Shadowing Practice: How To Create Exceptional Success in Life - Learn English Speaking with Video

It's so frustrating to feel like who you are right now and who you actually wanna be are two completely different people.

At 23, I was genuinely terrified of my own future.

I saw myself headed straight for a life where I had built absolutely nothing.

And I realized that the only person who could actually change that was me.

So I did.

I built a life that I actually respect today.

I've built multiple nine-figure companies and I'm married to my best friend.

And I truly live my definition of a dream life.

And I did this by using six standards that separate average people from the exceptional ones.

Standard number one is understanding that it's actually okay to be afraid that you're going to turn out average.

When I was in my early 20s, I had the stomach-turning vision of myself at 80 years old, having lived my entire life as a trophy wife.

I grew up in a tiny town where my graduating class had 56 kids and my world felt 56 kids long.

Too small, too constricting.

The life I was building inside this small world was heading somewhere

that I honestly hated and that terror of the alternative forced me to make extreme decisions.

Leon Fessinger pioneered cognitive dissonance theory at Stanford in the 1950s,

which showed that humans experience measurable psychological distress when their behavior doesn't actually align with how they view themselves,

essentially their self-concept.

Psychology Today published a piece in April, 2026, confirming that feeling stuck stems from the exact gap between what you value and what you actually do.

I felt that signal, and I felt it hard.

And that's why my extreme decisions kicked in, which felt radical to people around me.

But I knew that if I didn't lock in, as the saying goes today, that 80-year-old me that I saw in the vision would actually be my reality.

And here's the thing.

It's not like people don't know what their actions are leading them toward.

But coming to terms with the long-term consequences of your small little actions today is one big psychological dump

that your brain is just not willing to touch.

That's why people scroll on their phones and lower their expectations to try to kill that discomfort.

Making yourself numb to the gap between who you are and who you could be ruins your potential.

If you feel restless, your self-concept has simply outgrown your current reality.

And if you're here listening to this, some part of you already knows this.

But thankfully, the first step isn't actually as scary as it looks.

So this week, take out one piece of paper and on one side, list exactly who you are right now, detailing your income, your habits, and your daily reality.

On the other side, list who you are capable of becoming.

Look at the gap between those two lists.

Every item inside that gap is the exact roadmap that you need to start executing on today.

And the good news is that only you get to decide what those items are.

Stater number two requires you to stop seeking permission from people who've never done what you wanna do.

Something that's not talked about enough is the shame that you feel when you've realized that you've outgrown your circle of friends.

I had friends in my early 20s, and I knew deep down that the people around me weren't operating at the level I wanted to reach.

They were okay with the current version of Natalie, but I wasn't.

And it's incredibly important to realize what you need to grow.

I discovered Grant and Alana Cardone online and they completely shifted my inputs.

Instead of going out on Friday and Saturday nights, I would stay home, watch YouTube videos of their show called The G&E Show.

They had hours of content online

and I replaced the existing environment with this new environment

because I didn't need to meet them or have them in my life in order to learn from them.

I read every book that they wrote.

My favorite is Sell or Be Sold on Grandside and Build an Empire on Elena's.

And I still have the sticky notes

that I wrote on almost every single page one of the most cringy things

that I've ever done was DM Elena before I had ever met her in person.

At the time, I was just an online cyber stalker, and I told her that one day I was going to be her best friend.

And when she and I connected on Instagram, I deleted the DM because I was so embarrassed by this.

But it was true.

I was putting out in the future that I wanted to be her friend, and therefore I had to start showing up today as if I already was, which forced me to look at the habits that I had,

the friends that I had, and the things that I did consistently

that would either contribute to me having a great relationship with this person or detract from that.

Albert Bandura developed self-efficacy theory at Stanford and identified experiences that are lived through other people, aka vicarious experiences.

They are a primary source of self-belief.

Looking deeper at this, the American Psychological Association also published an overview in October of 2025

showing that observing role models achieve your aspirations, literally recalibrates your brain's belief in what is possible.

That is incredible.

How insane is it that people around you are defining what you think you're capable of in real time?

For women specifically, a 2020 systemic review in Frontiers in Psychology

found that role models were a more significant factor than access to capital for women pursuing entrepreneurship.

The point is, your future is literally invisible to anyone who hasn't built something similar.

When you surround yourself with people who haven't achieved what you want, your brain automatically recalibrates to their ceiling.

You absorb their risk tolerance and their definition of enough.

It is a heavy realization to come to because of the emotional attachments involved.

But selectively curating your circle doesn't mean that you cut everyone off.

Here's what you do instead.

Make yourself busy.

Most people think

that they have to cut out all of their friends in order to become the person that they wanna be.

