Shadowing Practice: This Book Stopped Me From Wasting My Life - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

I almost stayed stuck.

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I almost stayed stuck.

Not because I didn't have dreams,

but because I didn't understand what was blocking me.

Then I read a book that gave it a name,

The Upper Limit Problem.

It explained everything.

Why I kept self-sabotaging.

Why I could never seem to break through no matter how hard I worked.

This book didn't just inspire me, it saved me.

And today I want to show you why.

Now, I know some of you are thinking,

just tell me the book already.

And I get it.

We will get there in a minute.

But I want to give you a bit of context first,

because where I was in my life when I found this book is the reason that it hit me so hard.

Without that backstory, it won't really land in the same way.

At the time, I almost didn't notice how stuck I'd become,

because on paper, everything looked fine.

I was working full-time as a family doctor.

I had two healthy boys,

eight and 13 at the time.

A house, a routine, a life that looked completely respectable from the outside.

But inside, I felt like I was slowly disappearing.

Every day, I went to the clinic,

sat in that same small exam room,

and saw patients one after another,

15 minutes at a time.

Each interaction felt like a quick fix,

patch them up, write the prescription,

send them back out, knowing that they would probably be back in a few weeks with the same problem.

And I remember thinking, this can't be it.

This can't be all I'm here to do,

handing out band-aids while ignoring the deeper wound underneath.

The staff meetings at my clinic were even worse.

Everyone else seemed energized and passionate and in their element.

Meanwhile, I sat there quietly wondering why I felt like I was in the wrong room,

like I'd wandered into someone else's life and just decided to stay.

At home, I was barely keeping my head above water.

I was that mom making school lunches at 6am,

answering work emails with peanut butter on my hands,

letting way more things fall through the cracks than I care to admit.

The house was a mess,

my energy was tanked, and every day felt like just surviving,

lurching through life instead of living it.

And yet the craziest part is,

I didn't hate my life,

I just couldn't feel it anymore.

So in a small act of rebellion,

I started taking lunchtime walks.

Even though I always had a ton of charting and paperwork waiting for me,

I would force myself outside no matter the weather,

just to breathe, to get a little space from the noise.

I'd pop in my earbuds and listen to podcasts,

anything that made me feel alive or curious again.

And one day on one of those walks,

I heard someone mention a book called The Big Leap by Gay Hendrix.

I don't know why, but something in me just knew I needed it.

So I downloaded it that afternoon on Audible and that walk changed everything.

If you've ever had that quiet suspicion that you're living the wrong version of your life,

you might wanna stick around for this because what I learned from

that book helped me to understand why I was stuck and how to finally get out of my own way.

And by the way, if you want the full story of how I eventually left medicine,

I will link that video right here.

But for now, let's talk about the concept that started it all.

So in The Big Leap,

Gay Hendricks talks about something called the upper limit problem.

And honestly, it explained so much about my life that I felt personally called out.

He says we all have this internal thermostat.

It's a kind of invisible ceiling for how much success,

love, and happiness we'll allow ourselves to experience.

And when life starts going too well,

we subconsciously find ways to turn the temperature back down.

At first I thought, okay sure,

but that is probably for people with actual success problems like Oprah.

Then I started recognizing myself on every page.

So here's how it shows up.

You land a big opportunity and suddenly you're convinced that you're an imposter.

Or you finally get some momentum with your goals and you immediately reward yourself by taking your foot off the gas.

Or maybe you have a great week

and then pick a fight with your partner over something ridiculous like how they load the dishwasher.

Not that I've ever done that.

The point is, when we start to experience more joy or freedom than our nervous system is used to,

part of us panics.

Because good feels unfamiliar, and what's unfamiliar often feels unsafe.

In 1978 psychologists coined a name for this self-handicapping behavior.

It's a defense mechanism.

Basically our brains would rather create a familiar problem than face the unknown of success.

So we trip ourselves up just enough to stay inside what feels normal.

And the wild thing is I could see this everywhere once I knew what to look for.

Like for me, every time something started to flow in my side hustle,

the business that I was building,

I would suddenly get this urge to overhaul everything.

New website, new niche, new business plan.

It was disguised as being productive,

but really I was afraid of what would happen if I just let things work.

Or, and this one stung a bit,

I would get physically sick right after a big milestone, like clockwork.

Gay Hendricks actually calls that upper limiting through illness.

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It's your body's way of saying,

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this is too much happiness.

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Let's create a small disaster to balance things out.

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My immune system really understood the assignment.

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The truth is, it's not self-sabotage because we're lazy or broken.

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It's our mind trying to keep us safe.

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But that safety is also the prison.

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Once I understood the upper limit problem,

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I started seeing it everywhere in my life and not in an abstract way,

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in a wow, that is embarrassingly specific kind of way.

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At the time I was still working full time as a doctor,

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but as I mentioned I was trying to build my side hustle,

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creating wellness content and coaching and blogging and writing

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and then dabbling in YouTube and then switching to podcasting and then back to YouTube again.

