Shadowing Practice: These 8 Books Changed My Life (and they might just change yours too) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

Hey guys, so today I'm going to be talking about eight of the most life-changing books

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Hey guys, so today I'm going to be talking about eight of the most life-changing books

that I've ever read in my life.

I've read over a thousand books in my lifetime so far,

but if I really had to whittle it down,

these are some of the top picks that genuinely changed the trajectory of my life during those eras where I read them.

So I'll be breaking this down in terms of four key eras of my life that I've gone through so far.

We'll get all the way back to my origins when I started on YouTube as a Cambridge medical student,

literally filming in my university student room,

to the next era of being a YouTuber and content creator,

the next era of being a founder,

CEO and business owner and the final most recent era

which is the era of being a wife and mother and balancing all of the business stuff as well.

Oh and also I've created a completely free guide with all of my top picks for books

and also a couple of bonus ones

that I didn't have time to include in this video to help you to pick

which books actually could be the thing that really bends the curve for you at this point in your life.

So if you'd like to check it out, it's totally free.

I'll leave a link down below in the description.

So without further ado, let's dive right in.

So let's start with the wife and motherhood era.

The first book that had the biggest impact on my relationship with my now husband is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

The core thesis that Rosenberg tries to get at is

that all human behavior stems from us trying to meet our core needs.

So things like connection, safety,

trust, love, meaning, fulfillment, autonomy,

freedom, these kinds of things.

Conflict between people doesn't arise because our needs are wrong,

because these are just very fundamental needs,

but rather because we don't communicate in ways that each other can understand,

and so we don't really understand what we're actually trying to get at.

And instead we communicate them through blame or judgment or anger or criticism.

And he calls all of these violent styles of communication.

Nonviolent communication walks you through a four-step framework to help you to translate your needs from some kind of reactive sentence like,

you never help around the house,

you never do the dishes on time,

into something where you actually understand your own underlying needs there and you communicate them with clarity,

vulnerability and kindness to the other person to avoid triggering defensiveness

and instead including a positive request to ask them to do things differently in the future.

The framework is observation, feeling, need and request.

And literally no joke, this has completely changed the way that my husband and I communicate,

especially in areas of conflict or where there's areas of tension or disagreement.

And so let's do a worked example together.

So before reading non-violent communication,

maybe I could have said something like,

you never help with bedtime,

you always just sit on your phone or your computer doing your own stuff

while I'm dealing with all the baby stuff day after day, night after night.

You clearly don't care.

So that would be violent communication.

And if we were to translate this step by step using the four-step framework,

it might go something like this,

this week I've done baby bedtime on my own every night and I feel a resentful,

upset and honestly exhausted and I don't want to feel this way about you.

I have a need to feel like we're in a partnership,

we're in a team here and we're sharing the load

and I also have a need to feel like you care about me

and our baby

and also I need some evenings for myself to just be able to take care of me

and have some me time every now and then.

And so could I request that next week you do baby bedtime three nights of the week?

And so in this scenario it's actually the same underlying need that's being expressed,

this wish for baby bedtime to be shared more equally.

But by framing it in this non-violent communication framework,

yes it takes a bit longer than saying you never do baby bedtime,

you don't care, I've realized that it's actually a much more effective

and clean way to communicate because it doesn't trigger any defensiveness in the other person,

because they see that you're sharing a genuine need,

vulnerably and with great sincerity.

The second book that completely changed the way that I viewed my own transition into motherhood is is Matrescence by Lucy Jones.

I read this during my pregnancy when I was feeling really confused and almost a sense of joy and also grief.

I had this deep knowing that life would never be the same again.

This deep feeling of like,

oh, something big is happening.

There's some big shift coming.

And I didn't have the words to explain it.

I just felt tearful.

I felt lost.

I felt unsure.

And honestly, I really struggled during this time until I read her book.

The core argument is that this transition to motherhood is a huge transition.

Mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, hormonal, everything.

The leap from being maiden to mother is as big a developmental transformation as adolescence,

which generally in our culture we accept adolescence as,

oh it's obviously something that is sometimes uncomfortable,

it's sometimes ugly, it's sometimes beautiful,

it's sometimes painful and awkward and you're figuring yourself out,

you're figuring out who you're becoming.

And of course you're going to feel ups

and downs as you go through the roller coaster of growing into this next version of yourself.

This book, I wept and wept when I read it because she weaves in ecology,

biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology into this beautiful book that made me feel so seen at the time.

And I was like, oh wow,

I'm not the only person feeling this I'm not crazy

and insane for feeling like I'm wanting to burst into tears every other day

and it finally gave me a language to explain exactly what I was going through and why it was so profound.

