Shadowing Practice: Treat Yourself Like Someone You Love (How To Learn To Love Yourself) | Adam Roa | TEDxKlagenfurt - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Transcriber: Emilia Soso Reviewer: eric vautier You are who you've been looking for, so stop looking for more unless you’re looking in the mirror, because it’s about time for you to see clearly that you are who you’ve been looking for.
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Transcriber: Emilia Soso Reviewer: eric vautier You are who you've been looking for, so stop looking for more unless you’re looking in the mirror, because it’s about time for you to see clearly that you are who you’ve been looking for.
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And that empty feeling you got, that hole in your chest, you only got that feeling because you think you’re not blessed with everything you need.
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You see, we live in a consumerist society, which means they need you to buy stuff.
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And the easiest way to sell it is to tell you, “You’re not enough”.
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“Buy this car, you’ll get girls”. “Buy this bra, you’ll get guys”.
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And we're seeing it so much that we start believing these lies.
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But the truth is: the makeup they’re selling to make you feel prettier is the same makeup you buy to stop feeling shittier about this lie they keep telling you that “you are not enough”.
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And what about the movies we watch or the shows on TV?
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The more I watch, the more I see “I need you to complete me”.
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And yes, love is the answer, love is the key.
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But if you can’t love yourself, how can you ever love me?
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And “loving yourself”, what does that even mean?
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Messages and selfies, and that sort of thing?
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Because the more I think about it, the more it feels weird.
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I’ve always thought self-love was something to be feared.
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I’ve been taught that arrogance is bad, and vanity is not good.
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And even my bracelets are telling me to act how Jesus would.
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So, what should I do? How should I act?
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I'm supposed to love myself, but how do I even do that?
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Well, I got a trick that I picked up from a friend that noticed that I was quick to defend her when she’d say something negative about herself.
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She’d say, “I’m so dumb”, and I’d say, “You’re so brilliant”.
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She’d say, “I’m so weak”, and I’d say, “You’re so resilient”.
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And when she said, “I feel ugly” and I said, “You look beautiful”, she asked me why I was so dutifully filling up her cup constantly and yet treating my own cup so irresponsibly.
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Because when I looked in the mirror, my voice was quite clear.
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You’re ugly, too thin, your hairline is receding, and you got a pimple on your chin.
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And that was when she gave me a piece of advice that changed my life.
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She gave me a hug, and she said, “Treat yourself like someone you love”.
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Treat yourself like someone you love.
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Now, I had been standing, but I needed to be sitting because I couldn’t believe that I’d been letting myself keep forgetting that I was who I’d been looking for.
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And deep in my core, I knew it was time to stop looking for more until I could look through all my fear and look into a mirror and see clearly that the man looking back at me is the only one who can make me happy, and I am already enough.
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And I’m not any more special or unique than you.
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That’s why I’m here to speak to you.
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You are already enough.
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And when you start to see that, you will start to be that.
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Your world will get brighter; your load will get lighter.
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And you can see that with life you can be a lover, not a fighter.
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And that life, you deserve it, because you are worth it.
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And there’s no point in letting yourself keep forgetting because no matter what you say or do, you are perfect.
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And so today, I hope I leave you with a direction correction away from the flaws you see in your reflection.
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They aren't flaws to me.
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They are simply protection against all the doubts you have of your perfection.
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So, start today.
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Take a good, long look in the mirror and say, “I am who I’ve been looking for”.
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(Applause) Thank you.
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(Applause) That poem is one of the most viral in history.
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It has been viewed over 250 million times.
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When it was first posted in 2018, it spread like wildfire, and overnight, I saw an explosion in my social media following, I got invitations to speak all around the world, and I dropped into a deep suicidal depression.
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I was in Bali when it happened because that’s where you go when you’re a hippie and you’re healing from a breakup.
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Tropical weather, great food, beautiful sunsets.
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And one morning I turn on my phone and I immediately notice that something’s different.
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I have thousands upon thousands of new followers.
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My poem hadn’t gone viral, it had gone mega viral.
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It got 40 million views in the first 48 hours.
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In fact, it would continue to get more than a million views a day for the next several months.
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But with that came the messages.
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Hundreds of DMs that flooded my inbox, most of them being messages of appreciation.
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They said, “I loved the poem. Thank you”.
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“I sent this to my mom, my brother, my girlfriend. Thank you”.
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“This poem changed my life. Thank you”.
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But for every nine of those, there was one that was very different.
