Shadowing Practice: How to Build Self-Worth So Strong It Feels Illegal - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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We all have that one friend who's always dating down, the one who is smart and funny, has their life together, and then somehow ends up with someone who can't text back, can't commit, and makes them feel like they're asking for too much just by wanting the bare minimum.
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We all have that one friend who's always dating down, the one who is smart and funny, has their life together, and then somehow ends up with someone who can't text back, can't commit, and makes them feel like they're asking for too much just by wanting the bare minimum.
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Or maybe you are that friend.
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You keep telling yourself, it's fine, they're just busy, or I'm probably expecting too much.
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But what's actually happening is your standards are becoming negotiable and fragile.
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And most people think that setting standards is about defining what other people should do to you.
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But the crucial part they're missing is that your standards aren't about changing what others do, they're about changing what you do.
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So if you've ever felt like you keep choosing people or situations that give you the bare minimum, let's fix that right here, right now.
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Today we're going to walk through how standards actually change your life from the inside out and all your outcomes in your life so you can see why this matters in the first place and I'll share some personal stories here.
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Next we'll talk about the source of standards and the validation standard axis, where your standards actually come from and the science behind why yours might be wobbling and how to fix it.
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Thirdly, we'll go through the inner shift and the inner transformation that makes it stick and some practical applications for how to cultivate this relationship with yourself, this deep self-compassion, so you're not setting standards from the fear of being disliked.
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And finally, we'll go over the external design, so setting your standards and non-negotiables and learning to hold them with confidence, grace and kindness.
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Also, as a companion to this video, I've created a completely free set of exercises to develop this relationship with yourself from the root and so I've popped the link in my description down below if you'd like to check it out.
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So now without further ado let's dive in.
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I came across this quote recently and it kind of blew me away.
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You can tell how much a woman loves herself based on the partner that she chooses and this felt so true because people tend to accept the love that they believe they deserve.
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Since having my daughter last year I realized that I actually have higher standards for her than myself and I was like wait hang on a minute do I need to raise my own standards?
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Once upon a time, I had this friend who would constantly flake on me.
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We would make plans, and I'd get all excited and rearrange my day around our meeting, only just to get sent, sorry, can we do next week?
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And me being me at the time, I'd reply, all good, no worries, when works for you?
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Because I wanted to be easygoing, nice, and likable.
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And honestly, my standards for friendship were pretty low.
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I convinced myself that this was normal, this was the treatment that I deserved, or that I was being a nice girl by being okay with this.
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But if I was honest, it wasn't just the flaking, because whenever we did meet, it was always near their place, at a place convenient for them, and they would always basically just talk about themselves.
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And the one time that I actually really needed their help and asked them for it, they weren't there.
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They didn't really reply to my messages.
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They were like, okay, sure, hope it's okay.
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Hope you're okay.
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What's up with that?
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And this was honestly the breaking point where I remember thinking to myself, why on earth am I investing all my time and energy into this kind of friendship?
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They are unreliable.
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They're not really there for me.
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I don't really enjoy or feel good when I'm with them because they're just talking about themselves and they don't seem to care about me at all.
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And this is ultimately making me feel like I'm not worthy of true good friendship.
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And so then in that moment, I raised my standards.
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So the next time that they flaked on me, I said, all good, no worries.
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And I actually meant it.
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I didn't bother rescheduling them.
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I just stopped making myself available and invested my energy elsewhere.
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And so then this diversion away from this particular friend allowed me to free up my energy to invest in other friendships where I found genuine two-way supportive relationships.
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And all of this ability to find new friendships and level up my life and self-worth started with this shift in standards.
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And so now let's talk about where our standards even come from.
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The people that I know with the strongest standards also have the strongest self-worth.
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Let me explain how this axis works.
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According to two expert psychology scholars Dr Jennifer Crocker and Dr Laura Park found that that whenever someone's self-worth is based on external sources, so this could be other people's opinions, approval, or their looks, they tend to need to chase this validation continuously.
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One particular study followed a group of first-year university students over time, found that the ones who relied on these external sources of self-worth at the start of their university journey tended to have more problems, like binge drinking or low self-esteem.
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But the students who based their self-worth on internal sources, such as their values or their faith, were much less likely to experience the same problems.
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Chasing external validation and basing your self-worth on external factors comes at a great cost to self because it means you're constantly monitoring and checking, oh, how should my self-worth be today based on all these external sources and what everybody else thinks of me?