There's actually a definition for matrescence and it was actually defined back in the 1970s by an anthropologist called Dana Raphael.

It can be defined as the physical,

psychological, hormonal and identity transformation that a woman undergoes when she becomes a mother.

It is the developmental passage into motherhood,

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as distinct and disorienting as adolescence,

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but almost entirely unacknowledged by science.

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When you become a mother,

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your brain actually observably reorganizes and changes literally in its structure permanently.

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Your hormones shift dramatically and you go through the biggest hormonal shifts that a human being ever experiences.

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So as you can already tell, I love this book.

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It completely changed the way that I was approaching motherhood and this matrescence that I was going through.

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So if either you're thinking of becoming a mum or you are a mum or you know somebody who is,

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then this is a great book to read.

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Moving on to the next era,

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which is the CEO, founder, business owner era.

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The book Radical Candor by Kim Scott completely changed the way that I communicate with my team.

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The core thesis of the book is built around two key variables of how you communicate with your team.

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The first variable is care personally and caring personally is about genuinely caring about the human being that you're working with,

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seeing them as a whole complete human with their own life,

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their own worries, their own wishes,

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their whole family, everything going on for them.

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The second variable is challenge directly

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and this is about directly sharing upfront without beating around the bush or hiding indirectly what you think is going on,

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what you think needs to be improved,

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what you think was good,

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what you think was bad,

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what you think was okay.

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And with these two variables she draws out a like two by two diagram.

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On one axis is care personally the other axis is challenge directly and

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if you only care personally without challenging directly you end up

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in ruinous empathy where you're only just trying to take care of the feelings of the people

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that you work with you don't want to upset anyone

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so you're not going to tell them things straight

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and you really do care about them

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and also you're not going to challenge them directly

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if you just challenge directly without caring personally

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that ends up being obnoxious aggression think some of the tropes

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of toxic tech teams where they just challenge each other really directly

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and aggressively without necessarily caring deeply about the other human being on their team

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and she describes the sweet spot as being a combination of caring personally

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so deeply about your team while also challenging them directly

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and not being afraid to challenge directly

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because you know only through caring about them deeply

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and challenging directly can you give them the opportunity to do the best work of their life

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and to grow into the person that they're meant to be

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and so for me what this book really unlocked was actually the challenge directly portion

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because i I felt like it was easy,

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it was always easy to care genuinely about my team.

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But often I wouldn't want to upset anyone,

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I'd be worried like, oh if I say that are they gonna feel like hurt by it?

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But this book really like blew away all these people-pleasing tendencies

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that I used to have and made me realise

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that oh actually by not challenging directly

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and saying exactly what I think was great and what I think needs to be improved,

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I am denying them the opportunity to do the best work of their life and to really thrive in this role.

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One thing I found especially challenging is

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that I often have a way too many books on my to be read list

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and the number of books I buy versus actually read is sometimes a little bit embarrassing

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because I have such big dreams for wanting to read all of these books

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but then not quite enough time to actually finish reading all of them anymore especially since becoming a mum

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and also being CEO across Sparkle Studios

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which is our venture studio my book wish list of things I want to read is genuinely in the hundreds

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and so that's where I love to use short form who are very kindly sponsoring today's video

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if you want to check out their super powered book guides

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I'll leave a link down below in the description where you can get a free trial

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and also fifty dollars off the annual plan.

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Essentially Shortform is a digital library of thousands of non-fiction book guides.

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So let's say that you come across a book

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that you'd like to check out first before committing to actually reading the whole thing

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and honestly if you're a bit like me

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and time is your most finite limited resource then this is such a good tip.

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So what I like to do is simply search it up

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and have a little scroll through what the book is actually about before committing and actually reading the full book.

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Another thing I like to use it for is as a reminder of books I've read.

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So for example here's the one for radical candor

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so right off the bat there's a one pager

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which gives you the big picture of the book in under 10 minutes

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and then if you want more detail you can click in to go chapter by chapter with more context

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and a bit that i really love is the commentary where they bring in literature

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that surrounds this book either similar books or scientific articles

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and they give a bit of commentary outside of just the source book

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and even some exercises so that you can actually make sure

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that the concepts really stick

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and you're taking action i also find these exercises pretty useful in general

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because they're a bit like journaling prompts honestly so

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if you like to check out short form I've left a link in my description below.

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That will also give you a free trial and $50 off the annual plan.

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Now let's get back into the video.

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The next book was 100 Million Dollar Offers by Alex Formozzi.

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This book completely transformed the way that I view the core feature of a business which is value creation.

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The core concept is the value equation

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which can be summarized by perceived value of an offer is

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the dream outcome multiplied by the likelihood of achievement divided by the time delay and the effort to actually achieve it.

