Shadowing Practice: i'm too self-aware and it's ruining my life - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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What if self -awareness isn't the superpower?
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What if it's actually the trap?
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I know exactly who I am.
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INFJ, anxious attachment, and a gram four.
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I have a notes up full of observation about my own patterns, my own thoughts, my own feelings towards my thoughts.
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Journal entries from two years ago that describe the same problems I journaled about last week, but in better prose because I've had more practice describing them.
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I've gotten so good at narrating my own dysfunction that it's become a kind of a skill, a talent almost.
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I can tell you exactly I'm stuck in detail with references.
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And the scariest part isn't that self -awareness didn't work, it's that it felt like it was working.
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Every new insight felt like a step forward, every framework felt like a key, and I was collecting keys.
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I had a whole ring of them, beautiful shiny keys, and I never once tried to actually open the door.
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And apparently so is everyone else.
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Somewhere along the way, self -awareness became the most praised trait on the internet.
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People announced the red flags like they're reading a resume.
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They say that I'm anxious, avoidant, attachment, disorganized, attachment, I'm a recovering people pleaser, which got me thinking.
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What if self -awareness isn't the superpower?
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What if it's actually the trap?
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I think there is one culprit to this problem.
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BuzzFeed personality quizzes.
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Somewhere around 2013, BuzzFeed looked at the human race and asked, what if they could find out what type of bread they are?
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And by giving the masses the power to discover which Gilmore girl character matches their communication style, they accidentally unleashed something.
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The belief that you can be categorized.
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But BuzzFeed personality quizzes were really just the gateway drug.
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Because once you accepted the premise that your entire inner world can just be categorized by one quiz, now you're ready for the actual hard stuff.
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First came Meyer Briggs, 16 personalities, four little letters to find who you are.
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And I felt like people started using almost these personality quizzes as an excuse for their behavior.
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Like, oh, I'm an INTJ, so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And they took these personality quizzes as like fact, as this is just who I am.
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And here's the thing, I feel like I've gone back on this for
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so many times in the past few years on the legitimacy of personality quizzes.
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Like, can you truly be objective about a I think there's always some sort of subjectivity to that.
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Even if you're just taking this quiz and no one's seeing the results, you want to be someone.
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Do you know what I'm saying?
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I don't know if there is necessarily an objective truth of what your personality is, and even if there is, I don't know if you are the right person to evaluate that.
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Anyways, that's a whole other tangent.
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Like, I feel like I've taken the Myers -Briggs so many times, and I've gotten one consistent result, I would say, like, majority of the time, but there are some times I would just get a totally random result, and it's just maybe because my mood is,
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like, weird on a random, like, Friday.
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quizzes.
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I feel like the attachment styles got really popular because it didn't just tell you who you are, it tells you who you are in love.
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Anxious, avoidant, disorganized, secure.
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No one is secure by the way.
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Suddenly every failed relationship got their own Wikipedia page, every situationship got their own diagnosis.
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You're not getting ghosted, you're just activating someone's attachment system.
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Which sounds a lot better than he's just not that into you.
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But look, none of these frameworks are actually completely useless.
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Some of them are genuinely insightful, and tell you a lot about your personality and other people that are similar to you.
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But I think somewhere along the way, we stopped using them as tools and started using them as identities.
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The framework became the thing.
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Knowing your type became a stand -in for knowing yourself.
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And knowing yourself became a stand in for actually doing anything with that information.
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We've built an entire personality around having a personality type.
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And the more categories we connected, INFJ, Scorpio, eldest daughter, HSP, the more legible we became to ourselves and the more explained that we actually felt.
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But explained isn't the same as understood and understood isn't the same as changed.
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It's like we organize the closet.
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Every issue, every wound, every pattern has its own neat little tidy box.
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up in here.
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It's very self -aware, but we have yet to actually leave the house.
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So why does it actually feel so good to be labeled?
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Because it really does.
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Like the first time I read my Myers -Briggs description, I was just like, I feel so seen.
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It's so funny because it's like this paragraph that was written for probably like 200 million people.
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And I was like, oh my God, This is me.
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The thing is, the label doesn't tell you anything new.
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It just gives you permission to be who you always were.
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I've always been quiet, but introvert makes it sound less of a problem
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and more like something that's just inherent in my own architecture.
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I maybe always felt things too much, but highly sensitive takes that from a personal deficit to just a neurological feature.
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It's essentially just self -acceptance through classification, which is why it's so addictive.
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One label and you feel seen, two labels and you feel understood, By your fifth, you basically just assemble like an Ikea version of your personality.
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And the best part of this is it doesn't require anyone else.
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It doesn't require someone else's input.
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We figured out how to feel known without the inconvenience of actually being known by someone, which is incredibly efficient.
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and also Pretty sad.
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Bye.
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People much smarter than me have been thinking about this for hundreds of years.
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There's this writer named Fernando Pessoa.