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Basically, I was in perpetual beta mode.

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Always tweaking, never arriving.

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Every time I saw someone else rising in the coaching world,

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someone who looked confident and polished and like they'd figured it all out,

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I would immediately start doubting everything that I was doing.

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I would scrap my plans,

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rebrand, rewrite, rebuild, and start again from scratch.

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It looked like strategy.

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It was was actually fear wearing a productivity disguise.

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Then whenever things did start to pick up,

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a few new clients or a bit more visibility,

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something would knock me back down.

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Sometimes it was just one tiny comment from my kids like,

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You forgot to sign the permission slip again.

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Or you're always working.

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Instant shutdown.

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I would convince myself that I was being selfish,

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that I was failing as a mom,

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and I would hit pause on everything.

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No more clients, no more projects, no more momentum.

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I would retreat into the comfort of not trying too hard.

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And here's where it really got me.

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There came a time when I was starting to get some traction outside of medicine.

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I had been invited to speak at a few community events

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and people were starting to see me as a voice in wellness.

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And I remember thinking, maybe this is it.

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Maybe this is the direction that I'm supposed to go.

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And then I got offered a promotion.

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The clinic asked me to become the lead physician.

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It was flattering.

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It felt safe.

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And those little gremlins in my head started whispering, you're a doctor.

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That's who you are.

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This other stuff, this coaching,

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this YouTube videos, that's just dabbling.

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Be serious.

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Stay where you belong.

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So I did what a responsible,

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rational adult does when faced with a calling and a comfort zone.

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I chose the comfort zone.

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I said yes to the lead physician role and no to the speaking gigs.

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I told myself I didn't have the time anyway.

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But really, I was afraid of outgrowing the version of me that everyone else expected me to be.

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And that's the cruel irony of the upper limit problem.

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It doesn't show up as fear.

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It shows up as logic,

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as good decisions, as responsibility.

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And before you know it,

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you have traded your expansion for belonging.

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That's the moment that I realized the ceiling wasn't coming from the world around me.

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It was coming from inside me.

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So why do we do this?

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Why do smart, capable people,

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people who want to grow,

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why do we pull the emergency brake right when things start to work?

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Well, psychology has a few answers.

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For starters, our brains are wired to prefer the familiar over the fulfilling.

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It's called homeostasis.

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Your body and your brain's built-in drive to keep things stable.

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Even if stable means mildly miserable.

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When you start doing something new,

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building a business or writing a book or speaking up more,

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your brain doesn't recognize that as good.

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It recognizes it as different.

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And different feels like danger.

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There's research from Harvard psychologist Robert Keegan showing that most adults unconsciously resist change,

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not because they don't want to grow,

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but because the change threatens their sense of identity.

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In other words, we're not just afraid of failing at something new.

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We're afraid of losing who we've always been.

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And that ties straight into Carol Dweck's work on mindset.

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Now, if you've spent your life building an identity around being the reliable one or the high achiever,

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stepping into something uncertain, creative,

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public, or self-expressive, it can feel like breaking your own rules.

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Because if your value comes from being competent,

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then growth, which by definition requires being bad at things for a while,

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that can feel like an existential threat.

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And here's where the brain chemistry adds insult to injury.

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Every time you take a bold step,

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your amygdala, that's the part of your brain that's responsible for threat detection,

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it lights up like, whoa, who authorized this?

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It floods your system with stress hormones and your logical brain goes,

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aha, yes, see, proof that this is not safe.

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Your brain is basically that overprotective friend who means well but keeps you from doing anything remotely interesting.

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But the good news is awareness interrupts the pattern.

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Once you understand that discomfort is not danger,

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it's growth, then you can start to expand your internal thermostat.

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And that's exactly what I started experimenting with next.

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Once I understood what the upper limit problem actually was,

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I started treating it like an experiment.

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Because it's one thing to know that you're self-sabotaging

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and another thing to stop doing it when your entire nervous system is screaming at you to retreat to safety.

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So I started small, tiny,

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almost invisible shifts that helped me to expand what I could tolerate,

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not just in terms of success,

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but in terms of goodness.

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And there were three things that made the biggest difference.

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Number one, I started naming it in real time.

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Whenever I caught myself spiraling,

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overanalyzing an email, second guessing a decision,

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or randomly reorganizing my sock drawer instead of writing,

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I would literally stop and say, ah, upper limit moment.

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That tiny label created just enough distance for me to see what was happening instead of just automatically believing it.

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There's actually research showing that naming an emotion,

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what psychologists call affect labeling,

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it calms activity in the amygdala,

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that fear center of the brain.

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So every time I said it out loud,

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I was retraining my brain to see discomfort as data, not danger.

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And that awareness alone started to give me a little breathing room.

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A few seconds between the feeling and the reaction.

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Which, by the way, is where every transformation begins.

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Number two, I practiced expanding my capacity for good.

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This one surprised me because I thought that growth was about effort.

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Turns out it's also about allowing.

