Shadowing Practice: The Only 16 Minutes You Need To Control Your Mind | Andrew Huberman Motivation - Learn English Speaking with Video

The thoughts that you have right now, your ability to focus right now, is strongly driven by the inputs you received in the preceding hours and even days.

It's very, very clear that if you have a hard time getting into a bout of work or even staying focused,

there's a very good chance, I believe, that your breaks between work and what you were doing before work was too stimulating.

I'm a big advocator for boring breaks and I'm a big advocator for silence

before and after bouts of work for a couple of reasons.

Let's say you're trying to learn something or read a book or just do something that you're not reflexively doing.

You want to create this habit.

Doesn't matter if you're in an empty box.

If you are not good at clearing the slate before you try and focus, You're gonna have a very hard time for understandable reasons.

In fact, I'm amazed that anyone can think at all.

I'm amazed that anyone can focus at all.

I don't believe everyone has ADHD.

I think we've just not understood what thoughts are built up from.

And once you understand, you go, oh yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Am I supposed to walk around with my eyes closed and not take in any sensory input?

No. But am I supposed to take in an infinite number of novel items through this device?

It's also clear that reflection on what you were doing at some later time, just kind of like post-learning reflection.

Walking to your car, sitting on the plane for a second, thinking about a podcast you did earlier, or something you heard, or a discussion,

strongly reinforces the memories and the ability to work with the memories of new information.

I also believe that knowledge and gaining knowledge, not only learning, but learning and doing,

is what humans thrive on.

People who do the buy-in of learning a little bit about how something works, hopefully they learn something about cortisol and sunlight and these kinds of things,

it starts to make sense as to why you actually feel better when you feel more energized.

It's not a placebo effect.

When people don't have, when they have an uncomfortable feeling,

most people will turn that into self-destruction or destruction of others and people who are successful in life

transmute those uncomfortable feelings into self-support and creating things and supporting others.

Same feelings, divergent paths.

And envy, you know, Paul has said many times, is the enemy of all personal development.

If something bad happens to somebody, most of the time, unless we really dislike them, but even then, you kind of go, oh, that sucks.

You know, I really feel bad.

But if something good happens for somebody, You know immediately how you feel about that person.

But in all seriousness, I think that the bad habits thing involves, breaking bad habits involves a lot of top-down control.

Prefrontal cortex suppressing the activity of these hypothalamic and other subcortical neurons.

And how do we know this?

Well, if you want to summarize how the prefrontal cortex works, you'd say it's the shhh structure in the brain.

It's the no, don't reach for that cookie.

It's the no, don't say that thing.

It's the don't do the thing that your hypothalamus and other structures are creating some internal activation of the autonomic nervous system,

that kind of vibration of you want to do it.

It smells so good, it tastes so good, you just want to, I don't know why I did it, this kind of thing.

So that top-down control can be learned, and the beautiful thing, and this answers your question more directly,

the beautiful thing is that at some point that top-down control is not required anymore.

Unless you do the thing you're not supposed to do, and then it requires top-down control again.

The people, excuse me, who developed the algorithms for social media borrowed heavily from the casinos.

And I didn't realize that some years ago, slot machines were like a small fraction of the total casino income, maybe like 10, 20%.

Now it's 80%.

The kids would play video games for hours and hours and hours, and what they were playing for was novelty.

And so they switched the slot machines in casinos, on his suggestion, to instead of just spooling numbers and fruit or whatever it was,

because they're now electronic, you can get a near-infinite number of combinations of novel items,

and people will play while losing for novelty and think they're winning.

The brain is tricked into thinking that it's winning.

Everything now is gambling.

Social media is a form of essentially gambling for dopamine.

You know, likes and follows, markets, you know, I mean, my team, their team, the politics, I mean, a good friend has said,

you know, that all addiction is gambling.

You know, all addictions maybe are gambling in different forms.

I would say it all boils down to the same neural circuits of anticipation.

You know, the scary thing is he's known many gambling addicts that get addicted to the shame from losing.

Right?

I mean, everyone's got one, and so you gotta find the things that allow you to be adaptive and functional in life, not crater the things you've created,

and also to feel like you're in the hunt.

I mean, the hunt was the original gamble, right?

Hunting for animals, hunting for food, hunting for mates.

I think we need to really scruff ourselves and go, okay, I need to read this book.

I need to write this chapter.

I need to do this drawing.

And you'll notice once you drop into that trench, the brain has these attractor states.

It's like a ball bearing on a flat surface.

As you get more into a thought trench or activity trench, it's like that ball bearing drops into what's essentially a deep valley.

And it's actually hard to leave.

