Shadowing Practice: how to be respected as a woman | stop being nice, self-betrayal, people pleasing - Learn English Speaking with Video

Being the good girl is the fastest way to forget who you are.

Hi Mises, welcome back to my channel where the women who want everything can have their cake and eat it too.

I'm your host Nadine and I'm here to rebuild the village women once had

so we can have the right conversations and create lives that feel as good as it looks.

We just crossed 60k subscribers this last week

and I am beyond words for how excited and grateful I am to have you all here and to grow together.

so thank you again and I would love so much

if you could please like hype subscribe and turn on the notification bell

so you never miss our chats so good girl syndrome is the kind of programming

that teaches you to be pleasant and convenient before you are honest

and protective of yourself and it sounds like there's no real harm

if you're just keeping the peace and making sure everyone is happy

but what ends up happening is that you sacrifice your own needs and deprioritize your own feelings just to avoid disapproval.

Everybody thinks you are so easy to love, so sweet, so friendly, but you feel completely disconnected and unknown to the world.

That is the cost.

Okay.

Good girl syndrome makes you disappear in socially acceptable ways.

I mean, come on.

The world loves a woman who can be relied on, who never complains and just makes everyone else comfortable

while carrying the emotional weight of the room and still smile like it's nothing.

But you will wake up one day wondering why you keep attracting people who need your endless understanding

and forgiveness while offering very little accountability or anything for that matter in return.

So in this episode, we are going to talk about why the good girl is not always the good woman, how people-pleasing destroys attraction, boundaries,

and self-respect, and what you can do instead so you can be true to yourself.

As always, we don't get keep, So let's step into it.

So when I say that the good girl is not always a good woman, let me explain.

A good girl is usually performing goodness for approval.

A good woman is practicing integrity from self-respect.

Those are not the same things.

The good girl asks, will they be mad at me?

And the good woman asks, is this my personal truth?

The good girl asks, how do I keep the peace?

And the good woman asks, what kind of peace requires me to abandon myself?

And this is an uncomfortable truth because I am sure like me growing up, we have been taught to believe that being liked is evidence of being good.

But sometimes people like you because you are easy to benefit from.

Sometimes people call you sweet because you have no boundaries

or mature because you learn to suppress your own pain or humble because you are afraid to take up space.

And my personal favorite, they call you supportive because you made their dreams more important than your own.

So yes, you may be kind.

You may have a beautiful heart.

You may genuinely want the people around you to be happy, ahem, calling all of my lover girls.

But if your kindness requires you to betray yourself, then that's not it.

And I've noticed this with myself

that good girl behavior is often just a manifestation of fear

because you don't want to be rejected or misunderstood or be called selfish or be punished emotionally,

socially, romantically, financially, spiritually, whatever flavor your nervous system learned to expect so you become agreeable.

Your opinions still exist, but they feel expensive because you think you have more to lose.

If you're not forgiving, you might lose the relationship.

If you're not flexible, they might leave you out.

It doesn't always look like obvious insecurities, okay?

Sometimes it can look like being the strong type A friend.

Everyone sees capable, but inside you feel resentful, anxious, exhausted, and weirdly guilty for wanting more.

That is the internal conflict of the good girl.

She wants to be free, but she also wants to be approved.

And babe, sometimes freedom and approval do not live in the same rooms, okay?

Sometimes becoming the woman you're meant to be will require you to disappoint the people who benefited from you staying small.

That doesn't mean you are a bad person for disappointing them when the alternative is disappointing yourself.

And this is the part that needs to land in your soul and spirit.

Goodness without honesty is just performance.

You can't say yes, but silently keep score in your head

or stay in a relationship out of comfort and call it loyalty.

That is fear.

Fear of what happens when you leave and fear can show up and be very polite.

Fear can say, no worries.

It's okay.

I understand.

I'm sorry.

Even when you did absolutely nothing wrong or add three heart emojis to a message that should have ended with a period,

your body knows the truth.

And when your yes is actually a no. For a lot of women, me included, being good was a form of protection.