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And by understanding this equation

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and how people really perceive value in a business you can make an offer

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that is so good that people would literally feel silly saying no.

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And the thing that really changed my mind with this book is this idea

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that the offer is the core of the business a lot of businesses actually fail because the offer is not strong enough.

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His approach to price points and charging more and then delivering more value with that was a game changer for me.

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And genuinely we still go back to look at his book

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and look at the value equation when we're building out and tweaking new offers.

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Because fundamentally a business exists to deliver value to others

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and in exchange for that value that you deliver people pay you money.

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And so if you can crack this

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and crack actually figuring out what do people value and how to actually give it to them,

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that is the fundamental for a successful business.

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And in my role as CEO of our venture studio across our content,

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our courses, our software, understanding what kind of value

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and what kind of offers we're actually providing across the different

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things has given me a lot of practice in using and applying this actual framework.

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The next era is my YouTuber and content creator era.

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The surrender experiment by Michael Singer really changed the way that I view surrendering to the flow of life.

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This book is almost in the format of a memoir but sharing a lot of spiritual philosophy along the way.

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He talks about his life and his spiritual practice in meditation

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and each time that the universe presented him with something to do he said yes and surrendered to the flow of life,

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surrendered to what the universe was asking of him in that moment instead of consulting his own preferences and decisions.

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And he calls this his surrender experiment

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and surrendering to whatever the universe is asking for him to do and saying yes to it.

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And in this memoir he traces how this practice of the

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surrender experiment he was running took him from being literally a

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hermit meditating in the woods to being the CEO of a

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multi-billion dollar healthcare company all the way back to coming back to running a meditation center in the woods again.

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One key idea that stood out to me is that that voice in your head,

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the narrative that's going on that's talking about things

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that are going on in your life that's criticizing you or telling you what you should do is not actually you.

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You are actually the one who is noticing the voice

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and one thing that I was thinking about

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when I was starting to read the book it's like oh surrender

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that sounds kind of passive but he actually reframes it entirely

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and says that surrender is not actually about being passive it's about actively engaging

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but removing your personal preferences and actively diving into what is being presented to you

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and so in the course of creating these youtube videos

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and then going on to build the business around it I

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often ask myself this question of what is the universe asking from me right now

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and how can I surrender to the e-myth revisited by Michael Gerber

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I keep saying I keep saying completely changed my life for every single book

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but they genuinely did anyway I guess this is a compilation of books

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that have completely changed my life so fair enough

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but yes the e-myth revisited by Michael Gerber completely changed the way

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that I view systematization and also building out systems

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and delegation in business the e-myth okay the entrepreneurial myth

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that he talks about is the myth that small businesses are started by entrepreneurs but they actually usually aren't.

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Most small businesses are started by technicians who are artists,

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the great at their craft,

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who then turn that into a business.

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And through having this entrepreneurial seizure and turning it into a business,

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they then create a job that they can't leave,

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they can't take holiday from,

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and that they're basically working every single day,

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burning out and running themselves into the ground.

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He gives the example of a woman called Sarah,

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who is incredible at baking delicious pies.

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And everyone's like, oh my goodness,

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you should totally start a pie shop,

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your pies are so good,

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she loves baking, it's her passion.

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And so she thinks, you know what,

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I'll have this entrepreneurial seizure and decide I'm gonna start my pie shop business and it's gonna be so fun,

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I get to bake pies every day and have people enjoy my delicious pies every day.

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But then fast forward however many months and Sarah finds herself working every single day from dawn till dusk,

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scrubbing floors, doing bills and accounting and barely even baking pies most of the time

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and finding herself exhausted in a job that she kind of hates and can't quit and can't take holiday from.

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And so Gerber talks about how three personalities need to live in every single business owner.

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There's the technician who is the person who is good at the craft,

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so in Sarah's case this is her pie baking ability.

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Then there is the manager who organizes everything and makes sure that the trains are running on time,

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hires people, does all of the operational work.

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And finally there's the entrepreneur who sets the vision,

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imagines the future for where the business is going and has those big dreams.

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And a business needs all of these three functions to work well.

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And so his suggested solution to this is to instead view your business as something

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that you're trying to systematize as if you were going to turn it into a franchise.

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And so if you were to imagine your franchising

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and building out all the SOPs to the standard operating procedures

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and systems so that literally anybody off the street could come in,

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read your documents, be onboarded and then do your job just as well as you,

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that is what is going to give you the ability to build out those skills of being the manager

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and the entrepreneur and to actually create a business that you love rather than one that you are a slave to.

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And this is a quote from the book that I love and I find quite funny.