You'll notice you're walking out, and unless you pick up your phone, you'll still be thinking about that.

And this is how the brain works.

The brain is not working in step functions.

The brain, none of us are supposed to do the same thing all day long.

And none of us are supposed to be able to think and focus easily.

You just have to ride that sort of layering on of thoughts, going from board to sensory input to deeper and deeper.

And then work for about 90 minutes or a couple hours.

And then give yourself a little bit of time, pause, reflect.

And it doesn't mean you can't have a conversation, but people are texting in between.

It's unbelievable what we've done to hamstring ourselves against being able to think.

If you wanna be the best in your class at anything, best in class at pretty much anything, it's become so much easier now.

You just have to not constantly be projecting things out to the world or paying attention to what other people are doing.

But the reason I'm doing that, the reason I have my art projects, the reason I extended my book for a year to add more studies is because I like learning.

People with interests are interesting.

You know what's not interesting?

Other people's failures, other people's minor wins.

Like, there's nothing more boring than that.

But it hooks in the short term.

So social media, I think of as a very, we should go up to Clouds Rest sometime and hike Clouds Rest in Yosemite.

It's beautiful.

But there's this very narrow rock bridge out to the top.

And on either side, it's slide to your death.

Slide to your death.

And so I'm always doing, I don't get down on all fours, but it's precarious.

But it's beautiful when you get to the top and it opens up into a big flat spoon, you're above half dome, it's gorgeous.

I go there as often as I can.

But on either side, you fall to your death.

And I always think of the internet and much of life like this.

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On one side is the fall to your death that is numbing out by going online.

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And the other one is drama.

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So you're allowed to unfollow accounts that you're not learning from, or that are pulling you into either numbing out or drama.

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The drama piece is very serious because it gives the illusion that there's something meaningful there.

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But you realize this is just like, it's nothingness.

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When I mentioned this rock bridge, I mean, it's the visual I keep in mind

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when I'm trying to get into solid work or solid thinking or going on social media.

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Like there's a narrow band of very useful things to learn and participate in.

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So I do think that living life in a way where you're collecting data, so to speak, and you're understanding things is wonderful.

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But I guess what turned me off to this one particular

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drama in such a strong way was it's yet another example of something I've seen thousands of times before.

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There was no new learning for me there, except that humans are just being humans.

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And so at some level, there's at some point the novelty of life,

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the excitement of life, the enriching parts of life are about new experiences.

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Sometimes it's about experiencing the same thing and go, oh yeah, this is a general theme of me or of them or of life and understanding human nature.

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But at some point you're like, this is just yet another drama on the schoolyard.

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This is just, this reminds me of, and it's sometimes useful to make the parallels, this is like in junior high school when so-and-so said something about so-and-so.

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And so you go, there's no new data.

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This would be like running, you know, I published some papers, I don't wanna do those experiments again.

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Because, especially if I get the exact same result, right?

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Now if I get a different result, that's different, but I was seeing the same thing again.

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And so I think in order to develop a healthy relationship to social media, which is really a big slice of life now for many people,

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I think you have to be extremely conscious of like when it got you and why.

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I mean, you had a nightclub, you couldn't, you might have to respond to a catastrophe or something happening, but you can enjoy yourself there too, but you were there to work.

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You were able to navigate that chaotic environment.

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Ideas and insights about what's going on in the world or what might not be going on in the world.

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Thinking about your experiences is so critical to placing value on them, making them meaningful for you.

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What I'm not interested in is just an endless deluge of sensory input that goes nowhere, especially if it impedes other things.

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So a little bit more reflection, 10 minutes, one minute, Five seconds of just asking, did I remember anything you...

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Do I want to do that again?

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Find the thing that comes from outside that's going to change things.

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And you know, Lord knows I love caffeine and I love doing certain activities and learning.

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But at some point, you realize that the ability to...

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like withhold...

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like reflexes that you don't want to have like getting your temper sparked or something.

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You know, people say, no one can make you feel anything.

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Now you say, that's crazy, people can make you feel things all the time.

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You know, the ability to not speak from your first thought but your second or your third.

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You know, you hear these kind of cliches, right?

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But all of that ability comes from inside.

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It's from doing internal work.

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And it's kind of amazing how much we can accomplish, and I'm certainly not the first to say this, how much we can accomplish by just stopping and listening and going,

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wow, like my brain's crazy.

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It's like all these thoughts, all this stuff oh, too much input coming into this.

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Like, I've got to shut down this thought path.

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Also realizing that, you know, because these thoughts layer on themselves, or sensory memories layer on top and we feed our thoughts.

