing that you need to understand.
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Modern neuroscience increasingly looks at the brain as a prediction machine.
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Carl Fristen, who is one of the most cited neuroscientists alive built an entire framework around this idea.
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Your brain is not just sitting there waiting for reality to happen.
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It is constantly generating a guess about what is about to happen and then checking reality against that guess that it has.
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So like in plain language, here's what that means.
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Your brain is always answering one question, what happens next?
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And then it makes a guess and then it's trying to prove that guess true.
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Here's the problem though.
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What is the only material that it has to build that guess out of?
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It's your past.
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That's it.
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That's all it's got.
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So if somebody betrayed you in the past, your brain doesn't file that away as just history.
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It files it as evidence that this is what happens.
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And so the next time that somebody gets close to you, your brain runs a model and goes, okay, I know how this entire thing is going to end based off of what's happened to us before.
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And now you're not responding to the person who's right in front of your face.
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You're responding to a prediction
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that your brain is creating based off of your past from somebody who might not even be in your life anymore.
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If you really get this, this can change the entire course of your life.
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Your brain isn't showing you your past.
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It's using your past to write and predict your future.
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Holy, do you get that?
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This is why it's so important to separate yourself from your thoughts.
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Because a lot of times, your thoughts are just automatic.
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And if they're automatic, that means that they're coming from your past.
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And so you can't get caught up in these thoughts and, oh, I'm always so negative.
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This is just the way that I am.
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No, no, no. We're not trying to recreate our past here.
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That's not what we're trying to do.
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We're trying to change so that our future can be different from our past.
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And if we don't sit down and actually be diligent on it, we will always default to this pattern.
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And so for me, like I did this for years when I was younger, before I get into self-development, started working on myself, I didn't even know that I was doing it.
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I could tell you how I was a victim in my life,
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in my entire past and everything that summarized my victimhood in like three minutes.
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every hard thing that I had been through, all of the bad stuff, all of the losses, every reason why I was the way that I was.
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It was like I had said it so many times.
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It was basically like it was rehearsed.
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Like I could probably have delivered a TED talk on how much of a victim I was, right?
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Like that's how I used to be.
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And we will be right back.
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Hey, real quick.
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If you're someone who sets a goal, gets really fired up for a couple of weeks, and then somehow ends up right back with the same habits that you swore that you were done with,
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this is for you.
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Listen to me for just a second.
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It's not because you're lazy.
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It's not because you don't have enough discipline.
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It's because you're trying to create a new life with the same identity that you've always had.
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So you have to understand you will always act in alignment with who you believe that you are.
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So if deep down you see yourself as somebody who quits, someone who never follows through, someone who always falls back into the same old patterns,
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then you will keep proving that story true over and over again.
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And until you change that old identity underneath it, nothing will change.
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That's why on August 27th, I'm hosting a completely free live workshop where I'm gonna show you how to identify the patterns
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that have been controlling your decisions without you even realizing it, how to break those patterns, and then how to shift your identity so that the actions
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that you want to take finally match the life that you say that you want.
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So if you're ready for change and you don't want to stay the old version of you,
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go to 2026workshop.com right now or scan the QR code that's right here to save your free spot for August 27th.
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So go ahead, save your seat, and I'll see you there.
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And now back to the show.
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People think like I've always been positive.
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No, dude, like I had to work on myself.
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My brain was defaulting to focus on the bad from my past.
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And the reason why I was doing this, and I understand now, is so it could protect me from the bad in the future.
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So it takes the bad from the past, it throws it into the future, makes a prediction of it, makes us place smaller in our life than we should,
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so that therefore we don't get hurt again, or we don't get injured again.
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We don't have to go through that pain that we went through in our past.
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but like if you had gone back to that version of me
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when I was younger that was such a victim
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and asked like hey tell me about who you want to
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become I could not have given you five sentences I could
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give you a TED talk on how I was a victim
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I couldn't even tell you what I wanted for my life for what I was trying to build
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and like once I started working on myself I really realized
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like I was fluent in my past I was fluent in being a victim and I was like completely illiterate
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in my future.