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One that would say something like, “I don’t know how to love myself. Can you help me?” “My husband hits me and I’m too scared to leave.
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Can you help me?” “I’m thinking of killing myself tomorrow.
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Can you help me?” And I couldn't.
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I didn't have an answer.
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I had a poem that was getting millions of views a day, but I didn’t know how to respond to people who needed something more than a poem.
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And I felt like I was letting them down.
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I felt like a fraud.
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I felt so much shame and guilt that my body began to break down, until eventually I found myself one day locked away in a dark hotel room, feverish, shivering, covered in sweat, unable to open the curtains because any amount of light was excruciatingly painful to my eyes and my head.
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And what I didn’t know at the time was that moment was the beginning of a long and painful journey.
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A multi-year quest deep into depression so that I could find the answer that I didn't have.
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How do we learn to love ourselves?
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What does that actually look like?
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Truthfully, I didn’t know where to start.
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And I did believe that self-love was the answer.
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I hadn’t faked the poem.
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I just didn't know what it looked like in action.
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Treat yourself like someone you love, but how?
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For me, that looked like doing anything and everything that I thought would qualify as self-love.
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If I didn't know what would work, I would just do it all.
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Meditation, journaling, writing poetry, playing music, singing, dancing, shaking, cold plunges, saunas, taking baths, hiring coaches, doing all the therapies: CBT, IFS, TRE, NLP, EMDR.
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You just say the letters, I did it.
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Detoxes, juice cleanses, water fasts.
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Psychic readings, astrology readings, tarot readings.
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Plant medicine journeys deep in the Amazon jungle, punching pillows, primal screaming, and naked mirror work.
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Yes, I stood naked in front of a mirror, and I said “I love you” over and over because that’s what you do when you’re desperate and a hippie.
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And the thing was, at the time, I was watching a lot of content about self-love.
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But the thing was, so much of that content spoke about self-love like it was a switch.
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In On or in Off, you either have it or you don’t.
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And because I believed that I kept doing all of these things, seeking that moment when my self-love would click on.
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But it never did.
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Every day I kept spending hours showing up for myself, expecting a big shift that never came.
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Instead, I saw a little one.
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And then another.
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And then another.
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And I started to realize that the reason why I had felt so lost was because I didn’t understand the essence of self-love.
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It's not a switch, it's a result.
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It is the result of how we show up for ourselves each and every day.
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Self-love is the byproduct of your relationship with yourself.
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And it is a relationship that needs all the same things as any other, but because it’s inner, we often don’t know where to start.
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So, I started to use a framework developed by Dr Gary Chapman called “The Five Love Languages”.
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In it, they give you five categories that you can focus on if you want to deepen the connection you feel in a relationship.
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Acts of service, quality time, physical touch, gifts, and words of affirmation.
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Now these are normally used in context of your relationship to others, but they can be used with ourselves.
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Let's take quality time as an example.
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How much connection is actually happening when two people are sitting together, but they’re both separately on their phones?
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And yet, how often do we do that exact same thing by ourselves?
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We're just ignoring that inner voice in favor of mindlessly scrolling, because we’ve confused the idea of being alone with spending quality time with ourselves.
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And how about words of affirmation?
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How would you feel if someone was constantly telling you were dumb, that you were not good enough, that you were never going to succeed?
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And yet, how often do we say those exact words to ourselves?
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Sometimes on a daily basis.
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The good news is that we can change that through a combination of our attention and our intention.
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With the five love languages used as a direction, we can point our attention there, and when we do that, we will start to catch those little moments when we’re not so loving to ourselves.
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And when you combine that new awareness with the intention to love yourself more deeply, you will start to unlock new choices that you previously couldn’t see.
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Ways that you can actually strengthen that relationship to yourself and love yourself more deeply.
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And when you start to make those new choices, you will unlock the next clues that the universe is leaving you on how to achieve your intention.
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Yes, even if we don’t like it, the universe is always giving us our next step.
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Sometimes that next step can be very, very scary, like leaving a toxic relationship, quitting our job, or starting therapy.
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But often it’s a really small next step, but equally important, like writing a poem, or finally watching that TED talk on self-love your friend sent you.
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For me, it was all of the above and a mirror.
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So, for all the people that wrote me asking for an answer so many years ago, I’m really sorry that I didn’t have it back then.
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But I want to say thank you for helping me find it so that I could give it to all the people who need it today.
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And if you are one of those people, I want you to know that it is possible.