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When something good happened, a compliment,

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a breakthrough, a moment of ease,

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I noticed my reflex to immediately downplay it or move on.

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So instead, I started pausing and saying,

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what if I just let this feel good for 10 seconds longer?

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It sounds small, but it's actually rewiring your baseline.

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There's research from Rick Hansen,

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who is a neuroscientist who studies neuroplasticity,

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and his research shows that

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when you deliberately savor positive experiences even for a few extra breaths you literally strengthen the neural pathways for joy

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and confidence so i started practicing

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that letting myself feel good things fully instead of bracing for the crash

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and slowly life started to feel less like survival

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and more like expansion number three i began rewriting the story of who i was this was the hardest part

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because i had spent decades defining myself as a doctor.

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That identity was so tightly woven into my sense of worth that letting it stretch felt terrifying.

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But I started asking a new question.

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Who do I need to become to believe that I'm allowed this life?

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Instead of asking how can I achieve more,

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I asked who do I need to be to stop sabotaging what's already working?

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And that's when I started to see that identity wasn't fixed.

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It was flexible, like software I could update.

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Each time I showed up differently,

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took a risk, said yes to something aligned,

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I was quietly raising that internal thermostat.

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And one day, I looked around and realized that the ceiling I'd been living under wasn't even real.

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That realization changed everything.

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Because once you understand that the ceiling is self-imposed,

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you start asking much bigger questions about what is possible.

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Once I started recognizing those upper limit moments,

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my life didn't change all at once.

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It shifted slowly, in conversations,

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in small choices, in the way that I responded to opportunities.

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I started saying no to things that just didn't feel aligned,

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and yes to things that did,

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even if they scared me a little.

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I began seeing discomfort as information,

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not intimidation, and that shift quietly started changing everything.

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I remember the exact moment that I decided to resign from medicine.

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It wasn't dramatic.

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It wasn't angry or burned out.

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done.

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It was at the end of an ordinary clinic day.

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I was sitting at my desk,

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finishing up my chart notes,

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cup of tea beside me, fluorescent lights humming overhead.

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And as I looked back on the day,

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all the quick visits and the prescriptions and the rushing,

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something inside me just said, nope, that's it.

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I'm done.

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It was so clear.

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And honestly, it felt like relief.

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Like I'd finally stopped bargaining with myself.

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For years I had been waiting for permission.

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Permission to step outside the identity everyone else recognized,

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to want something beyond stability,

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to believe that fulfillment wasn't something you had to earn by suffering first.

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And in that moment I realized permission was never coming.

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I had to give it to myself.

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So I resigned.

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Not as an act of rebellion,

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but as an act of alignment.

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And for the first time I wasn't running away from something,

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I was moving towards something that felt more me.

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Of course it wasn't easy,

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people questioned it, I questioned it.

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But once you raise your upper limit, you can't unsee it.

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You can't go back to pretending that you're satisfied being smaller than you actually are.

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And what's incredible is, once I made that leap,

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everything I had been chasing started to meet me halfway.

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My business grew, my creativity came back,

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my energy, the thing that I thought I had lost forever,

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it started to return.

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And I realized that the big leap hadn't just changed how I thought about success.

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It changed how I thought about identity.

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Because the book isn't really about career or achievement.

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It's about expanding your capacity to live in alignment with who you truly are,

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without guilt, without apology, without waiting for permission.

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And that was my big leap,

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and it really did save me from wasting my life.

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If you're watching this and you have been feeling stuck,

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maybe not miserable, just underwhelmed by your own life,

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I want you to know something.

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You're not broken.

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You're probably just bumping up against your upper limit.

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That invisible ceiling that we all carry.

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It's built out of old stories about who we're allowed to be.

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Stories that say, you're too old to start over.

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You should be grateful for what you have.

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Who do you think you are to want more?

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But the truth is, you're allowed to evolve.

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You're allowed to outgrow a version of yourself that no longer fits.

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You're allowed to want more because you're ready for more.

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And if that idea makes you nervous,

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that's actually a good sign because it means that you're standing right at the edge of your next expansion.

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So if this video spoke to you,

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if you are ready to stop shrinking your life to match your comfort zone,

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I have created something to help you to take that first step.

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It's called the reset a free five-day challenge designed to help you to clear the noise

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and reset your focus and start expanding what's possible again.

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You'll get short daily emails,

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a printable tracker, and a few of the exact tools that I used when I started making my own leap.

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You can find the link below this video.

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And if you enjoyed this video,

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I think that you are going to love the video that I am linking on the next screen.

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It's called Three Habits That Quietly Stole 10 Years of My Life.

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It's the perfect companion to this one because those habits were the ones keeping my upper limit firmly in place.

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And I will see you there.

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I can't!

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The battery died as I said the very last word.

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that's ridiculous pretty sure i manifested that

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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: This Book Stopped Me From Wasting My Life - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Shadowing Practice: This Book Stopped Me From Wasting My Life - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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About This Lesson

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What is the Shadowing Technique?