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He was Portuguese.
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He lived in Lisbon in the early 1900s.
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His day job was just a commercial translator.
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But Pessoa had a problem.
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He was so aware of himself.
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He was constantly observing his own thoughts, his own feelings, his own reaction to his feelings, so much so that he couldn't figure out which version of himself was the real one.
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So he did something a little bit cuckoo.
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He started inventing people.
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- Like full people with different writing styles, different philosophies, different biographies, over 70 of them actually.
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He basically ran a population inside his own head because one wasn't enough for all the observing that he was doing, which honestly sounds like a mental health problem and it probably was,
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but it's also a very extreme example of what self -aware people experience.
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Because Pessoa landed on this observation that I've been thinking about for so long, and I'm gonna be paraphrasing here, but he said, "The moment you start observing yourself,
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you split into two." There's the you that's living, and there's the you that's watching you live.
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And here's the problem: these two people can never be the same person at the same time.
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Like, think about the last time that you were in a conversation and you were monitoring how you were coming across.
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Were you actually in the conversation fully present or were you just like above it narrating, focusing, fixating on how you are sounding,
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how you're speaking, saying like fuck like I'm being too quiet right now, it's so awkward, like does my breath smell bad?
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That's like the split right there.
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You left the moment to observe the moment and by the time that you fully come back, the moment is over.
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And if you do this long enough, you spend years monitoring, observing, curating this version of yourself, you stop being able to tell which version is actually you.
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The one that is living and the one that is watching.
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The feeling or the analysis of the feeling, the person or the personality type.
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But Soho wrote that he'd become a series of feelings.
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that belonged to no one.
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Which I feel like is a pretty good description of being too self -aware.
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You watch yourself too closely, you almost become a performance for yourself and the performance has become the person.
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So, Pessoa diagnosed the disease, but he didn't really offer a cure.
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He mostly just wrote about it under 70 different names and then kind of just died in relative obscurity.
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It's poetic, but.. not super actionable so for the cure i had to go to someone else Carl Jung.
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Carl Jung is a Swiss psychologist and he's a very common sub -sac screenshot.
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He basically studied a lot about self -awareness, the soul, about how people process different emotions, just a lot about psychology.
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He's pretty famous.
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But he had this concept of the shadow.
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Your shadow is everything about you that you decided isn't you.
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It's not just like the obviously bad stuff like your pettiness, your anger issues, the fact that maybe you rank every person that you see.
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It's also the stuff that scares you.
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The ambition you won't admit to because you're scared that you're just going to fail.
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The anger that you convince yourself, you process.
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It's every quality that you ever looked at and was like, That's not me.
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Like, I don't want to be that person.
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But it is you, except you're just not really good at looking at it.
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It's basically your emotional baggage drawer.
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Young argues that there's a difference between recognizing your shadow and integrating it.
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And most people, the smartest, the most pretentious, the most well -therapized people, they often get stuck at just recognizing it.
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Because recognition is the fun part, right?
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Recognition is a personality quiz.
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Recognition is being able to say, I'm anxious attachment.
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I'm a Scorpio.
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It's the moment that you say, I know that I do this at dinner.
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You're so emotionally intelligent and you're so self -aware.
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Recognition is a performance.
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Integration is a part that nobody talks about because integration is not a caption.
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Integration is not an insight.
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It's not a revelation.
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It's actually calling that friend that you had a little awkward standoff with six months ago.
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Instead of just writing and journaling why you're so bad at maintaining close friendships.
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It's deciding to actually talk to someone at a party and not let your introversion get the best of you.
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It's essentially just letting people see the person behind the performance.
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Young basically argued that you can't think your way into becoming a better person.
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And for all us overthinkers out there, that's quite unfortunate news.
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Like, he went a little bit further than this.
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He basically just observed that anything pushed to its extreme becomes bad.
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Courage becomes recklessness.
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Confidence becomes delusion.
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And self -awareness pushed far enough becomes self -imprisoned.
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The tool becomes the cage.
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Because at some point, you're reflecting not to learn anymore, you're reflecting to control.
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You're monitoring every thought that you have so nothing catches you off guard.
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You're analyzing every interaction so you're never vulnerable.
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You're essentially just staying in the observation deck of your own life because it's safer up there.
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You can see everything.
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you'll never be not prepared.
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but you're not actually in anything.
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Now this is the part where I have to stop talking about dead psychologists and just start talking about my own life.
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Because I am exhibit A.
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I am an overthinker.
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I love to introspect.
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I love to mull over topics over and over again and just find patterns and talk about why I'm feeling this way.
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Like, I literally just have friends where we meet up like once a month and we just talk about...
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What we're feeling and why we're feeling those things
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and those conversations are
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so interesting to me I feel like I've gotten to a point where like I just like talk and talk and talk.
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I know all my flaws.
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I know like all what makes me tick.
