Shadowing Practice: How to say brilliant things when you speak - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Stop choking the hose.
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This is why you're not able to speak like you think
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and understanding this concept is going to change the way that you communicate for the rest of your life.
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Let me give you the 10 second version of this video for all of you attention junkies.
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Here it is in one sentence.
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When you reopen the childlike channel of flow, breath, body and mind, your ideas come out alive and brilliant.
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You become like a mad scientist, fully unchained.
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Now, I want to develop this idea of the hose and the mad scientist over the course of this video, of becoming more like a mad scientist when you speak.
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You ever see this mad scientist types who just go crazy talking about things, and there's almost this passion and excitement for what they say.
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The hair's all wild, they haven't shaved in three months, and they've been rotting in the closet for two months, and hopefully have produced some cure for cancer in the process.
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there's something happening there that most people never experience.
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There's a beauty in someone who is so unbelievably unconcerned about what others think
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that their message matters more than how they appear.
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And I don't mean physical appearance.
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I also mean verbal appearance, the package of how they say things and how they show up.
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And there's a connection made here between the mind and the mouth that cancels out awareness.
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It cancels out care for appearance.
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And that's a very pure state of communication.
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And that's something that most people just never experience.
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Or there are a select few topics in life that they talk about in which they encounter this.
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But if you follow what is in this video and what we're about to learn, you're going to be able to access this state more.
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And this is a secret, by the way, to be able to say brilliant things
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or speak articulately or have profound insights for you create lightning in a bottle.
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And this is a secret
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that many of the top people in the world know to be able to access parts of their mind
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that remain unavailable to most people.
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And it starts by relearning how to think like a child.
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I'm dead serious on this.
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I love explaining this to people.
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When you were a child, you're relatively stupid in the way that you communicated and thought.
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not stupid as being an idiot, stupid in the sense that you didn't know and you didn't care that you didn't know about certain things.
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When you were excited, you were sharing something like it was the only thing in the world that mattered.
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And there's a healthy amount of innocence and purity in this way of thinking
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that was something that we began to limit within ourselves as we grew older.
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As we grew older, we became more aware.
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And that circle that used to be about our idea
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and what we wanted to share expanded to included other things other people our awareness bubble became wider
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and we began to take in and process much more in our environment
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and this relationship is something
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that changed over time we began to make decisions based on
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the external other people what our senses tell us what our
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eyes see what our nose smells our ears here versus the
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internal what we feel we want to share what the content is inside of our mind
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so a common example is let's say a child decides to kick a ball
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and then he becomes aware of someone who's watching him do
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that with a frown their arms are crossed now
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that child stops they stop kicking the ball and they don't
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or they don't put in as much effort
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because now their awareness expanded to include what the other person
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is thinking about them judgment has now entered the chat
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and this happens all the time in what we share especially
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in high pressure scenarios where there's a very extreme external variable
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which could be maybe someone who intimidates us it could be the stuffiness in the room
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or something in our environment and it limits the effort
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that we put into our ideas
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because we're now taking into an account these external factors inside of the bubble instead of the childlike internal one
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and this is one of the main kinks in our communications hose
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and this is one of the three kinks
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that we're going to iron out in this video we're going
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to return back to this pure flow of information this is
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the end state the effortless stream of what's in our mind getting
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that into words and staying in that flow this is how you achieve brilliant insights
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because here's the truth
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that i've discovered with working with hundreds of people over the
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last year brilliance is your default they're already brilliant like you
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can already say clever things you have enough you have good
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ideas in your mind you simply don't know how to access the flow between mind
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and mouth there are too many bends in the hose
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that we have to unkink and fix
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and they're probably environments in your life where you might not
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have a problem doing this like we talked about earlier there are things
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that are of interest to you topics that you can discuss
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that mean something and typically for most people these are their hobbies
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or their faith or their belief system or their principles that they build on and live off of.
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And this brings us back more to our natural state when we talk about these things.
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And so when we talk about the bends and the hose
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and straightening them out and getting more to that natural creative state that you had many decades ago.
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If you're an entrepreneur, business owner or high performer
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and you like the concept in this video and you want it to be something that you do effortlessly under pressure, click the link below to apply for Elite Speak.
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Elite Speak is my signature program where you work with me directly to identify
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and overcome the three communication bottlenecks that are limiting your influence, authority, and room control.
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I'll see you on the call.
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So the first problem that's happening to you is that emotion expression cannot exist in a hyper-analytical state.
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So a common exercise that I give people is to try to become 50% happy.