That's not the case.

If you just make yourself busy with new inputs, You just have less time for your current circle.

You don't have to stop being friends with them.

You just have to stop spending as much time and have them be as influential as they are.

You need new influences.

So instead of going out on a Friday night, say that you're busy because you are.

You are spending time watching YouTube videos.

You're spending time reading books.

You're spending time going through courses in order to become the next version of yourself.

This doesn't mean that you go out by yourself.

This just means that you replace the time that you were spending with people who potentially were a lid for you.

And you have that time now spent with new influences

that help you get to where you're trying to go because they've actually built what you're trying to build.

Standard number three is that your stats don't lie.

Early in my 20s, I had to get so honest with myself about all the things that I wasn't.

When I looked at my bank account, it didn't reflect the value that I thought I could create.

When I looked at my abs, it did not reflect that I was actually in the gym because I wasn't.

When I looked at the friendships that I had, it didn't reflect anything that looked like depth.

And it was so challenging for me to accept

that my life wasn't a real reflection of what I thought it was supposed to be.

I had left college and thought that life was going to be amazing and exciting.

And I was faced with the reality that I really didn't like my life very much.

I didn't like the results that I had

and I just couldn't keep lying to myself as

if I was putting in work that I really wasn't to have a life that I wanted.

100

James Clear's Atomic Habits relies on decades of behavioral psychology to prove that true behavior change is an identity change.

101

Research in health psychology journals on centered identity transformation found

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that shifting your self-concepts to align with your desired behavior makes that behavior self-reinforcing rather than a daily test of willpower.

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All of that means that your environmental design predicts long-term outcomes far more reliably than motivation.

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Your pattern is you.

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And if it's on autopilot, you're not even in control of who you are.

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And it's a compounding effect.

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These unexamined habits stack up silently into a life that you never actually designed or wanted for that matter.

108

People blame their circumstances, their upbringing, the inheritance that they never got.

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But the cause of their mediocrity is right there in how they spend their Tuesday evenings.

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Every time you default to low standard habits, you cast a vote for the average version of yourself.

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So do this for one day.

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Track every single thing that you do from the minute

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that you wake up to the minute that you go to sleep in 15 minute increments.

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Categorize every action into either building the life you want or maintaining the life you have.

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If the vast majority of your day falls into the maintaining column, you have a concrete list of behaviors to replace immediately.

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Standard number four handles how to outgrow your environment without guilt.

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I realized early on

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that being alone with my husband was significantly better than being surrounded by people keeping me in a comfortable life

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that I hated.

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A study with professors from Harvard Medical School

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and UC San Diego tracked over 12,000 people for over 32 years for the Framingham Heart Study.

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They found that if a close friend becomes obese, your probability of becoming obese increases by a massive 57%.

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Their book, Connected, proved this contagion effect applies to happiness, drinking, and income-related behaviors.

124

They name this the three degrees of influence rule

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because your behavior is measurably shaped by people up to three degrees of separation away from you.

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Your environment is the invisible ceiling on your potential.

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Your brain absorbs the expectations and the standards of the people around you.

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And if your circle thinks that making $100,000 is exceptional, your brain will unconsciously treat that number as a hard ceiling.

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Standard four can help you identify the ceiling, but standard number five helps you raise your floor because your minimum standards dictate your maximum income.

130

I kept a toxic employee for six months because he controlled a multi-million dollar project.

131

My team watched me.

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They watched me tolerate the disrespect and their confidence in my leadership went down.

133

They watched me for months not handle him

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and my rationale was he was responsible for this project and yet I watched our culture get challenged.

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I watched specific individuals start to question me and I started to question myself.

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He was single handily one of the most challenging people

137

that I have ever worked with and what I learned from it was that I should have made the decision sooner.

138

My inability to make a fast decision early on is what

139

allowed a tiny problem to grow into a systemic issue inside our organization and Stanford University research proves this.

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The research shows that delayed execution actually weakens your self-belief more than outright failure.

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Doing a few tasks hours after you committed to registers in your brain as a broken promise.

142

So what do I mean by a floor?

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It's the standard that you hold when you are exhausted and when no one is watching.

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What you tolerate is what your environment becomes known for.

145

And the people who produce exceptional results rely on non-negotiable minimums that they protect aggressively.

146

A goal without a floor is just a wish that ends up collapsing the second that life gets difficult.

147

So you have to define the absolute minimum for your health, for your work, for your relationships, for any place that you have a goal in your life.

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You have to establish the specific line that you will never cross even on your absolute worst day.

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Finally, standard number six demands that you move from a dreamer to an architect and go from wishing to building.

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The gap between people who want exceptional lives and the people who actually create them comes down entirely to this one thing.