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But instead by shifting over to more internal sources of self-worth, Crocker and suggests that your self-esteem is likely to be much more resilient and stable day-to-day.
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And drawing it out, it looks a little bit like this.
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If someone's basing their self-worth on external validation, this means that they'll constantly be seeking the approval of others from external sources.
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This leads to them feeling like they need to perform and people-please, and ultimately self-abandon.
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In terms of their self-worth, because they're constantly checking what other people think of them to determine what they should think about themselves, their self-worth is fundamentally quite fragile.
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And because their self-worth is always changing depending on these external circumstances, that means that the standards that they have for themselves are often either low or absent or inconsistent and changing depending on their self-worth in the moment.
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On the other hand, if someone is working from a place of internal validation, where they validate themselves and truly believe that they are worthy and deserving of love and kindness and compassion,
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this will lead them to feel comfortable being their authentic selves around people instead of trying to manage everybody else's opinions of them, because that's what they're basing their self-worth on, they have validated themselves.
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And so they are not seeking the approval of everyone else in the room.
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And that gives them the space to show up as their authentic self.
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This also means that they have resilient self-worth because their self-worth is based on something that they own and they control.
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And ultimately, this allows clear standards to emerge naturally and organically as a result of just this whole state of being.
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And so as we can see here, essentially the way that we get validation and develop our self-worth affects how we set our standards and where they come from.
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To use the example of my flaky friend, I was initially in seeking her approval, wanting to people please and perform for her in order to gain her friendship and be her friend.
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But ultimately I was actually self-abandoning where I was allowing myself to be repeatedly flaked on and treated like I wasn't very worthy at all.
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That also meant that my self-worth was based a lot on what she thought about me, which fed into this cycle of wanting to seek her approval, form and people please, and then feel like I wasn't worthy.
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Then my standards were low or very inconsistent.
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But then on the flip side, once I had had this breaking moment where I realized, you know what?
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I'm actually worthy of being cared for and having a friend who gives back to me what I give to them.
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I could show up authentically and be like, okay, she doesn't want to meet up.
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She's cancelled on me last minute.
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I could be, okay, yeah, all good, no worries.
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And then move on with my life.
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And so the next question is around this internal shift.
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How can we move from an external to an internal locus of validation of our self-worth?
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Two leading psychology professors, Dr. Kristin Neff and Dr. Ruth Svonk, joined forces on a large community survey assessing over 2,000 people to look at the relationship between their self-esteem and self-worth and their self-compassion.
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And they found that self-compassion was linked to more stable self-worth and that self-compassionate individuals relied less on external factors like their looks, their performance, or approval from other people.
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Now we know how incredible self-compassion is but sometimes it can be so abstract that it can easily go whoosh over our heads and kind of be a bit confusing as to how to actually break it down.
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So let's break it down using Neff's three-part structure.
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The first one is self-kindness and this means being caring and understanding with yourself rather than being harshly critical or judgmental.
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Self-kindness offers soothing and comfort to the self during times of struggle or suffering.
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On the flip side self-judgment is being critical in response to suffering or perceived poor performance.
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The next The next part of self-compassion is common humanity.
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Recognising that all of us humans are in this shared human condition of being imperfect, failing, suffering, making mistakes, and it connects our own flawed condition to the general shared human condition.
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So that greater perspective can be taken towards personal shortcomings.
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Because it's easy to think oh everyone else seems to have it all together everyone else has better friendships gets treated better knows how to set boundaries
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but common humanity says that your struggle isn't evidence that something is wrong with you it's actually just evidence that you're human and every other human
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being on the planet has some kind of struggle that you probably know nothing about and this helps to create a perspective shift where we become collaborative with other people or you realize, oh, we're all actually in this together, rather than feeling competitive.
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The final component of self-compassion is mindfulness.
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This means holding your thoughts and feelings in balanced awareness, rather than over-identifying with them.
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Over-identification is when you believe that the thoughts and feelings are actually true about you.
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For example, I feel worthless becomes I am worthless.
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Instead, with mindfulness, this allows us to be with the painful feelings of, I didn't do a good job on that, and be with them as they are, rather than trying to suppress them or run away with them.
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And so self-compassion starts internally, the way that you speak to yourself, and then gradually becomes expressed in your actions, behaviors, responses, and standards.
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And this is where they are naturally born from that self-compassion and self-worth.
