Shadowing Practice: If You Only Watch One Video Today, Make It This One - Learn English Speaking with Video

This video found you because you think that you're ready for a change.

But what if you believing that you need to be ready is the exact thing that's keeping you stuck?

Here's what's going to happen to 80% of the people that are watching this video.

Okay, you're gonna nod along, you're gonna feel motivated for a couple days, and then you're gonna go right back to whatever you're doing before.

The other 20%, they will actually do what's uncomfortable and they will do the work that I'm about to share.

So if you want to create real lasting change, these six mindset shifts have found you at the right time.

Here's the first piece of truth that's gonna piss off 90% of people in the self-help industry.

Real change occurs when you can define what you are willing to give up to get what you want.

The self-help industry does not want you to change.

They want you to stay broken, so you keep buying their .

Okay, so here's what's messed up.

Most think that transformation means adding more.

You need more habits, you need more discipline, you need more routines, you need more that you gotta buy from people, right?

But every person I know who's actually changed their life started by becoming really, really good at one thing, saying no to themselves.

Here's the test.

Are you trying to add more to your life?

More success, more relationships, more variety, more to do, more to keep you busy?

Because people who actually change don't start by asking, what new thing should I do?

They actually ask by saying, what bull am I going to give up?

And that is why most people stay stuck.

I wasn't willing to kill off the old habits and identity that I was addicted to.

And I couldn't sustain anything new because I was adding more to my plate, but I was not taking out the things that were dragging me down.

Look at it from a dieting standpoint.

You say, I'm gonna eat more healthy foods.

Great, but if you don't stop freaking binge eating at night, it doesn't matter.

You don't stop the sugar addiction, then who cares if you're eating lettuce during the day?

Let's be real, and I have been there by the way.

Okay, it doesn't matter that you're eating healthy.

It negates itself.

Maybe you're not gonna gain weight, but you're certainly not gonna look better overall.

You're certainly not gonna feel better about yourself.

You're certainly not gonna get the body you want.

Your progress is blocked by what you refuse to let go.

What most people miss is that being ready for change is not adding more motivation.

It's about removing all the reasons to stay the way that you are.

So ask yourself, have you removed enough freaking garbage from your life to make the new habits actually stick?

But here's the thing about identity and about change that nobody tells you, and it's going to make you uncomfortable.

The biggest lie keeping you stuck is the belief that this is just who I am.

Here's the thing, your identity is not fixed.

It's built from stories, from habits, from emotions that served an old version of you.

You cannot grow into your future self while clinging to your past self.

I used to, this is crazy for people who know me, I used to say, I'm not a morning person.

Like it was like written in my freaking DNA or something.

Right?

And then that phrase kept me sleeping in until 10 or 11 and feeling like about myself.

Because I'd wake up and I didn't have time to work out, eat healthy, journal, do all these things.

I told myself, I'm just not built for discipline.

And you know, I'm more of a soft, empathetic type.

I don't know if I could run a business.

It's crazy to think now.

Now, the day that I realized that these were not facts about me, they were just excuses that I had dressed up all pretty as personality traits.

That's when everything shifted for me.

I'm not a morning person was just a story that I told myself to avoid the discomfort of waking up freaking early.

And so what I realized over time and from my own personal experience is that a lot of people, a lot of self-help, a lot of even therapy,

it keeps you stuck in victim mode by reinforcing these identity stories.

Oh, here's why when you say this is just who I am and here's why you do this and why you, why does it matter?

When you keep saying, this is who I am, this is why I am this way, you're not healing, you're not getting better, you're cementing and reinforcing the old stories that you made up.

And by the way, 50% of the things that we remember aren't even freaking true.

So you might be reinforcing an identity that isn't even real off things

that didn't even happen or didn't happen the way that you remember.

And so in dismantling our old identities, we need to do these things.

One, remove the excuses we don't even realize we're making up because they protect our ego.

Two, remove the things we've been avoiding, even if they're scary.

By avoiding them, we avoid success.

And three, identify the stories that we tell ourselves to justify staying stuck.

If you want real change, you need to identify the identity, the stories, the habits that are keeping you small.

It's what you're used to, it feels safe, it feels comfortable, it feels cozy.

But the dangerous part is that oftentimes your friends, your family are actively sabotaging this transformation that you wanna make and they don't even know it.

Here's where most people lie to themselves and it's where it gets really brutal, okay?

You are not stuck because your goals are too big.

You are stuck because you're being dragged down by the habits and patterns that make that goal impossible.

When I made the biggest change in my entire life, it wasn't because I suddenly got more motivated.

It's because I got really freaking honest about what my goals were and where I was at at that point in time.

And it looked bad.

And I'm gonna be really honest with you guys.

Like I have no shame in saying this.

I cared way more about looking like I was somebody who had their together than actually having my together.

So when I had to change, I had to admit myself that I wanted to be successful more than I wanted to stay comfortable,

that I wanted to build something meaningful more than I wanted to avoid the risk of failing publicly.