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Become 50% happy.
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What happens? you can't become 50 happy
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when you begin to analyze emotion you take yourself out of the emotion out of the feeling
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and you enter into what we call head speak it's very structured it's very analytical conscientious thinking
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and this is why when we train speakers the number one thing
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that we focus on is getting out of your own head because overthinking is the deadliest of speech cancers
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brilliant insights they come from when a person has a playful relationship with ideas
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and playfulness is an emotional state
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that you have to let it almost overtake you in a way
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and this is what you had as a child
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and we have to return to this state
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and the first major characteristic of this child
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or this playfulness is a relaxed nervous system what has happened over time is
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that your body your nerves have developed to present
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and perform in a certain way and this has caused you to not make relaxation
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and calmness the norm for you it's almost like
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your nervous system has become calcified your playfulness has become calcified
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and when we talk about relaxing the nervous system we're talking about allowing yourself to relax
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and train that as your default
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and this takes time it's the analogy i often give is
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like going in for a massage you might feel better temporarily
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but you have to keep stretching
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and engage in the the physical therapy in order to maintain that state of relaxation and flexibility.
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And then 10 weeks later, you can touch your toes effortlessly.
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So how do we do this?
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What are we talking about here practically?
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Well, you can't retrain your nervous system in a day.
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What you do have control over is your breath and your body.
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And so one piece of advice
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that I would offer up is to become more aware of your breath and how it influences your speech.
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So when we watch back the interviews and meetings that our clients send us, the first thing I listen to is their breathing pattern.
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Specifically, where is their breath coming from?
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How loudly are they comfortable breathing?
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What is the rhythm of their breath?
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Is the breath coming from their stomach?
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Is it coming from like their lower ribs?
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Or is it coming from their chest or their throat?
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Where are they breathing?
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Are they breathing at the beginning of their sentence or mid-sentence?
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A lot of these things aren't conscious things we're aware of, but they reveal the full display of our nervous system.
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And when we understand this, we realize that we can actually influence nervous system in the moment with our breath
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and we can influence the way that we feel
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and how calm we are
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and how grounded we are by bringing attention to where we breathe how loudly we're breathing
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or where we're breathing in the sentence
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or how many words we're saying per breath and
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so one of the exercises
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that i want to give you i'm going to link the very best tutorial
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that i found on how to do this below this video is learning to breathe with your stomach
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or from your stomach
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learning to breathe from your your diaphragm filling your your belly with air
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and talking from that because that gives you more of a grounded quality and i'm not talking about
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increasing the influence in your speech or making it more impactful
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or authoritative like certainly that is a secondary outcome
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but this is more so that you feel better
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when you speak this is not about the external impact this is about how you feel internally
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and it's the most satisfying feeling in the world
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when you learn how to breathe properly this is what elite communicators know how to do
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and it just feels so right once you get
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that right the second thing
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that i'm going to encourage you to do is to increase the overall words per breath
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that you are comfortable with so what this looks like is reading through a paragraph
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and there's a document that has a series of parables
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that you can read through for our clients i'll link it below this video read through
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that hit record
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and see how long it takes you to get through with
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one breath most of you're probably not going to be able
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to go through four to five sentences without running out of air what you're going to find is
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that you're now aware of how much breath
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that you put on each word see what a lot of
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people do is they'll fill their lungs with oxygen they'll fill their stomach with air
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and they'll then lose 50 of that air and the first few words because they don't have good breath control.
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And so this is one of the reasons why run on sentences tend to happen or a person might
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get to the point where they're at the end of their sentence
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and they're just exhausted and exasperated because they've depleted a lot of the oxygen
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because they don't have good breath control because their words per breath are not as high as they could be.
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So this is something to train.
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This is something to measure and become aware of and just practice increasing that.
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If your words per breath are 50, maybe get it to 55.
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And there's a routine for this that I'll link below this video.
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So what this is helping us do is really develop a calm nervous system by learning how to breathe properly, by focusing on our words per breath.
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Or another way of thinking about this is practicing a soft, unashamed inhale.
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So you have to do something to either affect the exhale, which is the words per breath.
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How many words are you focusing on per breath?
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And this is something you do in a dedicated training practice, by the way.
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You set aside time, five minutes a day, and you just drill this.
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This is what we call a verbal workout.
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This is what we give our clients.
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This is not something that you need to be doing or should be focusing on when you're speaking.
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Do not be doing that.
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You don't want to overanalyze the playground while you're on the playground.