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And now I've been coaching people for about 20 years now.
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And I can tell you the pattern that I see over and over and over again,
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is that the people whose lives change are not the people who have like the easiest pass.
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Like a lot of times they're actually the hardest pass, but they are the people who actually stopped making their past,
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their main character stopped focusing on their past so much because they were trying to get away from it.
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Because whatever you focus on, you're going to get more of.
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So if you focus on your past all the time, guess what your brain is going to build for you?
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More of whatever happened to you in your past, right?
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So let's talk about how to actually stop this.
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The first thing you need to do is you need to catch the time travel.
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Our brain is always time traveling.
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You cannot change something if you don't notice it.
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So we need to become aware of this thing.
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So the next time, like let's say for the next week, right?
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I don't want you to change anything in your life.
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I don't want you to try to change.
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For the next week, I just want you to catch yourself going back to the past.
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Because your mind is almost never here in the present moment.
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It's either in the past or it's in a future model built out of the past.
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And so there's many, many, many moments throughout a day where this happens, where your default mode just kicks in.
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So when you catch yourself defaulting and going back to your past or your problems or your victimhood When you catch it, don't fight it.
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Don't judge it.
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Don't do anything about it for the next week.
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Just notice it Right become aware of it.
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Oh Hmm.
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Look at that.
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It looks like i'm time traveling right now I'm, not even here But just notice it because you cannot change something that you're unaware of.
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Okay The second thing you want to do is you want to start changing the question that you're feeding it
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So your brain, you've heard me say this before, is basically like a search engine.
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Whatever you type into the search engine, it's gonna go and find evidence for.
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Your brain is gonna do the exact same thing.
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The problem is, is that most people are typing in past tense questions all day long.
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So they're saying stuff like, why does this always happen to me?
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And then their brain is like Google and it's gonna go find all of the answers why this always happens to me.
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And then they ask, why do I always act like this?
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Then your brain is going to go back
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and find all of the times in the past and the problems and all the stuff where you acted like that.
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It's going to find what you're looking for.
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People ask, why do people always treat me this way?
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And then it's going to find all of it.
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And the more evidence that it finds because your questions suck, the more you're actually going to get deeper and deeper into these patterns
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and it's going to be harder to get out of them.
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And so your brain goes, huh, great question.
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Let me go ahead and pull up the archives.
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It will find you the answer.
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I promise you this, any question that you ask yourself, your brain is going to type all of that in and it's going to answer that question every single time.
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It'll find you usually 15 answers.
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And now look at that.
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You just turned yourself into a victim again.
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And now you're living in a victim mindset.
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So your question determines the search.
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So what do we need to do?
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We need to change the question.
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So instead of asking like, why does this always happen to me?
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You ask yourself a question like, what am I supposed to learn from this?
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You see, it's like, it's the same circumstance that you're currently in right now, but it's two completely different things.
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Why does this always happen to me?
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You're going to find all of the answers why it happens to you.
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And it's going to make you more stuck.
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What am I supposed to learn from this?
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It's going to go in.
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It's going to actually start to challenge your brain to find what you're supposed to learn from it so you can grow.
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Same circumstance, completely different paths in life.
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And so instead of asking a question like, why am I always like this?
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You ask, how can I change?
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Why am I always like this?
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It's going to keep you stuck.
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How can I change?
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It's going to free you.
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It's the same brain.
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It's the same circumstance.
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It's the same searching power.
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It's just a completely different direction that you go from the current moment.
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And like, I want to be clear, like I'm not talking about like just positive thinking.
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I'm not asking you to lie to yourself.
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I'm telling you, your brain is going to be searching either way.
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You're not going to be able to stop your brain from searching.
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You might as well point it somewhere useful.