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It goes like this, if your business depends on you,

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you don't own a business, you have a job.

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And it's the worst job in the world because you're working for a lunatic.

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And I think anybody who has maybe had an entrepreneurial seizure

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and started a business has kind of had this experience where

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actually working for yourself can be quite a horrible job because you're working for a lunatic,

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because the way that you treat yourself and the expectations you set for yourself are often unbelievably high.

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The next era is the Cambridge medical student and doctor era.

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So for some context, I studied medicine at Cambridge and then I worked as a doctor in the NHS in London.

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And in this era, the key books were ones that changed my worldview in some deep way.

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The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle was a book that I read relatively early in my spiritual and meditation journey.

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And it gave me an entirely new lens through which to view life.

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A whole perspective that I hadn't even imagined was possible.

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The core concept is that the only time there ever is, is now.

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And that by leaning into being and presence,

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we can actually free ourselves from a lot of the illusions and social constructs that we often bind ourselves with.

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And ultimately free ourselves from the illusions of the thinking mind and actually settle into this more fundamental place of consciousness.

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This book was an experience to read and it's actually hard to summarize

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because a lot of the insights are experiential from reading the words.

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And so I'll read out a couple of my favorite highlights from this book.

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Honestly, this book was one of my most highlighted books of all time,

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but I highly recommend that you actually read it

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because it's an experience to actually read it

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and to actually have the words land directly and direct your consciousness in a certain way.

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This quote changed the way that I view suffering and discomfort.

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If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy,

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you have three options remove yourself from the situation,

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change it, or accept it totally.

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Accept, then act.

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Whatever the present moment contains,

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accept it as if you had chosen it.

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Always work with it, not against it.

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Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.

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This will miraculously transform your whole life.

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The great Zen master Rinzai,

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in order to take his students' attention away from time,

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would often raise his finger and slowly ask,

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what, at this moment, is lacking?

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A powerful question that does not require an answer on the level of the mind.

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It is designed to take your attention deeply into the now.

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A similar question in the zen tradition is this, if not now, when?

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And there was one specific example that he gave in the book of imagine you ask an eagle soaring over,

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let's say, back in the dinosaur age,

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a jungle with dinosaurs and you ask,

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oh eagle, what time is it?

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The eagle will obviously say,

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well now silly, like there's no other time but now obviously.

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And so even this idea of time became crystal clear that time is a social construct.

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And the last book on this list is the top five regrets of the dying by Bronnie Ware.

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Bronnie Ware was a palliative care nurse

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and she wrote a book distilling the regrets that people most often shared at the end of their life.

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And I'll read out the five regrets.

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First one was, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself,

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not the life others expected of me.

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I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

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I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

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I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends.

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I wish I had let myself be happier.

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And in the years since first reading it,

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there is another one that I strongly believe will be on the list for our generation

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which is I wish I hadn't spent so much time on my phone.

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This book really grounded me in what is important in the end.

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What are the things that are really going to count?

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At the end of the day after everything is said

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and done what will you look back on and think oh that was a life well lived?

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And so I often think about what would my 80 year old self advise me to do?

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What would my 80 year old self say about this?

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And she usually has an answer that is very different from the answer that my present self has.

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And I'm not saying

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that you should only base your decisions in the now on what you think you might prioritize

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or regret in the future but it's an interesting different lens and perspective

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that helps to take me out of getting stuck in the

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day to day in the business as usual all the stuff that's going on all the worries

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and stresses that are happening

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and actually realize oh there's something bigger than this this is actually just a moment in time

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so those are my four eras from being a mom

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and wife to now being ceo across our venture studio and a business owner,

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YouTuber and content creator and Cambridge trained doctor.

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Honestly there were so many books I had to leave off this list

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but hopefully this gave you a taste and

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if you enjoyed this kind of format let me know in the comments below

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and I can do more of these because I read so many books.

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And at the end of every video on this channel I love to invite you to do two action points

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that you're actually going to take action on and execute.

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And some people have said

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that they are struggling to pick action points at the end of the video so here are two suggested action points.

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The first one is to choose one book of the eight that you're interested in checking out and actually buying it.

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And the second thing is to start reading it the very day that you receive the book.

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You can even use the totally free guide to all of these books to help you to pick the one

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that might be the most impactful for you right now.

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If you like this video,

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I think you might like this video over here,

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which is eight game-changing journal habits.

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As always, thank you so much for watching.

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Take care of yourself and remember that the journey is the destination.

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I'll see you in the next video.

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Bye!

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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.

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Shadowing Practice: These 8 Books Changed My Life (and they might just change yours too) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Shadowing Practice: These 8 Books Changed My Life (and they might just change yours too) - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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What is the Shadowing Technique?