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I mean, Jenny Groh's description of how thinking works makes you think that, yeah, like if you're ruminating on something that really bothers you, you probably do want to distract yourself,

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unless you're really going to work on that thing.

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That you really can feed thoughts like embers and a fire.

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And it's important to not do that if it's not adaptive.

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At some point, you realize you just can't keep this going.

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And I think most entrepreneurs feel that way.

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At some point, you're just like, I can't do this.

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Ask oneself, okay, if I had total control, when would I naturally wake up?

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When would I naturally go to sleep?

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Like, what would be my preferred times to do that?

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And then whatever your wake up time is, to really treat that first three to six hours of your day as go time.

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And to do the things, bright light, hydration, exercise, caffeine, etc. that really push you into the day.

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But then really essentially doing all the opposite things that you do in the morning in the last, ideally four, but most people won't do that, last two hours of your day.

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Dim the lights.

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Caffeine, forget it.

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It should have halted that probably eight hours before sleep.

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Limit your hydration, right?

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Unless you're dehydrated, limit your hydration.

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You know, long exhale breathing, anything that can bring your cortisol levels down and bring your melatonin levels up,

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which is why we were so bullish about dimming the lights later in the day.

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And, you know, we were talking about the red lens glasses to block out short wavelength light.

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Cortisol's job is to deploy energy sources for your brain and body to be able to react to things, think and move.

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So, cortisol naturally goes up a bit during stress and it comes back again, provided you don't ruminate on that stress too much.

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On the stressor, that is.

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Rampant fragility that seems to be destroying your classroom or your country

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or the world with constant distraction and people not being able to focus

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or deal with a little bit of discomfort or resilience is not great.

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But from a selfish perspective, that widespread fragility is your competitive advantage.

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And if you're one of the people, you're not going to be able to change the world, certainly not before you've changed yourself.

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And that means that the first step is, ah, this is an opportunity for me.

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The reason you wake up every single morning, even if you have an alarm clock, is because of something called the cortisol awakening response.

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So if we just step back from a typical healthy 24 hours, it looks something like this.

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A couple hours before sleep, your cortisol is low.

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Your heart rate's low, you're calm.

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Hopefully it's dim in the room.

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You go to sleep.

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Your cortisol is then at its absolute lowest levels for the entire 24 hours.

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And by the way, this is the same time when melatonin, the sleepy hormone, is at its highest levels.

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After about four or five hours of sleep, and typically in that first four or five hours of sleep is when you get your most deep sleep, slow-wave sleep, non-REM sleep.

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Many people experience a transition into the sort of last third of their sleep for the night, and they tend to wake up around that time.

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Just not quite right and not quite fixed.

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All of that is to be said, I got inverse pretty privilege, which is you look fine on the outside, you're in good condition, you're a young dude that seems to still be performing at an okay level,

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But it's kind of the same as saying to Usain Bolt, oh you ran a sub 10, you must be great.

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It's like, yeah, but I should be running like 954s or 95s and I know where I'm supposed to be at.

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A lot of what determines total set number is how well

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you can like really direct the effort toward the muscle you're trying to target.

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So some people are exceptionally good at that, I think Dorian was.

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Other people, no matter how hard they try and curl with just their biceps and forearms and anterior delts, like it's going everywhere, you know?

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And so a lot of it is about being able to...

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But one thing he was very clear about is that as you get better at training, the neural component of contracting the muscles that you're trying to contract,

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you actually can get by with fewer sets because you're able to direct more intensity to those muscle groups.

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So over time, I found, yeah, I probably do somewhere between six and eight sets per muscle group.

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But with two, I can not slaughter the muscle, but I can get where I need to go.

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But I like training, so sometimes I'll do more.

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But yeah, Menser was great.

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And the number one thing is you don't want to listen to anyone else besides me.

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He told me, he said, he said most people in gyms are explicative morons.

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He said they're morons.

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He kept saying these people have the intelligence of a toad.

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And he would just like yell and yell.

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Menser, this is terrible advice.

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He said, get a jug of white wine and just have like a half mug of white wine.

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If you wake up in the middle of the night, you'll fall back.

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First of all, it doesn't work at all.

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Okay, so like hit and miss.

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Oh, listen, Mike was an extreme guy.

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But he actually said, he said, stay away from anabolics, which I did.

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He said, enjoy learning to train hard.

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Enjoy your training hard.

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He said, even though he wasn't a fan of cardio, like, get out and live life.

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And he said, and read really good books.

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 Practice: The Only 16 Minutes You Need To Control Your Mind | Andrew Huberman Motivation - Learn English Speaking with Video

Context & Background

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

What is the Shadowing Technique?