And so you need to realize

that you have to care more about becoming the person

that you want to be than protecting the person that you have been.

Because to a lot of people, it's gonna look like change, they're gonna question what you're doing, they're gonna say, oh, what about this, what about that?

You're not gonna be perfect, so people are gonna say it's not working, but that is actually what real change or real readiness looks like.

When who you are is compatible with what you want, the execution will become automatic, the effort is going to feel obvious to you,

and it's not going to feel like this massive thing that you have to force because there's compatibility.

So here's what you want to do.

One, identify your new goals.

Two, identify your new way of operating.

And then three, most importantly, the things that you're no longer going to do.

And that's actually where you want to start, is you want to start with the things you're no longer going to do.

But now here's the part that nobody wants to hear.

Number four, there is no quick fix.

The fantasy of a quick fix is why it doesn't work and why the industry keeps selling it to you.

Because we all want it.

I still want it.

When people tell me, I'm like, I would like that.

I would like a quick fix.

That sounds great.

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But real change requires sacrifice and there's no quick fix for that.

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We all want the fantasy where we snap our fingers and we are instantly where we want to be.

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There's no fear, there's no resistance and everything is aligned with our goals and we feel excited about the challenge.

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Like I get it.

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I was there too.

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I used to write long messages of all the things I was going to do and then I, guys I can still remember, I was like yesterday, I would always be like okay but I'll start Monday.

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Like I don't know why but I was always like Monday will be different.

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Like on Monday I'm going to do all those things and every week I'm going to do this new thing.

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I'm I'm gonna be this new person.

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And I would add more into my plate of all the things I was gonna do, but I never did less of the things that made it hard.

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And then by Wednesday, I was back to the same shit I was doing on Sundays.

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Like Monday and Tuesday would be like pretty good.

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And then by Wednesday I was like, oh, this is kind of hard.

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I don't really know if I wanna do this anymore.

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The truth is that's gonna make a lot of people feel uncomfortable is like real change.

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I mean, I'm gonna say it takes 18, 24 months minimum.

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This is not 30 days.

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This is not 60 days.

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This is not like a stint on Love Island.

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First six months, you're fighting your old patterns.

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Next six months, you're gonna be building new ones.

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And then in the second year, it starts to feel automatic.

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Now, why is that?

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It's because if you want it to go faster, you would have to do it faster.

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And this sounds ridiculous, but like you would have to do more of the new things faster to make it feel automatic faster.

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But that's just not reasonable for a lot of people.

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Like you might not be able to do all those things every day.

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You have all these other things in your life.

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And so being realistic, we're looking at two years.

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Now, why does that fantasy persist that we can just and then just change on time?

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Because it costs nothing to think about.

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You don't have to sacrifice anything.

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You don't have to let go of parts of yourself.

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You don't have to admit that the way you've been operating is a freaking problem.

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You think that's scary.

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You think changing is scary.

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What's terrifying is being the same person in five years that you are right now.

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So ask yourself this, are you still subscribing to the quick fix fantasy?

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Because if you are, we need to let that go.

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Now this next part will separate you from everybody else watching this video.

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The readiness checklist.

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Okay, if you're still watching, you're not just a viewer, you are somebody who's probably ready to do the work, okay?

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And that puts you in the top 5%.

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I've helped hundreds of entrepreneurs make this shift.

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And the ones who actually do this work versus the ones who don't, the difference is night and day, okay?

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If you can check these things off, you're ready for a change.

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If not, you're probably still lying to yourself.

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So this is not a motivation checklist.

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This is self-evaluation.

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Just like we use scaling frameworks to diagnose where a business is in the growth process, this reveals whether you've done the work required for permanent change.

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Let's call this a readiness checklist.

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One, I am no longer willing to defend my old patterns.

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I'm giving them up.

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It feels scary, because I don't know what I'm gonna do instead, but I'm done defending what doesn't freaking work for me.

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Two, I'm emotionally calm.

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Not because things are perfect, but because I've realized the truth, that the underlying anxiety about something bad happening, I have looked at it head on and I am ready to feel it.

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I'm not gonna run from it.

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I'm not expecting it's not gonna be there.

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I'm ready to feel it.

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Three, you don't think needing to change makes you weak.

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You do not have shame about wanting to change and be somebody different, because shame makes change very hard because then we try to hide things.

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Four, you're okay with having ambiguity around your identity.

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You're in flux.

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Are you this person?

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Are you that person?

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You're okay with not knowing and it being uncertain and messy.

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And it's fine.

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Life's not perfect.

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Five, you have dropped the idea that this should be easy.

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You have stopped Googling and asking ChatGPT how to change all day.

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Why don't I change, chat master?

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Why am I not able to?

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You've stopped.

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This is not going to be easy.

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It's not going to happen overnight.

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And AI ain't going to do it for you.