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But focusing on either the exhale with the breath, the words per breath, or the soft,
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unashamed inhale, which is just developing the ability to fill your lungs with oxygen and be comfortable with that.
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It's not supposed to be a statement.
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It's just something that you are doing for your own internal comfort.
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And this last way is the slow breath before a sentence.
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So this is focused on exhale, which is before you begin to speak, exhale slightly, let your breath out,
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and then begin to trace that exhale with your words.
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And what this allows you to do is create momentum and allows your first few words to be very smooth.
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And if you focus on these three exercises and just maybe spend one minute on each of these, what you'll notice is that your nervous system will be significantly calmer.
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you'll like the way that you sound
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and you'll have a very calm grounded playful quality to the way
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that you start speaking
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if you need more detail on these just ask me in the comment section
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and I'm happy to develop these further
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so what we're going to focus on next is how to get your body more comfortable
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and what I mean by that is be comfortable in the way
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that you express yourself physically so if we think back to
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that analogy of the child as a child we're relatively unafraid to like put our hands in the air or look silly.
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You never really thought about that as a child.
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When you put your hands in the air, how silly that is.
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There is a very silly part of us that many of us are afraid to show.
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And I'm not suggesting you put your hands in the air as you talk to your board of directors
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or deliver the Gettysburg Address.
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But what I want you to do next time that you speak is focus on incorporating what we call a personality break.
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So what a personality break is, it's little human leak into your communication.
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It's a little part of you that reveals your quirks early on.
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So you stop spending mental energy trying to hide part of who you are.
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So I'll give you an example.
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I trained a sales coach a little
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while ago to reduce overthinking in his videos by starting his
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videos by the simple action of drinking a glass of water on camera.
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Then he would do this right after he hit record.
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Then he would drink the water.
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And that action was unprofessional, but it's something he would do all the time and cut out.
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And that gave him the ability to now embrace his unprofessional self that didn't create a huge expectation to perform.
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And he was on full display exactly how he wanted to.
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Another example is the famous comedian and storyteller Rory Sutherland.
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If you watch his videos and his interviews, he always crosses his arms on his stomach, not for any special analytical strategic reason,
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but because that's just what is most comfortable to him.
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It's not professional, but that's his personality on full display.
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A common example that I often give, too, is someone who might have a bracelet or prayer beads.
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This is the illustration here.
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As you're speaking, you're doing something that's a little bit unconventional.
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You might be thumbing through beads or fiddling around with something that you have, a tassel, a trinket.
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It might be the way that you hold a pen.
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this is the idea of creating like a power object something
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that you know you you're not fidgeting with but it's natural to you
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that allows you to be very forward with a fundamental part of who you are
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and it's part of the way that you communicate
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and it allows you to bring more of you effortlessly into the way
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that you present it's bringing the physical realm into your presentations more so So what this is really helping with fundamentally is,
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this is kind of a call back to what we talked about earlier, the internal and the external.
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You're bringing the circle more back onto yourself, not in a selfish or egocentric way, but you're choosing to focus more on the impact
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that happens inside of the circle in your space and not so much on what's happening in the audience or the external.
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Because what happens, and the truth is with most people, is we're so easily influenced by what happens in the external.
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We might see a disapproving facial reaction, or someone says something negative, and now the mind kicks in.
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And so what this is really helping with fundamentally is this is kind of a callback to the internal
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and the external bubbles that we talked about earlier, where you're bringing more of the focus back onto yourself, not in a selfish or egocentric way, But you're choosing to focus more on the impact
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that happens inside of this circle and not as much on what's happening in the external circle.
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Because what happens is people are very easily influenced by what happens in this external circle.
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They might see a disapproving facial reaction or someone says something negative
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or swears at them and the mind kicks in and now they're overthinking everything that they're saying.
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And what you have to do is overpower that.
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And you can do that with that personality break, that little human leak, that part of you that's making itself front and center in what you do.
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For example, this coffee cup that I decided to include in this video because, well, I'm always drinking coffee in the morning and it's a very unprofessional thing to do in a video.
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I'm not doing this strategically.
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I'm just doing this because it makes me feel comfortable and it makes this environment feel more natural to me.
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So that's one way that you can do this.
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The other way to do this is to just get very comfortable with punching up the next five words.
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So what this looks like is over-egging your tone a little bit.
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And when you feel those little lethal thoughts, those external influencing marks entering into your mind, you feel yourself stepping into the external,
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and maybe you're not comfortable yet with the personality break, one way to bring it back to yourself and your messaging is to just punch up the next five words.
