Shadowing Practice: How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

So if you clicked on this video,

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So if you clicked on this video,

then that means that you're interested in improving your speech and how you communicate with other people.

Articulacy is a skill that literally anyone can benefit from.

It doesn't matter what field you're in,

whether you're in academia or you're in corporate,

regardless of what industry or type of job you're doing,

whether it's technical or non-technical,

being good at explaining shit to other people is a skill that has literally zero downside.

If you work in a job where you have to deal with other people,

which is 99% of jobs out there,

then it can only serve you to be better at explaining stuff to your colleagues,

to your boss, to your friends and your family.

And so today I'm going to share with you some of the highest value things

that I've learned about how to be a great communicator.

Hi, if you're new to the channel, my name is Matt.

I'm currently working in strategy and ops at Google.

Before that, I was a management consultant and I make these videos because I enjoy it.

But without further ado, let's get right into the video.

So make sure you lock in,

turn off the notifications, full screen the video and follow along.

The first thing we have to ask ourselves is what does it even mean to be articulate?

Now, some of you probably have preconceived notions about what it means.

You probably know that being articulate means that you are very good at speaking or maybe you're very good at communicating,

but let's break it down into the actual definition.

And so one that I really like

and I think really gets to the essence of what it means to be articulate is to express an idea

or a feeling fluently and coherently.

There's two components of it.

There's expressing the idea fluently and then expressing it coherently.

Now if you look at what fluent and coherent mean,

you'll understand that fluent means to do something with ease and with grace,

and coherent means to do something with a clear, logical, concise manner.

And so if someone is good at speaking and they are considered very good at articulating their thoughts,

for example, then that means that they can explain their thinking to someone,

or they can explain an idea or a feeling to someone in a way that is clear and logical,

but not only clear and logical,

because they're also doing it in a way with a lot of ease and grace.

And so how do we get to the point where we can deliver a message,

whether it's in a meeting with our boss,

or whether it's in a job interview where we have to explain our experience or walk the interviewer through our resume,

or whether it's even just in a normal conversation with a

friend where maybe you want to explain to them something that you saw,

book that you read recently and you want to do it in the most articulate way possible.

How do we do that?

Well it's simple and there's actually two parts to it.

So the first, if we look at the word fluently,

is really going to come down to the delivery and the way that you're actually delivering that message.

And then the second part of it which is,

you know, is the message itself clear and logical?

Well that comes down to the content and the structure of what we're actually saying.

And so today I want to talk about both of these things,

the delivery and then the content of the message itself.

But let's start now with the content and the structure.

So the content and the structure of whatever you're explaining always is going to start in your head.

And so step one is always actually understanding the thing or the idea that you want to explain.

Because how on earth can you try to properly explain to someone how you're feeling

if you don't even really understand the feelings that you have?

Or how on earth can you explain to someone quantum physics if you don't have a very deep,

base-level, first principles understanding of how quantum physics works?

No matter how good you are at speaking and no matter how big your vocabulary is,

you're just going to fall flat on your face as soon as you open your mouth

because the words are going to come out,

and maybe they sound good,

but they're not going to mean anything,

and the listener is not going to comprehend what you're actually saying.

And so step one is you need to understand the topic or the issue that you want to explain.

And this seems so simple,

but you'd be surprised how many people start talking about something

and they only have like a 50% grasp of the concept or the issue that they're trying to explain to someone.

And as a result, the message comes across kind of muddied

and the listener might have to ask them to restate what they said

and they have to ask follow-up questions because really the listener just doesn't really understand what that person said.

And so step one is all good communication starts with good understanding

and clear thinking about what the topic or issue at hand even is and then knowing what your objective is.

are you trying to get out of this conversation?

If you're going into a meeting with,

say, a high-level executive, what are you trying to get out of them?

And it can't just be,

oh, I'm just trying to tell them or give them an update on what I'm working on.

Like, no, you think they're going to accept that?

Their time is extremely limited.

You have to remember, if someone is a very high-level executive at a large company,

for example, every day there are many,

many, many people asking them for this and that.

They're in meetings all day.

They're tired.

They're thinking about a million different things

and then all of a sudden you come in

and you have 30 minutes

and you start spewing all this nonsense uh maybe giving a ton of background context that's totally irrelevant

or not helpful

and by the end of it they don't even understand what

you want from them do you need a decision from them

do you need them to say yes this looks good to me

or are you trying to convince them to change their mind

about something you need to be extremely clear on what your objective is because

Even if you do understand the topic or the issue,

if you don't have an objective when you go into a meeting,

nothing that's like your north star,

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then every word that comes out of your mouth is really not going to be

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that helpful for the other person to understand.

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Because the question that they have in the back of their mind is going to be,

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okay, he's saying all this stuff.

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What do I need to do?

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What does he or she want from me?

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Right?

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That's the question that people are going to be thinking.

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But that leads me to the third part,

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which is once you do understand,

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okay, this is the topic I need to bring up,

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this is the issue I need to raise,

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and the objective of this conversation is that I need this person to say yes,

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to go ahead with this program.

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Then what's the fastest path to explain that?