Maybe you learned early on that love came easier

when you were helpful or that expressing your anger got you in trouble

or if you grew up with parents with narcissistic tendencies and you had to walk around eggshells to manage their emotions.

Now as an adult, your body reacts to conflict like it's an actual survival threat.

Someone is disappointed in you and suddenly you feel like a kid again overwhelmed with shame.

Someone misunderstands you and all you want to do is explain, explain, explain until your soul is tired.

The important thing to understand is that we are not shaming you for being the good girl, okay?

She wasn't weak.

She was adaptive.

She found a strategy that worked.

The problem is that that strategy that helped you survive childhood, survive difficult family dynamics, toxic relationships,

or unstable environments may now be the same strategy keeping you from building the life you actually want.

The good girl is built for approval, but the woman you are becoming is built for alignment, and alignment requires your authentic voice and truth.

Stop confusing being needed with being loved and being loved with being cherished or being useful with being valued.

Your soul was never meant to be community property, nor is your presence or your time.

You absolutely can be generous and warm and nurturing and deeply loving, but you also need a door that's guarded with discernment, standards, and self-trust.

You need to be able to say at some point, no, this does not enter my life because kindness and compliance are not the same thing.

Okay?

Kindness comes from overflow.

Compliance comes from fear.

And many of the nicest women that I know are carrying a ton of resentment

because they have spent years ignoring their own needs and calling it love.

That's why people-pleasing completely negates attraction because it turns your presence into convenience.

And convenience is not the same thing as value or being valued.

It makes me so sad to see this in relationships because this is where so many women get it wrong, especially when they are dating.

You think that if you become easy enough to love, he will finally choose you.

You think that if you laugh at his jokes, stay patient through the confusion, cook the food, send the paragraphs,

do all the things that show that you will be a good wife that eventually he will realize you are the one.

Babes.

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And please do not misunderstand me.

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We love love over here.

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Okay.

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We love devotion when it's mutual.

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We love softness when it is safe.

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We love making someone's life more beautiful when they are also making our lives easier.

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But when you are giving out of insecurity to secure your position, that is not love.

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You are auditioning and chasing and chasing energy is not magnetic energy.

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It's proving yourself.

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And if there's one thing I have learned with relationships is that if you are put in the position to prove yourself, you will never feel soft or safe in the relationship.

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You will always be proving yourself to him and the goalpost will always move.

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Magnetic energy comes from self-possession.

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It comes from a woman who has her own life, her own standards, her own joy, her own inner circle, her own rhythm to life.

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She can love someone deeply, but she will not betray herself to keep them.

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That is attractive because that is self-respect.

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This isn't some dating trick and this isn't because men only want women who act unavailable, okay?

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That advice is way too shallow for grown women.

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Think about yourself and who you are attracted to.

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Would you be attracted to a man who lacks confidence and self-respect?

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No. Self-respect is attractive because it gives your presence emotional weight.

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Your yes means something because your no is real.

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Your time means something because it is not automatically given and available.

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Your love means something because it is not a desperate attempt to be rescued from your own life.

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When someone knows that you will tolerate anything, they will put you through everything.

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If they know you never speak up, you don't require reciprocity, or you lack self-respect, they will also not respect you.

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An attraction without respect has zero happy endings.

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People-pleasing also affects boundaries.

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You don't need some long speech, emotional press conference to explain why your no is a no or multiple draft rewrites in your notes app, but then sending something with a disclaimer like,

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I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way with a closing prayer that all goes well.

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Okay, a boundary is a decision you are willing to honor.

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Good girls often think they have boundaries because they have feelings.

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They feel hurt.

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They feel drained.

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They feel resentful.

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But a feeling is not a boundary.

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A boundary sounds like, I am not available for that.

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I need more advanced notice.

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I will not continue this conversation when I'm being spoken to like that.

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And then you have to behave accordingly.

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Because if you state a boundary and abandon it the second someone gets irritated, you did not set a boundary.

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You made a request and hoped that they would be kind enough to respect it.

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Good girl syndrome makes boundaries feel optional

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because you were trained to treat other people's comfort like your

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responsibility You feel your nervous system crashing This is why good girl syndrome is not just like a mindset issue.