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Like remember this, there's a reason why there's something called the negativity bias in psychology.
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And it's because your brain will almost always default to the negative.
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It's a protection mechanism built into us hundreds of thousands of years ago, but we're not hunter-gatherers anymore.
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So if you're going to change your life, you need to start changing your questions.
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The third thing you need to do, you need to give your brain new evidence.
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What most people get wrong about changing is they think in order to change their way and move into a new identity, identity is just built out of thoughts.
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No, your identity is not built out of just thoughts.
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It's more than anything else.
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It's built out of evidence.
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It has a case file in your brain that it has been assembling about you your entire life.
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And right now, every piece of evidence in that file comes from your past.
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So yeah, of course, your brain predicts the same future because that's the only file that it's got.
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And so your job today is not to just like think differently or to feel differently.
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Your job is to hand your brain
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at least one piece of evidence that doesn't match the old file by doing something that you normally wouldn't do, by doing something outside of your comfort zone,
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by doing something that the version of you that you want to become would actually do.
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So that might be like a phone call that you've been avoiding.
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It might be a workout when you don't feel like it.
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It might be a post that you've been sitting on and avoiding for six months.
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And it has to be done today because the past has 10,000 day of like head start of evidence on you.
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You're not going to beat it with one day.
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That's fine.
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And so you're only going to beat your old identity the same way that it got built, one piece of evidence at a time.
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And so every time you do something different, your brain goes, huh, well, that's new.
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Like, all right, let me update the file on him.
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And you do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
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And your old identity has no choice but to update itself because it is built on evidence
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and you are giving it new evidence as much as you possibly can, okay?
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And then number four is I want you to rehearse forward as much as you rehearse backwards right now.
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Like you are already excellent at mental rehearsal, whether you realize it or not.
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I need you to understand that you're probably elite at it.
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Like you can replay a conversation from 2009 in HD with the lighting and with the smell of the room, with what they were wearing.
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And that's not like a flaw.
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That's just a skill of being a human.
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You've just been pointing that brain of yours at the wrong direction.
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You've been focusing too much in the past.
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And so in the normal 20 minutes that you'd spend replaying your past, I want you to spend it pre-living instead.
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And be specific about the future you're creating because vague doesn't work.
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Think about the future that you want in vivid detail.
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Don't just think like, oh, I want to be successful.
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Where do you want to wake up?
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What does the room look like?
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What's the first thing that you do?
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How do you handle something that used to wreck you?
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What's your body doing?
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What's it look like?
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Who are you when no one's watching?
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You should be living in your future and what you're creating more than you're living in your past.
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Your future is way more exciting.
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Like you should be thinking about that more often.
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Become obsessed with the future that you're creating and do it every day because repetition is what makes it feel familiar.
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And familiar is what the brain moves towards.
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And so your brain is going to rehearse something today.
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That part is not optional.
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the only thing that you get to choose is what it rehearses
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if you don't take charge of it it will default to the past i promise you that and
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so what you want to do is you want to be
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very intentional about what your brain focuses on make sure
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that it focuses on the future and that your future is vividly detailed
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and more exciting than the past is okay
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and like i need to quickly warn you i guess
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because this part gets misused constantly i'm not pretending that your past didn't happen I'm not telling you to forget your past.
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If something real happened to you, that's real.
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Like grief is real.
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Trauma is real.
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What was done to you was done to you.
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And some of it probably actually might need professional help, not just like a podcast.
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And I want you to go get that.
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So I'm not saying skip over it.
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There's a difference between processing something and then like marinating in it, right?
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Processing has a direction.
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It's going somewhere.
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Marinating in it is just like a circle that doesn't get you anywhere.
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It's just like mental masturbation, right?
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And so here's what I want you to write down today.
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I just want you to answer this one question.
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If my brain builds a future out of whatever I give it most, what have I been giving it?
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And get very detailed on what you've been giving it.
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Sit with it, write it down because your past already happened.