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And you'd be surprised.

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A lot of people tend to ramble in meetings,

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and they think that more airtime equals better comprehension because you're giving them more details.

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But the problem is what you don't understand,

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and something that I'm going to talk about in the delivery section,

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is that you're actually just increasing the mental load for the listener,

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the more details, especially if you're including more irrelevant details to your explanation.

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And so you need to understand,

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first of all, what is the fastest way to explain this to my audience?

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And then once I've understood that,

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then I need to execute on it.

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So for example,

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let's say that I am coming to the police station

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and I need the police officer to help me find a criminal who just stole my laptop.

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So in one scenario,

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I could come into the police station say I was just in my house at 5 p.m

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and I was cooking dinner with my mom

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and then we were eating dinner

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and all of a sudden we heard a noise in the back

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and I went to the back to investigate and I opened the door

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and I saw a shadow running across the yard

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and then I realized that it was a person

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and they were holding my laptop and then I yelled at them

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and I chased them but they were too quick and

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so I wasn't able to get my laptop back and

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so we decided to come to the police station and now I'm begging you police officers,

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please help me open a case ticket for this stolen item.

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Now that probably took me,

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I don't know, 20, 30 seconds to say, maybe longer.

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But what if I just went to the police station and said,

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look, I need your help.

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My laptop was stolen.

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How much quicker is it for the police officer to understand what I need from him?

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And now it's such a simple and honestly silly sounding example.

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But if you apply this thinking to high level executive meetings,

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or you apply it to job interviews,

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things like that, then you begin to realize,

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oh, the best speakers are the ones who are able to express the idea

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or the thing that they need from someone in five to ten seconds or less.

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Any longer than that and you honestly don't understand the thing that you're trying to explain.

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But going back to this list of key considerations with content and structure,

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the last one is anticipating key questions.

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Now this is kind of a second level thing.

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Once you've gotten better at structuring your thinking,

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understanding the thing that you want to actually talk about,

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and knowing your objective, and laying out the path to explain it in the most concise way possible,

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then the next level is like,

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okay, I foresee that when I say this one thing,

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they're going to think this.

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And so they may have this question.

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So I should actually preempt that by explaining the answer to their question.

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And so an example of this is say I'm explaining to my boss

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that we've been seeing declines in revenue from this specific product in the business and we're not sure why.

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Now, I'm going to stop there.

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Now, imagine if I just told my boss that.

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Okay, we're seeing declines in revenue for this product and we're not sure why.

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Then what is he going to be thinking?

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He or she is going to be thinking,

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okay, well have you looked into this and that?

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Have you tried talking to this and this person?

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Have you tried to determine whether this is an external issue that is affecting all of our competitors in our entire industry?

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Or is it like something that's localized to our company?

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A good communicator will know this and they will think about it

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and take action to address some of these questions so that in their delivery they can say something like,

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Like, look, we're currently investigating this decline in revenue for a specific product line.

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And we've already ruled out the fact that this is a market-wide issue

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because our competitors' similar products are doing very well, except ours.

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And so we're looking internally right now at X, Y, and Z.

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And we're going to talk to X,

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Y, and Z about this to try and get to the bottom of what's actually causing this issue.

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So you see how the second way that I just talked about

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that gave a lot more detail

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but the details were around what we've been doing to address key questions that you anticipated would come up.

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And so this is a second level ability,

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but if you can make this a habit of always thinking about,

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okay, when I tell this person this thing,

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he or she is obviously going to start thinking about that.

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And if you can start like preempting and introducing the answers into your explanation,

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then that makes it so much more easy for the person to understand and comprehend what you're trying to say.

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But let's move to the last part, which is the delivery.

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So how do we make the delivery effective?

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And here, I've kept it really short with three main things.

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The first is you need to always remember,

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decrease the mental load of your listener.

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If you decrease the mental load of your listener,

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then that gives them more bandwidth to actually think about what you're saying and thereby understand what you're saying.

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Now, what do I mean by mental load?

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Well, mental load is literally anything that you say or do

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that makes the other person have to use more brain power in order to understand whatever you're trying to explain.

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So a great example of decreasing mental load is being smart about your word choices.

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And so a very easy way to make things extremely difficult for someone to understand

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is to use an insane amount of adjectives,

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especially long verbose words that don't actually contribute to the meaning of a sentence.

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And so a great example of this is,

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you know, if you had a sentence like he voraciously read through the Victorian era novel Jane Austen

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and finished it in just under six hours.

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You can actually shorten

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that sentence to get to the essence of it by literally saying he read quickly through Jane Austen

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and finished it in six hours.

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Or he read through Jane Austen in six hours.

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That's the essence of the sentence, right?

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Now, if you're an English major right now or you're a literature buff,

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you're probably looking at me with absolute horror thinking,

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wow, you've stripped out the soul of the entire sentence.

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But look, that's not the goal of today's video.

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What I'm trying to explain to you is how to deliver the message with ruthless effectiveness,

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which often involves taking out any flowery language.

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Flowery language might be okay in a novel,

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but it's not okay when you're trying to explain something quickly to someone who has limited time and mental bandwidth.