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It is memory and identity Your body remembers when being agreeable kept you safe.

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It remembers when speaking up made things worse It remembers when being easy made life easier.

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So we are not shaming her.

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She helped you survive She is useful at times, but she can't be leading your future self.

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The woman building her rich girl era, her peaceful home, her healthy relationship,

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her supportive inner circle cannot be led by the part of her that panics every time someone is unhappy.

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Because that version of you will keep choosing immediate relief over long-term freedom.

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She will accept the bare minimum to avoid a hard conversation.

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She will stay in rooms where her spirit feels tight because leaving would require disappointing someone.

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And babe, a life built around never disappointing people will eventually disappoint you.

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Self-respect is built in private when no one is watching you or clapping for you.

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You are clapping for yourself.

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It grows every time your actions tell your nervous system, I will not abandon you for someone else's approval.

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Good girl syndrome teaches the opposite.

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Every time you say yes, when you mean no or laugh off something that hurt you, you teach yourself that your needs are negotiable then resentment shows up

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because you've been writing silent contracts on your head and keeping tabs on whether or not people deliver on it.

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I'll over give and you'll notice.

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I'll stay patient and then you'll choose me.

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I'll be useful and you'll finally love me.

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But people cannot honor contracts they never agreed to.

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So the answer is to become clear.

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Stop giving what you cannot give freely.

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Stop saying yes with an invisible invoice attached.

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The same woman who struggles to say no in relationships usually also struggles to say no at work with family

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or with friends.

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Okay.

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Because the good girl wants approval and the woman you're becoming wants freedom.

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And those two don't make the same decisions.

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So what do you do instead?

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Be more honest.

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Start with smaller truths.

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Don't try to jump from a lifetime of people pleasing into bold, unapologetic boundary setting overnight or do.

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Okay.

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I feel like I sort of did, but I came off the wrong way.

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I didn't know how to set boundaries.

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So when I did, I sounded a lot more angry and mean and defensive than I actually wanted to be.

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Versus now, I just casually say it and it's no big deal.

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But living and speaking your truth will help.

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Instead of saying it's fine, tell people how you actually feel.

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I was disappointed.

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Instead of instantly agreeing, tell people, let me think about it and I'll get back to you.

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These moments seem small, but they are how self-trust is rebuilt.

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I don't want you to leave this conversation thinking, okay, so I have to be more mean now.

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No, we are not swinging from self-abandonment to emotional terrorism.

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We are not confusing healing with being rude.

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The goal is not to become colder.

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The goal is to become more in your own truth.

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Also, stop over-explaining your nose.

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You don't need validation before you think you'll disappoint someone.

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I can't make it.

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Sorry.

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That doesn't work for me.

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And then stop talking.

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I know the silence feels uncomfortable.

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You'll want to soften it.

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You'll want to add a disclaimer or explain your intentions, don't.

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Let your words stand and let people have their reactions.

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Stop trying to fix it, soften it, or make people comfortable again.

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Let them deal with their own discomfort and their own reactions.

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And pay attention to which friendships or relationships can survive your honesty.

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They may not love every boundary and they may need time to adjust, but they get over it and won't require you to shrink to keep the connection.

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If a relationship only works when you have no needs, it doesn't work.

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Some people will struggle when you change because your healing changed what they had access to, your time, your energy, your attention.

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The ones who respect your boundaries, great.

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The ones who don't, they can show themselves out.

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Build friendships where you are seen and known.

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Create a life that feels full enough that one person's approval isn't the entire world.

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Because when your world is small, rejection feels devastating.

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And when your world is rich, rejection is just information in another part of life and realizing

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that is also a kind of power that's all the cake i have for you today thank you

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so much for watching until the end i appreciate it

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so much and if you enjoyed our little chat today please like hype subscribe

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and leave a comment to share your thoughts and i'll see you in the next episode Thank you.

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.

Shadowing Practice: how to be respected as a woman | stop being nice, self-betrayal, people pleasing - Learn English Speaking with Video

Context & Background

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

What is the Shadowing Technique?