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It's done, it's over.
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It cannot touch you anymore.
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I always say that your past is basically like the wake of a boat.
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If you turn around and you look behind the boat when you're on it, you can see the wake and it shows you where you've been, but the wake cannot steer the ship.
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But so many people are letting the wake of their life, the past, steer their ship.
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So the only thing that it can still take from you, all of these things that have happened to you in your past, is your future.
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But it can only take it from you if you just keep handing it over.
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And so stop rehearsing all the things that have already happened.
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start rehearsing what you're building start rehearsing the life that you want
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and you have to be more obsessed with the future
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that you want and what you're building more than you are with your past hey thanks
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so much for watching today's video
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if you love this video click this one right here this is the one
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that you need to watch next and
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if you want to make sure you don't miss any more of these episodes click
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that button right there make sure you subscribe and check out the next one
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How NOT to Let Your Past Control Your Future”. This video has 254 sentences and 3167 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:13. The speaker talks fast, about 195 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 91% 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 |
|---|---|---|
| rehearse verb | /ɹɪˈhɝs/ | To repeat, as what has been already said; to tell over again; to recite. |
| circumstance noun | /ˈsɝ.kəmˌstæns/ | Something which is related to, or in some way affects, a fact or event. |
| prediction noun | /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/ | A statement of what will happen in the future. |
| excite verb | /ɪkˈsaɪt/ | To stir the emotions of; to cause to feel excitement. |
| marinate verb | /ˈmæɹɪneɪt/ | To allow a sauce or flavoring mixture to absorb into something; to steep or soak something in a marinade to flavor or prepare it for cooking. |
| obsess verb | /əbˈsɛs/ | To be preoccupied with a single topic or emotion. |
| victimhood noun | The state or perception of being a victim. | |
| recreate verb | /ˈɹɛk.ɹi.eɪt/ | To give new life, energy or encouragement (to); to refresh, enliven. |
| fluent adjective | /ˈfluənt/ | That flows; flowing, liquid. |
| steer verb | /stɪɹ/ | To guide the course of a vessel, vehicle, aircraft etc. (by means of a device such as a rudder, paddle, or steering wheel). |
| replay noun | /ˈɹiːpleɪ/ | An act or instance of replaying (of playing something, such as a game, again); a replaying of (something). |
| predict verb | /pɹɪˈdɪkt/ | To make a prediction: to forecast, foretell, or estimate a future event on the basis of knowledge and reasoning; to prophesy a future event on the basis of… |
| workshop noun | /ˈwɝk.ʃɑp/ | A room, especially one which is not particularly large, used for manufacturing or other light industrial work. |
| betray verb | /bɪˈtɹeɪ/ | To deliver into the hands of an enemy by treachery or fraud, in violation of trust; to give up treacherously or faithlessly. |
| diligent adjective | /ˈdɪlɪdʒənt/ | Performing with industrious concentration; hard-working and focused. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| go ahead verb | /ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/ | To proceed with; to begin. |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| fall back into verb | To return to old habits; to return to an unhealthy or unhappy situation. | |
| follow through verb | To execute or complete a commitment. | |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. | |
| go back verb | To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Holy, do you get that?
- Why does this always happen to me?
- What am I supposed to learn from this?
- What's the first thing that you do?
- Who are you when no one's watching?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | have been controlling · I've been coaching · has been assembling |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to be · used to wreck |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being dictated · was rehearsed · were done |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have delivered · I've always been · you've heard |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 96 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: prediction /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/, workshop /ˈwɝk.ʃɑp/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/, unconsciously /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəsli/, intentional /ɪnˈtɛnʃənəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: illiterate /ɪˈlɪtəɹət/, negativity /ˌnɛɡ.əˈtɪ.vɪ.ti/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/, unconsciously /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəsli/, intentional /ɪnˈtɛnʃənəl/
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 rehearse, circumstance, prediction.
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.