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I know why I'm not the person I want to be yet, but it's just so hard.
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to like kind of break out of that because talking about it, introspecting is an easy part, but actually doing something about it,
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changing it, kind of scary.
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It's kind of scary, guys.
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Like, I feel like when I've gone through periods where I felt like I'm in a rut
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I usually know why I'm in a rut but actually having agency and putting my life in control
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and not just like viewing my life go to shit, but actually stepping in and doing something and veering it off from the shit I don't know,
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I feel like it takes a lot of effort to do that.
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It takes a lot of willpower, it takes a lot of discipline. But...
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Essentially what I'm trying to say, is
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I think a lot of people use self -awareness as a coping mechanism because I have
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I have for a really long time.
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I thought that being able to diagnose my own dysfunction was the end goal, but it really is just a starting point.
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And the scariest part isn't just that self -awareness didn't work, it's that it felt like it was working.
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Every new insight I made about myself felt like a step forward.
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Every framework felt like a key, every personality test felt like a new revelation.
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And I was just like collecting keys beautiful shiny keys, I had a whole keychain of them, but I never use the keys to open any doors.
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That sounds like so much fun.
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So the thing that I think I'm starting to understand is that self -awareness was never the actual destination.
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It was supposed to be the door.
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And I've been standing in this doorway for years, admiring the hinges, looking at the door frame, looking at the little dust in the corner,
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and somehow just never walk through it.
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I think that's like the uncomfortable truth about all this the personality tests therapy, the talking, the rumination, the overthinking,
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the entire self -awareness industrial complex, none of it was ever going to just be enough.
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because at some point you have to do the thing that no framework can do for you.
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You have to be the person.
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I know exactly who I am.
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And maybe that was never the point you
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “i'm too self-aware and it's ruining my life”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: self, personality, felt, awareness. This video has 188 sentences and 2425 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:16. The speaker talks fast, about 198 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| quiz noun | /kwɪz/ | A competition in the answering of questions. |
| attachment noun | /əˈtæt͡ʃmənt/ | The act or process of (physically or figuratively) attaching. |
| observe verb | /əbˈzɜːv/ | To notice or view, especially carefully or with attention to detail. |
| anxious adjective | /ˈæŋkʃəs/ | Nervous and worried. |
| observation noun | /ˌɑbzɚˈveɪʃn̩/ | The act of observing, and the fact of being observed (see observance) |
| insight noun | /ˈɪnsaɪ̯t/ | A sight or view of the interior of anything; a deep inspection or view; introspection; frequently used with into. |
| avoidant adjective | /əˈvɔɪdənt/ | Exhibiting avoidance; avoiding something. |
| categorize verb | /ˈkætɪɡəˌɹaɪz/ | To assign a category; to divide into classes. |
| diagnose verb | /ˈdaɪ.əɡˌnoʊs/ | To determine which disease is causing a sick person's signs and symptoms; to find the diagnosis. |
| disorganized adjective | /dɪsˈɔːɡənaɪzd/ | Lacking order or organization; confused; chaotic. |
| introspect verb | /ˌɪntɹəˈspɛkt/ | To engage in introspection. |
| narrate verb | /ˈnæɹeɪt/ | To relate (a story or series of events) in speech or writing. |
| overthinker noun | One who overthinks. | |
| superpower noun | A sovereign state with dominant status on the globe and a very advanced military, especially the United States or formerly the Soviet Union. | |
| dysfunction noun | /dɪsˈfʌŋk.ʃən/ | A failure to function in an expected or complete manner. Usually refers to a disorder in a bodily organ (e.g. erectile dysfunction), a mental disorder, or the… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| stand in for verb | To replace; to act as a double or substitute for. |
| step forward verb | to take one or more steps forward, especially in response to a request for identification |
| come across verb | To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition. |
| come back verb | To return to a place. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| go back on verb | To be treacherous or faithless to; to betray. |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- What if self -awareness isn't the superpower?
- What if it's actually the trap?
- Do you know what I'm saying?
- It's like we organize the closet.
- It's also the stuff that scares you.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | have been thinking · I've been thinking · I've been standing |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've had · I've gotten · I've gone |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | can be categorized · be categorized · be labeled |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | classification, which is · someone, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 72 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, I've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: anxious /ˈæŋkʃəs/, observation /ˌɑbzɚˈveɪʃn̩/, dysfunction /dɪsˈfʌŋk.ʃən/, revelation /ˌɹɛv.əˈleɪ.ʃən/, actionable /ˈæk.ʃə.nə.bəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: categorize /ˈkætɪɡəˌɹaɪz/, disorganized /dɪsˈɔːɡənaɪzd/, psychologist /ˌsaɪˈkɑl.ə.d͡ʒɪst/, revelation /ˌɹɛv.əˈleɪ.ʃən/, actionable /ˈæk.ʃə.nə.bəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like quiz, attachment, observe.
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.