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Just raise your volume by 10 to 20%.
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You don't have to shout, but what you're doing is you're doubling the distance of what you're speaking to.
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It's a very simple way of thinking about it.
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So if you normally speak to someone five feet away, think about speaking to someone 10 feet away.
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And that's just causing you to be a little bit more aware of yourself, your expression, and what you're putting out there into the world.
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That's focusing on the internal.
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There's a spore that's happening for most communicators, especially the overthinkers, where they're stepping in and out between the internal and the external all the time during their speaking.
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They're evaluating what they say and how it's reflected in their environment, and then what they're trying to say.
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And this is happening multiple times within the span of a single sentence.
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And it's extremely exhausting.
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And this really surfaces the next challenge that I want to talk about, which is winning this battle of the mind.
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And this is a concept that we teach called developing good cognitive security
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so what good cognitive security is is it's the ability to defend your mental territory
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and defend your thoughts like there's a version of that child
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that we talked about earlier on the playground where before he even stepped onto the playground thinks about the spiders
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that are in there or the ant piles
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or the other bullies on the playground
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and never begin to even want to have fun and
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so what we have to be very protective of is the peace
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and the calmness that we bring to our conversational territory
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because there's a version of us that overthinks every potential threat and danger and becomes incredibly guarded
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and you can really get a sense for someone who is
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that way when they speak there tends to be a lot of buffering
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or hesitation or the inability to just go all in
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and talk about what is of most interest to them
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so the biggest exercise that i can give you the highest leverage one
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that i've seen most helpful is what we talked about earlier
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which is getting comfortable punching up the next five words
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and whenever you have one of those thoughts which can be something as simple as
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how is my idea coming across or i'm stupid for thinking about this or any of those self-sabotaging
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incredibly destructive thinking patterns whenever you find yourself engaging in those
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just force up the next five words
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and it's almost a way of turning up the volume on
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the radio to drown out the noises of the crowd it's
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a very practical way of helping yourself not give attention to what is going on in the external
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or what's going on upstairs in the mind that's preventing you from stepping on the playground in the first place
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and what this is going to help you develop is just good cognitive security
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and being very protective of the mental real estate that you have
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and your involvement in your thought in the moment your idea
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and not allowing that to be muddied by anything
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that might distract you from developing and pursuing the mission
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that you're on with your words and
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so that's really the third kink in this hose
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that we've straightened out and
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when you find this the hose fully straightened out you're not bounded by your breath your body
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or your mind you have control over those
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and you have the ability to set yourself up for success
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and what you find is it's an incredible unlock for your speech
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because it becomes boundless and you end up playing brilliantly with your ideas
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and that's what i want to encourage each of you to
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do is put this into practice play with your words and speak well hope this helps
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you’ll practice speaking with confidence and fluency by tapping into a "childlike flow"—a state where your ideas come alive without overthinking. You’ll learn to let go of self-judgment, speak with passion, and connect your mind to your mouth more naturally. Perfect for English speaking practice, this lesson will help you sound more articulate and brilliant, just like the "mad scientist" speakers in the video who focus on their message over appearance.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Choking the hose: Blocking the natural flow of ideas (e.g., "Stop choking the hose—let your thoughts come out freely!")
- Unchained: Free from restrictions (e.g., "When she speaks, she’s fully unchained, sharing ideas wildly.")
- Awareness bubble: The range of things you notice (e.g., "As we grow up, our awareness bubble expands to include others’ opinions.")
- Lightning in a bottle: Capturing something rare and powerful (e.g., "Great speakers create lightning in a bottle with their words.")
- Judgment has entered the chat: When self-doubt or others’ opinions start to affect you (e.g., "I was speaking well, but then judgment entered the chat, and I froze.")
Practice Tips
Use the shadowing technique to master the video’s energetic tone and pace. Start by watching a 10-second clip, then pause and repeat it immediately, mimicking the speaker’s passion and rhythm. Focus on "shadow speak"—matching not just the words, but the excitement in their voice. The video’s speed is conversational but lively, so don’t rush; let your voice rise and fall with the ideas. For extra practice, use a shadowing app to record yourself and compare it to the original. Remember: the goal is to let go of self-consciousness, just like a child. When you feel yourself "choking the hose," take a breath and remind yourself: your message matters more than how you appear. Keep practicing, and soon you’ll speak with the unchained brilliance of a mad scientist!
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 | haven't shaved · has now entered · i've discovered |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | someone who is · someone who intimidates · exhale, which is |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is let · are crossed · is focused |
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.