Shadowing Practice: How to Not Waste Your Life (before it's too late) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

If you've ever had big dreams and projects and started them with all the passion in the world,

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If you've ever had big dreams and projects and started them with all the passion in the world,

only to then at some point lose momentum and not actually finish what you started,

then I made this video to help.

Shiny object syndrome

and continually getting distracted from finishing what you start will only

result in a life where you're surrounded by the graveyard of

dozens of half-done passion projects with nothing actually completed to show for it.

This is for anyone who actually wants to create cut-through and make progress to fulfilling their potential.

Because execution is a muscle that you can practice and strengthen over time.

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

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

And on this channel, I share the mindsets and strategies to help you create a life that you love.

In the first part of this video,

we'll walk through exactly what the cost is of all of these unfinished projects.

Then we'll walk through the psychology of why most people don't actually finish what they start

and how we can try to fix this.

And finally, we'll go through a three-part framework that will show you exactly how to finish everything you start from today onwards.

So without further ado, let's dive in.

Every single one of your actions either reflects traction,

so moving in the direction of what you actually want and helping you to achieve your goals,

or distraction, moving away from what you actually want and your goals.

And so let's dive into the cost of all these graveyard projects,

which are often the result of repeatedly being distracted away from actually making traction on your goals.

The average person will have 4,000 weeks in their life,

which is an idea popularized by Oliver Buckman's book.

And now think about how many of your 4,000 weeks have been invested into those half-done projects.

And the return on that life energy investment

into these projects that you start and then don't finish is actually quite minimal

if you don't complete a project because maybe you get the enjoyment

and start to learn new skills and it's kind of fun along the way and those are all very valuable.

But then the real return on time investment for a project usually actually comes after a significant investment in it.

So once it really comes to fruition,

this means that of your 4,000 precious weeks that you have in your life,

maybe dozens of these have been dedicated to projects that you just started and then never really took anywhere beyond that.

And our time, our life energy,

our attention is the most valuable finite resource that we have.

It's one of the only things you can't really buy that much more of.

So other than the life energy that was dedicated to these unfinished projects,

another cost is actually the mental cost.

In 1927, Bloomer Zygarnik, a Russian psychologist,

ran her famous restaurant study.

Zygarnik noticed that waiters could remember extremely complex orders if they were unpaid.

But as soon as customers paid,

the waiters immediately forgot all the details about the order.

She took this to the lab to test it again.

People were given around 20 tasks each,

but in around half of these tasks,

they were obviously rather annoyingly interrupted before they could even finish them.

And this was a surprising finding.

Participants remembered incomplete tasks 90% better than completed ones,

which just goes to show how our brain keeps tabs on all of these unfinished tasks.

And this actually does result in this level of mental load which stays with you until you finish them.

This led to her developing the theory of the Zygonic effect,

which can be defined as the way that open loops

and unfinished tasks actually create intrusive thoughts and mental tension that persist until the task is completed or that loop is closed.

This means that our graveyard of unfinished passion projects aren't just a collection of dreams that were half cooked and abandoned,

they're actually an active attention vampire,

because when we think about these projects and think,

oh I should really like get back to this project where I started to learn Shaolin Kung Fu

and then gave up halfway,

and actually creates that friction and drag across everything else that we do.

And finally, the third and biggest cost to unfinished projects is actually losing self-trust.

Repeatedly starting a new project and then not actually finishing it creates seeds for self-doubt and erodes your self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to achieve the things that you set out to do.

Psychologist Albert Bandura defined it as your confidence in your own ability to take the actions needed to reach a goal.

By eroding this sense of agency,

it leads us to limiting ourselves and then actually putting a ceiling on our potential in life.

Before we move on to the next section,

I actually have a completely free gift for you.

It's a three-day guide on how to integrate soft productivity into your life

so you can make both sustainable and also effective progress on the things that matter the most.

So if you'd like me to send it over for free,

I've popped a link down below in my description.

So now let's dive more into the neuroscience of why we don't finish what we start.

Most people never finish what they start because they just get completely bogged down and stuck in the perilous valley of despair.

Let me explain.

You might have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect,

which explains why beginners often feel overconfident and excited

because they don't actually know enough yet to recognize what they don't even know.

So this is known as the Rumsfeld matrix,

which is a way of categorizing information and knowledge about something.

There are two main axes, awareness and knowledge.

And so when we start out a project,

we actually don't have any awareness of even what we don't know.

We have so many information gaps about a new project

or a new goal that we don't even know what we need to learn about.

And this is exactly what the Dunning-Kruger effect is based on.

All of these unknown unknowns,

where when you're a total beginner,

you don't know what you don't know to the extent that you don't know enough to even be intimidated by it.

And you think it's easy and simple because you don't know any of the difficulties that exist.