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And so now let's go into a couple of exercises that can actually build your self-compassion.
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And there are three practical exercises that helped me to work on building this self-compassion muscle for myself.
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The first is a loving-kindness meditation.
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And actually research has genuinely found that loving-kindness meditation is linked to a whole host of positive benefits, such as improved mood, more balanced immune response, and enhanced activation in brain areas involved in emotional processing and empathy.
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And let me tell you a story about the first time that I did a loving kindness meditation.
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This was around five or six years ago.
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So I was sitting down to do a metta bhavna meditation.
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Metta bhavna basically means the cultivation of loving kindness.
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And the first stage of the meditation was generating a sense of loving kindness towards yourself, wishing yourself well and repeating the phrases, may I be well, may I be happy, may I be free from suffering, may I make progress.
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And as soon as I started sitting and meditating, I just dissolved into tears, I started sobbing.
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And I realized that this was because for so much of my life, I had lived from a place of self judgment,
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that critical voice constantly pointing out flaws in how I'd done things, my performance, what I was like, and I had so rarely taken this perspective of self kindness and loving kindness towards myself.
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And so the simple act of wishing myself well was a level of self compassion, which broke through years of self-judgment and using criticism to motivate myself.
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One concept that I love in Kristin Neff's work, she distinguishes between yin and yang forms of self-compassion and then the next two tips are around applying Neff's yin and yang self-compassion in action.
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On the yin side there's treating and also speaking to yourself as if you're somebody that you love and on the yang side there is this concept of fierce self-compassion and the way that you'll protect those standards and those boundaries to create the space that you need.
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One of my favorite ways to work on developing this new kind of mental muscle is actually using an AI chatbot to act as my coach and to help me to work and think through different scenarios as they come up in my real life.
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My go-to AI these days for being a great thinking partner and also writing really well is Claude, created by Anthropic, who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
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And so I'm going to walk you through exactly how I use Claude to act as a Socratic mindset coach in these different areas to help me to develop this mental muscle of self-compassion and develop this perspective.
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So here I'm in the chat with Claude and I've set it to opus 4.6 extended and opus 4.6 is their newest and most capable model and I am obsessed with this model let me tell you.
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And so I put in a prompt a bit like this where I'm working on developing my self-compassion, my self-worth, my standards and I would like you to act as a Socratic mindset coach for helping me to develop this.
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A Socratic mindset coach here essentially will ask you a bunch of questions so it's the Socratic method of teaching.
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Socrates back in ancient Greece was a philosopher who was famous for standing in the forum in ancient Greece and then asking people questions to explore their thinking and challenge them.
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And so what I want Claude to do here is to ask me questions that will help me to come to a realization on my own and essentially help me to extract my thinking and act as a thinking buddy.
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I love using the voice input that's available on Claude because then I can just hit record in Claude itself and then just start talking to either the computer or my phone.
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Beyond generally helping to coach me on these self-compassion practices, I can also pop in specific examples of things that are going on which maybe I want support in how to clarify my boundaries.
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So for example when dealing with let's say a flaky friend, you could pop in to Claude essentially, okay act as a Socratic mindset coach, help me to work through this with self-compassion, grace, confidence, and also setting my standards for friendship.
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Tell Claude a little bit about the context and some of the messages, and then Claude will literally ask me a bunch of follow-up questions that challenge me in ways that I hadn't even thought of before.
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And honestly, this AI hack of using Claude as a mindset coach is so helpful because it's easy to learn all of this stuff in theory,
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all the stuff about self- compassion and self-worth and standards, but in real life, where the rubber meets the road, the moment when those standards get tested is actually the hardest point.
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This is where Claude can come in handy.
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So if you'd like to check out Claude Chat, I've popped the link in the description down below.
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Now let's get back into the video.
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Part four is the external results.
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And here we're going to set the actual standards for ourselves by asking the crucial questions to really hammer and hone in on what it is that we really care about, and fundamentally to make our actions follow our new, more resilient self-worth and self-compassion.
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So these are some questions that I love to ask myself.
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Firstly, what would you advise your daughter or your five-year-old self to do?
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And when I ask myself this question, it's suddenly so clear.
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The next question is, what would feel good?
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If you knew that you mattered, what would you do?
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And I find that these two questions, if I ask myself them, I immediately know the answer and it just is so clarifying.
