Shadowing Practice: How to Lock In and Transform Your Life (using science) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

The difference between people who actually achieve their goals and those who don't isn't discipline.

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The difference between people who actually achieve their goals and those who don't isn't discipline.

It's actually about building strategic systems and identities that make success inevitable.

And we are not in the business of waiting for the

arbitrary start date of the new year to start working on our goals and creating our dream life.

If you're a bit like me and determined to make the most of the rest of the year,

kickstart your lock-in and comeback season,

and emerge on the very first day of the new year as the best version that you can be,

then I made this video for you.

I'll walk you through a complete lock-in system with three tried

and tested evidence-backed levers that you can pull to build your dream life before the end of the year.

Five months ago, I had a baby and completely paused on every single goal that I'd set for myself,

which was exactly what I needed to do for that season.

But now I'm coming back into the arena and as we approach the end of the year,

I've realized that I have a choice.

Either coast into the new year and change nothing

or commit to transformation right now and step into the new year with my best foot already forward.

And one of the most valuable lessons I've learned is that ultimately in life,

you choose your hard.

Building a fit, healthy body by sleeping,

exercising, and eating right is hard.

Being unfit, unhealthy, and feeling limited by your physical body is also hard.

So if you're ready to make a change starting from today,

then keep watching this video.

If you're new here, my name's Izzy.

I'm a mum, tech co-founder, and Cambridge trained doctor.

And right now, I'm on a mission to help you create your dream life.

So without further ado, let's dive in.

Also, I've created a completely free companion for this video,

which is the Great Lock-In Starter Pack,

which has all my favourite resources and some AI prompts

that I've designed to help to guide you through getting momentum

as you get off the ground with setting your goals and really committing to them.

If you'd like to check it out,

I'll leave a link down below.

So what is a lock-in?

A lock-in isn't just about working harder,

it's also about working smarter by pulling the right levers intentionally until progress becomes unavoidable.

The first lever is the focus lever.

The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.

This is a quote by Alexander Graham Bell,

which is absolutely so resonant for this focus lever.

Because focus is the starting point of every lock-in.

It's about deciding what truly matters this season and actively releasing what doesn't.

There are two parts to this lever.

Firstly is the visualization.

Visualize yourself at the end of the year.

Where do you want to be?

I recommend thinking about this in four key areas,

which are health, relationships, career slash finances, and growth.

And so the way that I like to think about this is write out everything

that you think could maybe be on that list.

In the health category, I usually break this down into sleep,

nutrition, movement, mind, and beauty.

So think about each of these areas of your health

and consider is there anything you'd like to add or remove from them.

And I intentionally mention remove here

because part of locking in is really focusing the raise of our attention onto a couple of key things that really matter.

And so actually making sure that we can constantly prune things out of our lives,

whether that's possessions or habits that are no longer serving us,

or even relationships that are really no longer contributing positively to our lives,

then once you've got your long list of all the things that you kind of want to do,

it's time to eliminate and select.

Psychological studies have found that we are most likely to succeed at a goal

when we are focusing on just one key goal.

This doesn't mean that you only have to choose one goal,

but what it does mean is that you shouldn't choose 20 goals.

You should choose as few goals as possible.

And so I personally like to cap this at maximum three goals that I'm really focusing all my energy on.

So have a look at your long list

and then choose only the top one to three goals to only go all in on for the great lock-in.

This doesn't mean that we completely abandon everything else,

but it means you don't focus on them because every single morning

when we wake up and every single night when we go to sleep,

we want to be thinking about striving towards our chosen goals.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing that you've got to focus on,

but that's not what it means at all.

It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.

So what feels most alive for you right now?

What one change, if you successfully executed on,

would have the most positive impact on your life?

And you'd look back and think,

wow, I'm really proud of myself.

So here's where most people get stuck.

They genuinely don't know where to start.

And I've realized that there are kind of two camps here.

So some of you will have this massive,

overwhelming list of goals, as in everything feels important and you don't know what to cut out and what to prioritize.