The issue is that once you actually start a project and as you learn more,

you enter something called the valley of despair.

And that's because you go from unknown unknowns to having known unknowns,

where you have awareness of all the things that you don't know and all the things that you need to learn,

the skills you need to gain in order to complete your goal or project.

This here is the psychological moment where most people quit,

not because they lack the ability but

because actually the reality of how difficult the thing they're trying to do has actually caught up with the initial optimism.

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Additionally the initial dopamine flooding into their brains from the novelty of drawing something new has usually dried up.

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So there's a dip in motivation and also a realization

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that oh this actually is a bit harder than I thought and it's gonna take longer than expected.

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The only way out of this valley of despair is actually through.

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And so you dedicate and commit to actually going from known unknowns to actually known knowns and you level up.

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And so this is the cycle that everyone,

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including myself, will go through when we actually approach a new project.

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So the axes here are essentially progress,

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so how far through the project you are,

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and then how you feel.

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So this is like how motivated you are, how optimistic you feel.

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We all start out at this high peak where we feel

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so optimistic and this is also known as the peak of uninformed optimism.

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This is where you're like,

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oh my gosh, this goal is gonna be so exciting.

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I'm gonna get so in shape and I'm gonna learn all these languages

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and I'm gonna start this business and it's gonna be so good.

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I can totally do this.

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This is like, how hard can it be?

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I see all these other people doing it and everything feels

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so possible because you don't actually yet know what you don't know.

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Then after working on it for a little while comes the valley of despair.

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And this is where reality hits.

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The work is harder than expected.

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Progress is slower.

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You realize how much you still don't know.

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And then you also lose that initial dopamine rush of motivation.

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So this is where you start to think,

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maybe I'm not cut out for this.

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Maybe this was actually like not a great idea.

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Everyone else makes this look easy.

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What's wrong with me?

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Why can't, why is this not working?

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Maybe this isn't for me.

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Maybe it's time to quit.

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This is where the graveyard happens.

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If you actually decide to commit and push through the valley of despair and feeling like actually maybe actively pessimistic even,

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maybe even dropping below neutral,

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then you actually start to enter what's called the slope of enlightenment.

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You start gaining actual competence and you start to make small wins

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and you develop systems and progress starts to become visible again.

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And finally, you reach a plateau of sustainability.

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This is where you've really built out the systems.

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The project is working.

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It's a habit that you've built in and it feels automatic.

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You're no longer struggling through.

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You're in a sustainable rhythm.

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And this is where you really get to the next level and start to see the fruits of your investment.

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So before you think, how could I possibly make it through this valley?

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I always quit exactly around this like three to four week mark where the valley of despair usually hits the hardest.

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Do not actually despair.

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We have a three-part framework to actually give you a proper system to finish everything you start.

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By the way,

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if you're looking for a more frictionless way of getting out your best ideas onto the page

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and then actually following through with them,

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you might want to try speaking them instead of typing

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because the average person actually speaks four times faster than they can type.

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And that's where Whisperflow comes in.

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It's a voice-first writing tool that works on both Mac and Windows,

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which lets me speak into my computer instead of typing.

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And they're very kindly sponsoring today's video.

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So nowadays, whenever I'm drafting my newsletter,

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Letters to My Younger Self,

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scripting these videos, or working on any project that requires getting my thoughts down,

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I can just speak naturally into my computer.

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Flow does the transcribing and automatic tidying up for me,

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which means that all of my rambly thoughts get turned into sentences that actually flow nicely and make sense.

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And what I found particularly useful is that it works across all of my apps on my whole computer.

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So whether I'm in Notion,

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Google Docs, email, anything else, I can just speak.

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So if you want to try speaking more and typing less,

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I've put the link down in my description below

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and you can use my code Izzy for an extra 30 days completely free.

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Now let's get back into the video.

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Step one is choosing what to start and investing your attention skillfully.

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This is being wise about where to dedicate your energy and attention.

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When starting a new project,

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sometimes it's easy to go all in and think,

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oh my god, I'm going to buy all the equipment,

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I'm going to commit to like years of this gym membership

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and like really like send this only to then three

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or four weeks later realize that actually you're not really feeling anymore

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and so what I'd like to invite you to do is instead run tiny experiments.

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My friend Anne-Law actually wrote a whole book on tiny experiments

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and how to integrate them into your life and I love this concept.

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So when you're approaching a new project blocking your calendar a fixed amount of time to run a tiny experiment.

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For example

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when I was deciding on what new hobbies to start I

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thought okay I'm just going to sign up for literally just two sessions of Chinese calligraphy and see how that goes.

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Part of my work includes building out software and apps

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and on the engineering side a big part of starting a project is actually scoping the project,

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estimating how long each thing is going to take,

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what it's really going to require,

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and also beyond how hard or long it will be,

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also scope your enjoyment and fulfillment.