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In order to truly get the life that you want, you have to do all of the unsexy things that you don't want to do.

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And instead of thinking that you just have to add a bunch of new stuff, one of the fastest ways to change your life is to figure out what you're willing to remove

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and for most people that looks like some version of television

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and some version of social media i challenge you right now put this video on pause

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and open up your screen time

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and look at how much time you spend across social media

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or television every single day the average american spends almost four hours a day between social media

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and television wasting their time instead of building your future

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so look at how much time you're spending across those things

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and take that time and reallocate it to the work that you need to do.

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Instead of consuming content on social media, if you want to get known on social media, actually post content.

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If you're looking to understand AI better, actually spend that time using AI and having it help you understand what you don't know, so then it can teach you what you need to know.

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There's no shortage of ways that you can use your time to actually create the life that you want, but you have to be super honest with yourself that this life

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that you want isn't just going to come because you created a vision board and you you had some big dream.

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It comes from doing all of the unsexy work that nobody wants to highlight because it's not cute, it's not fun, and it's not Instagrammable.

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Dreamers talk and they're quite good at talking or building stories in their head, but it rarely translates.

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Now an architect, on the other hand, engineers the steps to actually build it.

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And the blueprint to that architecture is what this is.

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Effort without architecture is just random activity.

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Specifying exactly when and where you will execute a task pre-decides the action

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that your brain doesn't have to rely on willpower for in the moment.

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So take your single biggest goal and answer four specific questions on paper.

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Define the measurable finished version.

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Pick an exact completion date.

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Outline the five milestones between now and then and identify the single task that you must execute before Monday to start building.

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If you want to see how these principles apply to wealth, watch this video next to see how the top 1% really thinks about wealth.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How To Create Exceptional Success in Life”. This video has 176 sentences and 2560 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:41. The speaker talks fast, about 202 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
exceptional adjective	/ɪkˈsɛpʃənəl/	Forming an exception; not ordinary; uncommon; rare.
ceiling noun	/ˈsilɪŋ/	The overhead closure of a room.
outgrow verb	/ˌɑʊtˈɡɹoʊ/	To become too big in size or too mature in age or outlook to continue to want, need, use, experience, or accept some object, practice, condition, belief, etc.
execute verb	/ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/	To kill, especially as punishment for a capital crime.
dreamer noun	/ˈdɹimɚ/	One who dreams.
measurable adjective	/ˈmɛʒəɹəbəl/	Able to be measured.
recalibrate verb	/ˌɹiˈkæl.ə.bɹeɪt/	To calibrate for a second or subsequent time.
unsexy adjective		Not sexy.
willpower noun	/ˈwɪlˌpaʊɚ/	The unwavering strength of will to carry out one's wishes.
align verb	/əˈlaɪn/	To form a line; to fall into line.
obese adjective	/oʊˈbis/	Extremely overweight, especially: weighing more than 20% (for men) or 25% (for women) over their conventionally ideal weight determined by height and build…
systemic adjective	/sɪˈstɛm.ɪk/	Embedded within and spread throughout and affecting a whole system, group, body, economy, market, or society.
surround verb	/səˈɹaʊnd/	To encircle something or simultaneously extend in all directions.
absorb verb	/æbˈsɔɹb/	To include so that it no longer has separate existence; to overwhelm; to cause to disappear as if by swallowing up; to incorporate; to assimilate; to take in…
tolerate verb	/ˈtɑ.lə.ɹeɪt/	To allow or permit without explicit approval, usually if it is perceived as negative.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
come down verb	To descend, fall down, collapse.
cut out verb	To refrain from (doing something, using something etc.), to stop or cease (doing something).
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
go down verb	To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one.
go out verb	To leave, especially a building.
go through verb	To travel from one end of something to the other.
live through verb	To survive a difficult period or event

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Here's what you do instead.
You don't have to stop being friends with them.
You're spending time reading books.
This doesn't mean that you go out by yourself.
Standard number three is that your stats don't lie.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've built · who've never done · you've realized
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	person who could · anyone who hasn · people who haven
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	Be Sold · are lived · was faced

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 49 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, didn't, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: exceptional /ɪkˈsɛpʃənəl/, measurable /ˈmɛʒəɹəbəl/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, aspiration /ˌæspəˈɹeɪʃən/, negotiable /nɪˈɡoʊʃəbəl/
Long words — get the stress right: exceptional /ɪkˈsɛpʃənəl/, measurable /ˈmɛʒəɹəbəl/, recalibrate /ˌɹiˈkæl.ə.bɹeɪt/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, invisible /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/

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 exceptional, ceiling, outgrow.

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 technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: How To Create Exceptional Success in Life - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?