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Another thing I've only recently learned is that boundaries don't have to feel reactive or triggered because if you're actually coming from a place where you are actually embodying your higher self and you are totally comfortable with yourself,
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Your standards and boundaries will feel natural and neutral rather than reactive or triggering.
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And so I find that once I have a few examples, then it's a good time to decide on my non-negotiables.
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Acting from a place where I know that I matter, I believe that I matter, I believe truly that I am deserving of loving kindness and compassion.
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What are the things that I want in my life and what are the things that I don't want?
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Where do I draw that line?
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And so in the previous section, we used Claude Chat as a Socratic mindset coach to help us work through our thoughts.
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It can even help to create a list of non-negotiables that you can keep revisiting and revising over time.
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The only thing that this only works if A, you've done the inner transformative work and B, you actually follow through with them.
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And that's where Claude Cowork comes in.
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Cowork is basically Claude working with your files like a teammate.
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It can do all sorts of things like read, edit, create new files, sorting your downloads, building out spreadsheets, checking your calendar, which means instead of your standards living just in a chat window or being scattered or lost, they can actually live inside a system that you actually use, such as inside your computer.
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So let's go back to that same friend example.
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If my standard is, I don't keep rearranging my week for someone who flakes.
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The place that standard actually gets tested is my calendar.
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So I'll ask cowork, read my non-negotiables.md file and my calendar, and spot where I'm likely to abandon my standard, and then suggest a couple of simple rules for this month, and draft one short message that I can use when I need to reschedule or say no without over-explaining.
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And that's what I mean by making a standard real.
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It's not actually just a mindset shift, it's an entire system change.
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Claude Cowork is still in research preview mode, so it's probably going to change quite a lot over time, but if you'd like to be one of the earliest people to check it out, you can click the link in my description down below.
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So now that we've walked through exactly how to set standards from the upstream point of actually developing this self-compassion and self-worth, the next step is actually to take action.
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So at the end of every single video, I always invite you to choose at least two action points that you'd like to take forward and write them down somewhere, whether it's on a notepad, in your journal, in the comments below, or in an email.
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The most important part is committing and then executing.
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If you liked this video, I think you'll enjoy this video right here where I share eight game-changing journaling habits to try this year.
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And since you've made it this far, feel free to hit subscribe for more self-development videos every single week to create a life that you love.
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As always, thank you for watching, take care of yourselves, and remember that the journey is the destination.
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I'll see you in the next video, bye!
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Context & Background
In today’s fast-paced world, self-worth often becomes intertwined with our relationships and the expectations we set for ourselves. The speaker highlights experiences related to friendships and the importance of maintaining high personal standards. By reflecting on interpersonal dynamics, particularly the ups and downs of friendship, the speaker emphasizes that the real transformation begins within. This conversation provides a deep dive into self-compassion, the roots of our self-worth, and how these factors influence our social interactions. Through practical advice and relatable anecdotes, learners can grasp how internal change reflects outwardly in everyday communication.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- “All good, no worries.” – A helpful phrase to convey understanding when someone cancels plans.
- “What works for you?” – Useful for negotiating plans that accommodate someone else's preferences.
- “I feel like I'm not worthy of true good friendship.” – A way to express personal feelings regarding self-worth and relationships.
- “Let’s prioritize what truly matters.” – Encourages focusing on valuable relationships.
- “I’ve raised my standards.” – A powerful affirmation of self-respect and the willingness to seek better quality interactions.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively improve your English pronunciation and speaking skills while shadowing this video, follow these steps:
- Choose a Shadowing App: Use a reliable shadowing app to help you sync your audio playback with the transcript. This will facilitate smoother practice sessions.
- Listen Actively: Start by watching the video without speaking. Focus on how the words are articulated, noting intonations and emotions behind each phrase.
- Break it Down: Segment the video into manageable parts, applying the phrases you’ve learned. Repeat each segment out loud after the speaker, mimicking their tone and rhythm.
- Practice Daily: Incorporate these phrases into your daily conversations. Try to use them in context during your English speaking practice with friends or language partners.
- Self-Assessment: Record yourself practicing these phrases and compare your pronunciation to the original audio. Focus on clarity and confidence to enhance your voice.
By following this structured approach and practicing regularly, you'll not only improve your English speaking skills but also build the confidence essential for setting personal standards in communication. Whether your goal is for IELTS speaking practice or simply to engage more meaningfully, this method is designed for you to succeed.
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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