And then maybe others would literally be looking at a blank page thinking,

I don't even know what my goal should be.

I don't know where to begin.

And so one really helpful thinking tool is using AI tools to help you to unpick your own thinking

and figure out your answers to these questions.

And so at this point in my lock-in journey,

I turned to Claude, which I've been using for just over a year now,

built by Anthropic, who are very kindly sponsoring this video,

which kind of blows my mind because I've literally been using and loving Claude over the last year.

So this is how I used it to help me to navigate my own mind and figure out my own priorities.

It didn't just give me a template or tell me what to do.

It actually just asked me lots of questions that made me think differently about my own goals.

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So I had this long list,

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like 15, 20 goals, and everything felt kind of important.

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And so I basically popped the whole thing into Claude and I said,

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look, I've got all these ideas and they all feel quite important to me.

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And can you help to act as my life coach and ask me further clarifying questions to figure out my priorities,

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to focus on really locking in on and making progress on.

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And what Claude did is ask me follow-up questions that made me think differently.

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Things like, which of these goals am I pursuing because I genuinely want them versus I think I should want them?

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Or if I could succeed at only one thing this year,

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which one would actually create the most meaningful change?

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But what if you're on the flip side and you're not even sure what your goals should be?

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So in case any of you are in that camp,

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I actually tested out Claude to see if it could help with this use case.

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And I opened up a new conversation and said,

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I want to lock in and make progress towards something,

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but I'm staring at a blank page and I don't know what to work on.

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I know I want to improve my life,

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but I don't know what to focus on.

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So how should I even start figuring out what my goals should be?

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Please act as my life coach and ask me questions that will help me find my own answers.

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And the key thing here is Claude didn't make my decisions for me.

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It just helped me to think more clearly

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and ask the questions I wasn't asking myself

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and challenging my thinking in areas that I wasn't necessarily aware that I was missing something.

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Because at the end of the day,

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it's not about getting quick answers to something.

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It's actually about having a thinking buddy that helps you to find your own answers.

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And once I'd actually selected the goals I wanted to focus on,

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Claude was really helpful in actually elaborating on a systematic plan of how to get there using an evidence-based framework,

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which I had shared with Claude that I wanted to use.

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I've put together a bunch of free prompts in the lock-in starter pack

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that you can copy and paste into Claude to try it out yourself.

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If you're interested in trying out Claude,

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then I've popped a link down in the description below.

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Once we have clarity on the goals that we're focusing on,

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the next lever is the identity lever.

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And this is about becoming the person who achieves these goals.

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Every action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become.

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The identity lever is about shifting from behavior level change,

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which is, I should work out,

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to identity level change, which is,

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I'm someone who moves every day.

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Because once you know what you want,

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you need to decide who you need to be in order to get there.

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Identity level change is less about forcing discipline and more about aligning your self image with your goal.

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So what I suggest here is visualizing yourself at the end of your lock-in.

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Step into the version of you who has achieved the goals that you want to work on.

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Take a deep breath, maybe close your eyes and imagine,

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okay, what does this version of me think, act, choose?

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What do they believe about themselves?

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What are the narratives that she says to herself?

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And then for each goal,

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come up with some kind of identity.

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So for example, for me,

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one of my goals is to sleep earlier and have a fixed consistent bedtime.

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So my task here is to switch the narrative from,

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I should sleep early, sounds so boring,

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to instead, I'm a person who has early nights.

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And immediately, even just saying this out loud,

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I feel this sigh of relief.

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This feels much more spacious,

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much more aspirational, much more relaxed and enjoyable.

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The third lever to make the most of your great lock-in is the systems lever.

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The foundation of this lever is that design beats discipline.

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The system lever is about architecture.

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It's not about willpower.

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And there are three subsections to this, keystone, friction, and implementation.

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A keystone habit is the anchor of your lock-in.

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It's the one daily or weekly behavior that transforms everything else and has a domino effect on the rest of your life.