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I dare you to screenshot this checklist and honestly assess yourself.

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And if you do, go ahead, comment and let me know where you land land.

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Are you ready?

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But if you can't check these off, you will be fighting an uphill battle, my friends.

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I promise you, each one of these things is required for somebody to change, okay?

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And remember, change isn't a one-time event or an overnight miracle.

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Change is a process.

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So here's the final truth that nobody talks about.

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Change is repetitive.

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Once you've gotten rid of the stuff that's keeping you stuck, change becomes about one thing and one thing only, and that is repetition.

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So when I started my journey, when I had been arrested six times, I was drinking, I was doing drugs, I was overweight.

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I did the same freaking uncomfortable stuff every day.

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And I wrote down three things I was avoiding every day.

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Three things that made me feel uncomfortable every day.

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And then I'd be like, okay, how do I tackle the hardest one first?

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But no matter how small it may seem to somebody else, whatever it was that I wrote down, I was scared or I was nervous about doing it.

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And so it made a difference to me.

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And here's the thing, those things that I wrote on that list, I still do most of them today.

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Because in order to attain change, you have to set a new set of behaviors, right?

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But in order to keep that change, you do the same things, you just don't stop.

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So the work never stops.

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It just gets less dramatic because you lose all emotional charge to it.

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Like for me, it used to be like walking into a gym and just being in workout clothes is embarrassing.

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Now it's like, gotta go to the gym.

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Like I gotta keep what I worked for, right?

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And so change doesn't feel magical.

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It feels boring, it feels mundane, and then one day it's just automatic and you just realize that there's no going back.

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It's about day in, day out work.

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It's not about some crazy spike or some linear thing.

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If you haven't shed the old beliefs and the BS about your identity that's keeping you back, it's never going to feel easy.

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Here's the test that I promised.

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Close your eyes.

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Imagine it's one year from today.

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If you change nothing, you keep the same patterns, the same excuses, the same identity, the same habits.

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Where do you see yourself a year from now?

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Now imagine a year from now.

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What if you actually who did the work?

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What if you subtracted the BS?

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What if you dismantled all those limiting identities you put on yourself?

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And what if you put in those boring mundane reps that got you to be the person you wanna be?

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If imagining the first scenario makes you feel sick and the second one makes you feel alive, you might be ready for change.

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Now, if both scenarios make you feel the same, you're probably not ready yet because I don't understand that.

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Come back to this video when staying the same feels more painful than changing.

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So here's what I ask of you guys.

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I want you to comment below with one thing that you're willing to give up this week.

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Not something you want to add, but what are you going to cut out to be the person you want to be?

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Now, if you're part of the 20% who will actually do the work, do not forget to subscribe.

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You are my people.

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And I am happy that you found this video that when you needed it the most.

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So, if you want to become someone more confident on your journey, you can check out my next video on how to become dangerously confident.

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Why Practice Speaking with This Video?

If you want to learn English with YouTube while boosting your confidence and fluency, this video is a goldmine. Its conversational tone and relatable topics make it perfect for the shadowing technique—a proven method where you repeat phrases aloud right after the speaker. By "shadowspeaks" (mimicking the rhythm and tone), you’ll master natural speech patterns and build the habit of thinking in English. Plus, the motivational content keeps you engaged, turning practice into a daily win!

Grammar & Expressions in Context

The video is packed with practical phrases to add to your toolkit. Here are 3 key ones:

"What if you believing that you need to be ready is the exact thing..." This uses a gerund phrase ("you believing") as the subject, a common structure for emphasizing ideas. Practice saying it to sound more confident in complex sentences.
"Real change occurs when you can define what you are willing to give up..." The "when" clause here connects a condition to a result. Repeat it to master cause-and-effect storytelling.
"Your progress is blocked by what you refuse to let go." This passive voice structure ("is blocked by") is useful for talking about obstacles. Mimic the speaker’s emphasis on "refuse" to add emotion to your speech.

Common Pronunciation Traps

Watch out for these tricky words to nail your shadow speech:

"Transformation" – The speaker shortens the "a" sound in "trans" (like "tranz"), not "trans" (like "trainz"). Repeat it slowly to avoid over-enunciating.
"Binge eating" – The "g" in "binge" is soft (like "jin"), and "eating" has a long "e" (not "eat-ing" with a short "i"). Mimic the flow to sound natural.
"Identity" – The stress is on the second syllable ("i-DEN-ti-ty"), not the first. Use the shadowing technique to copy the speaker’s rhythm here.

With this video, you’re not just learning English—you’re building the skills to speak with clarity and confidence. Start "shadow speak" today, and watch your progress soar!

Grammar in this video

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

Structure	In the video
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to say · used to write · used to be
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	we've been avoiding · you've been operating
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have found · have been · I've helped
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was addicted · is blocked · is not fixed

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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

Shadowing Practice: If You Only Watch One Video Today, Make It This One - Learn English Speaking with Video

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