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And so be very selective about your word choice.

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You should make sure that whatever words and sentences you add into your delivery,

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they have to fight tooth and nail to stay there.

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If you can strip it out without losing the meaning of the message or the sentence,

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then you should strip it out as a rule of thumb.

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Now, the second thing is top-down communication.

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Get in the habit of communicating in a top-down way.

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What this means is you always start with the answer first,

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or maybe it's the main idea,

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or maybe it's the question that you need to ask them.

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You always say, hey, so today we need your input on this program that we're working on.

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We need your thoughts on this project or this paper that we're writing.

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And these are the three things that we need your thoughts on.

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Or this is why we think that the product is not doing well.

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But up front, you say,

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okay, look, the product's not doing well,

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and this is why we think it's not doing well.

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And then you have supporting evidence under each of it.

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The reason why top-down communication is so effective and is taught at firms like McKinsey and BCG is because executives,

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again, have very little time and mental bandwidth.

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And by doing top-down communication,

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you're actually decreasing the mental load.

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you're minimizing it because they don't have to wait for you to do this whole explanation before understanding,

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oh, like that's the final outcome or that's the actual thing that they wanted to ask me about.

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Because then instead of holding all of these thoughts in their head,

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then they understand immediately what you're trying to get out of the conversation.

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Second is storytelling.

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Now, storytelling, I will say,

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is effective in certain scenarios where you really want to illustrate an idea or a feeling.

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and when you use it accurately and when you're good at storytelling,

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it can be extremely, extremely effective for the delivery because you captivate the audience.

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And I'm telling you, the best storytellers out there,

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they're also really, really good at articulating their thoughts and they understand what people actually pay attention to.

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Now, I'll probably make a video about storytelling later on,

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but high level, how to get really good at storytelling is you need to understand

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that details are really important when it comes to storytelling.

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You want to show, not tell.

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So for example, instead of saying something like,

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I almost got killed last night.

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Instead, if you put them into the actual situation,

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you include details on the location,

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on how you're feeling, what you were thinking in that moment,

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and you don't just tell them,

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you say something like, last night at 11 p.m.

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I was walking home after a late night of dinner

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and drinks with my friends in the Soho neighborhood of New York City.

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And as I was walking to the subway,

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I go through the turnstiles,

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I'm waiting on the platform,

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and suddenly out of the corner of my eye,

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I see this black shadow moving.

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And there's this like man in a black coat and with a mask on carrying a knife.

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And he's slowly walking towards me.

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And in that moment, I honestly thought I was in a horror movie and I froze.

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Like my blood literally ran cold.

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And I was like, holy shit,

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I need to get out of here.

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And so I run

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and thank God the subway comes like two seconds later as I'm running in the opposite direction down the platform

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because I turn around and this guy's like starting to like move a little quicker and he's starting to run at me.

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And I'm like, oh my god,

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and I see the conductor,

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he sees me, and he opens the door,

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and then quickly closes it after I run through the subway.

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And only then am I able to take a sigh of relief,

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and I turn around, and this guy is staring at me through the windows of the subway,

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and he's holding this knife,

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and he's like screaming all this random gibberish at me,

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and it was just absolutely horrifying.

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And I couldn't sleep last night,

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even after I got home.

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Okay, so you see how that story that I just told you had a ton of detail,

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and it also had a lot of suspense, right?

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Because I was being chased by this guy with a knife.

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What that does when you put people in the actual moment is it captivates them

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and it makes them think about what if I was in that situation?

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And the little details around like what I was thinking in my head and how I was thinking like,

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oh my god, I'm screwed.

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I need to get out of here.

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Like those things, those are the kinds of details that captivate people with a story.

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You don't just say, oh, I was really scared.

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Like that's boring.

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You say, you know, I saw my life flashing before my eyes.

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You say something like that.

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That gets people paying attention.

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But anyways, the last thing is just the energy with your communication.

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Again, different people have different levels of energy.

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If you're naturally someone that is high energy,

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then good for you, because high energy tends to be a little bit more engaging for people to listen to.

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But if you're someone like me,

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who's naturally a little bit more introverted,

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a little bit more reserved,

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what you might need to do is you might need to dial up the energy

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when you're giving a presentation or you're in an interview, for example.

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The reason why you need to dial up the energy is because it engages the audience more,

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because they can feel the energy.

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And whatever energy level you think that you're projecting,

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you need to dial it up and turn that dial up by at least two or three X more,

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probably like five X more energy.

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And what this is going to do is in reality,

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you're going to feel like you're coming across like super energetic,

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but to them, it's not going to be as energetic as you think.

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So keep all of this in mind.

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And if you do all of the things that I've just laid out,

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you improve your content and the structure of your messaging,

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and you actually improve the delivery,

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then you're going to find that when you do have to explain things to people,

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You're going to be that much more effective

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and you're going to avoid situations where you have to keep explaining yourself again

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or people are looking at you weird and asking questions because they don't really understand what you just said.

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That's all I got for you guys and I'll see you in the next one.

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Peace.

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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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Shadowing Practice: How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Shadowing Practice: How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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What is the Shadowing Technique?