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How much are you actually enjoying this thing that you're doing?

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And ask yourself this key question,

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will I still care about this in week three when it feels boring and hard?

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And something I'd like to say here is that there's a paradox of optionality,

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where there's often a sense that maintaining optionality is a good thing.

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But actually if we optimize only for optionality in every area of life,

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this actually closes the doors to real success in any one area.

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Think of relationships.

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Optimizing for optionality is very useful in the early stages of dating,

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but to actually build something deep and real with someone you need to commit

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and invest and put a stake in the ground

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and decide to push through even in all the moments when it's not fun and easy.

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It's that commitment that brings true fulfillment and allows you to reach the next level.

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Projects are kind of similar.

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The early stage is optimizing for tiny experimentation and optionality,

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figuring out, okay, what's a good fit in terms of like how hard it is

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and how much I enjoy it and how much I care about it.

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But then once you've done that experimentation,

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choose and commit to facing the valley of despair and going all the way through it.

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This brings us to the second stage,

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which is facing the valley.

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And firstly, we're to talk about motivation.

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This actually all happens in the preparation in the early stages while you're riding that wave of motivation,

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dopamine, novelty, you're so excited,

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you feel the vision, you're like yeah we're gonna do it,

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combined with then the discipline to actually look at what you prepared for yourself.

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Let me explain.

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When you are excited and starting out prepare the following things for yourself.

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Record a video which is maybe just for you or journal about your vision for this project,

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share all of your excitement,

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write a letter to your future self which is the version of you in the valley,

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encouraging yourself to keep going because you know that the valley is normal.

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Literally every great thing that was built

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or learned required someone to go through the valley to the other side

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and so really remember that experiencing the valley is not necessarily a sign that you should quit because it's completely normal.

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The third part of this framework is systematization and this is

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because in the valley of despair there is both the crisis of motivation

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and also a crisis of actually like you need to actually start taking action steps

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and knowing what to do next

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and this is about taking your goal breaking it into milestones

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and for the current milestone

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that you're currently on breaking this down into more action points

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once you've got a bunch of these action points what i love to do is time block

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so i live by my calendar my google calendar is like my one source of truth for what i'm doing

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and what i'm working on and

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so blocking out time to actually do these action points

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and instead of setting the bar really high and expecting myself to always have a good day.

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Set your standard for a bad day.

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So what is a minimum viable session on this project that you can still choose to feel good about?

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By making it easier to actually succeed and feel good about yourself,

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this helps you to actually develop that momentum that you need to carry you through this season.

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Another hack is actually building in accountability systems.

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Psychologist Dr Gail Matthews did a study on 270 people around goal attainment and completion,

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basically trying to answer the question of what actually increases the chance that someone achieves the goal they've set out to achieve.

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She found

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that the two groups who are the most successful in actually

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completing their goals always involved an accountability buddy to keep them in check.

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So literally having a friend on board

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and keeping them in the loop on your progress is proven to increase your goal attainment.

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For example here group four sent their goals

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and action commitments to a supportive friend and group five sent weekly progress reports on top of everything that group four did.

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And the final thing that has helped me through so many valleys of despair is creating implementation intentions.

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Two leading psychologists, Golwitzer and Shiren,

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investigated over 90 studies and did a meta-analysis,

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finding that people who made if-then plans,

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which are also known as implementation intentions,

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had around a 68% better chance of achieving their goals than those who didn't.

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So from your goal, breaking down into milestones,

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breaking down into action points,

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for each of your action points,

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actually create an intention of,

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okay, let's say one of my action points is I want to go to the gym every single week on Monday,

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Wednesday, and Friday.

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And so then maybe what I do is I set an alarm to ring on Monday,

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Wednesday, and Friday at the time I want to go to the gym

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and it's like okay if the alarm rings then I go to the gym.

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So now that we've gone through the cost of our graveyard projects,

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the valley of despair, and how it's been sabotaging so many of our goals,

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and how to actually push through it,

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the next step is to take action.

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At the end of every video I always invite you to

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choose at least two action points to take forward from this video and write them down somewhere whether that's in the comments,

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in your emails, or in your journal,

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and whether that's let's say getting some of the free resources I've attached to this video

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or actually deciding on a project that you're going to take forwards and take through this framework,

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the important part is execution.

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If you enjoyed this video,

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feel free to hit subscribe and maybe follow me over on Instagram at Izzy Seely.

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And I think you'll enjoy this video over here where I

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walk you through a systems-based approach to realistically achieve all of your goals this coming year.

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As always, thank you so much for watching,

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take care of yourselves, 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 Not Waste Your Life (before it's too late) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Shadowing Practice: How to Not Waste Your Life (before it's too late) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Why practice speaking with this video?

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