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For me, one great example is something in the health category,

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which is sleep,

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which is a big reason why sleep is one of my three top goals to focus on during this lock-in.

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Because as soon as I've slept well,

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I have more energy, I'm more creative,

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I'm more likely to feel excited to create YouTube videos or to work on my business.

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I'm more likely to be able to show up as my best self for my baby

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and my husband and pour in all the love and care that my family deserves.

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And I'm also much more likely to be able to show up for myself and take care of myself,

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whether that's showing up for my daily exercise or my skincare

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or taking all the supplements that I've planned out or making sure that I'm eating healthy meals.

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The second part of the systems lever is friction.

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And this is all about your environment.

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Your environment becomes your silent accountability partner.

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So it's crucial that you design your environment,

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schedule and queues so that your lock-in habits become the path of least resistance.

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Kind of like water flowing down a mountain,

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it follows the easiest path and the way that we do this is by either adding or removing friction.

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So for habits and actions that we want to encourage,

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we want to reduce the friction for those.

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So for example if you want to go to the gym first thing in the morning,

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maybe lay out your gym clothes the night before.

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Or if I want to journal every day,

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I put my journal on my desk every single day.

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Or for example if I want to make sure that I I drink a whole bottle of water,

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first thing as soon as I wake up,

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I can make sure that I always have my water bottle topped up,

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ready by my bedside.

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So as soon as I wake up in the morning,

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my bottle's already there.

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This also means adding friction to things that are distractions that we want to avoid.

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Examples of this include if you have a snacking habit,

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putting the snacks far out of reach rather than making them obvious on the table,

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or deleting apps which are distracting or lead you to doom scrolls such as Instagram.

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It also means automating whatever you can.

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So for example, when I was working on investing as one of my goals,

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one thing that I did was set up automatic investment.

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This was while I was working as a doctor.

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So every month when I got my paycheck,

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I would automatically set up a direct transfer to my investment account.

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And then in my investment account,

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I had set up an automatic investment in a basket of ETFs.

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So specific funds that I wanted to invest in every single month.

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And this would all happen automatically,

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which meant that my investment was so seamless and completely had no friction once I'd set up this system.

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The third part of the systems lever is implementation.

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And this is all about implementation intentions,

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where you translate your goals into daily and weekly anchors.

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So you define when, where,

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and how you're gonna do all of the things that are gonna get you towards your goal.

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These have been proven across multiple studies to massively increase the likelihood

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that you're actually going to take action and make it happen.

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For example, if one of your goals is to meditate every day,

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then your implementation intention could be,

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when I wake up after I've brushed my teeth and done my skincare,

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I sit on my bed and meditate using a timer for 15 minutes.

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This works by reducing cognitive load because you've already made the decisions about how you're going to make all these things happen.

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So those are the three most powerful levers

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that I've found to really lock in your goals and make meaningful progress before the end of the year.

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And one thing I think about a lot is when watching personal development content like this on YouTube,

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it's easy to just watch the content and not actually take any action in our lives.

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And so right now, right here,

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before you click off this video,

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maybe even pause the video for a second,

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think of two action points that you're taking away from this video and that you're actually going to make happen.

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Feel free to either comment them below,

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send them to me as an email,

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or just like write a note to yourself somewhere in your journal or like message it to a friend.

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Because the most important thing is that you actually take action having watched this.

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Because my deepest wish for you is that you watch these videos

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and you actually take action to improve your life and move closer towards building the life of your dreams.

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If you enjoy this video,

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I think you would like this one over here where I talk about key habits

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that can help you to level up and become the best version of yourself.

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So check that out over there.

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As always, thank you for watching,

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take care of yourself and remember that the journey is the destination.

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I'll see you in the next video.

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Bye!

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Shadowing Practice: How to Lock In and Transform Your Life (using science) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Shadowing Practice: How to Lock In and Transform Your Life (using science) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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About This Lesson

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What is the Shadowing Technique?