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It is 100% possible for you to get out of the darkness, and even if it takes years, it is so worth it.
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I know because I did it.
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Day by day, the voices in my head got a little less mean.
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I still get sad sometimes, but I show up completely differently for myself when I do, because I’ve started to relate completely differently to my own emotions.
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I relate differently to other people.
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And I relate differently to life itself.
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I learned how to love myself.
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And just like the poem said would happen, my world got brighter and my load got lighter.
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And that is something worth writing poetry about.
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And so, I’d like to close today with one more poem.
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It’s a poem that I call Heaven.
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Can I have everyone take a nice deep inhale?
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And exhale.
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The most impactful thing you can do for the world is learn how to love life.
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All of life.
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Show people that being happy doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to the pain and the sadness and the suffering that happens here.
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Show them that choosing love doesn't mean ignoring fear.
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It just means being willing to feel.
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And those brave souls will always heal as long as they maintain the courage to feel.
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Because the fear of feeling is really at the root of every fear, which creates the fear of living because feeling is why we’re here.
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So, you can fight the fact that feelings past have felt so freaking hard, but it’s the very fact you have felt all that that feels like the part we should celebrate, investigate, learn to navigate with ease.
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Your emotions are the gift God gives you every time you breathe.
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Energy in motion with the strength to bring a king down to his knees and yet contained within the emotion is the key to set you free.
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Yes, contained within the emotion is the gift of what being human is, a chance to feel all of life, from deep sorrow to deep bliss.
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And you might wish the two would split, but the twist is that they’ll always coexist.
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Because even the heartbreak you hate today had the way paved by a lover’s kiss.
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So, you can write your list of how life’s a bitch, but don’t forget the asterisk.
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Because for all the times you went through shit, it fertilized a lot of gifts.
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But when you only focus on what you lack, you can't appreciate what you've got.
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But with gratitude for what you have, you can see that it's a lot.
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And that is the difference between abundance and scarcity.
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It's not about what you have, it's about what you see.
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So, the next time you forget how blessed you be, take a moment and focus on the next breath you breathe.
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The next time you forget how blessed you be, take a moment and focus on the next breath you breathe.
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And notice, you’re right here with me.
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A miracle, a great mystery.
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Out of hundreds of trillions of stars and hundreds of billions of galaxies, somehow, some way, you’re here today with me, and we all breathe on a spinning sphere of chemicals, spiraling through the universe.
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You were once one of 200 million sperm; you just happened to get there first.
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So, how could you ever say you’re cursed?
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You’ve been blessed since before your birth.
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And you might not think you have it best, but it could definitely be worse.
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And if you don't believe that yet, go tell the deaf what you just heard.
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If you don’t like what you see, go tell the blind how much it hurts.
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On your hardest day, when you really want to walk away, go tell the paraplegic how it’s unfair.
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Share how you want to run from all your problems, while he's pushed everywhere in a chair.
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And I’m not saying that life is fair or that it’s easy.
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We all go through a lot.
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But as you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, don't lose gratitude for the fact that you walk.
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Celebrate the fact that you can dance and sing.
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Embrace the abundance in the very act when you talk.
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Because when you can spot abundance in the simplest things, that’s when more abundance unlocks.
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The simplest things.
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Taste and touch and breath and smell.
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Did you know there are people with something called anosmia, which means their sense of smell is completely lost?
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So, while they literally can’t smell the roses, do you want to complain you don’t have the time to stop?
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Because this life is the only one that you’ve got.
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And there are people who would trade places with you without a second thought.
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So, no matter how many tears, heartbreaks or bad days you pay, the cemetery is full of souls that know living is worth the cost.
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Don't wait till it's too late to learn that lesson.
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Living is worth the cost.
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But make no mistake, being alive is not the same thing as living.
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Just like throwing something away is not the same thing as giving.
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So, if you haven’t yet found your love of life, I suggest you keep on digging.
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And allow yourself to feel your way through all the hurt and all the rage.
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And as you feel, allow yourself to finally turn the page.
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That’s how we heal.
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And it might hurt like hell, but you’ll have shown us we’ll be okay to feel it all and still love life.
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That’s heaven.
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And you’ll have helped pave the way.
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That's heaven.
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Can you feel it?
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Heaven is here today.
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(Applause)
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Context & Background
In a thought-provoking TEDx talk, Adam Roa addresses the crucial theme of self-love and personal acceptance. He emphasizes that self-worth and love can often be overshadowed by societal pressures that dictate our understanding of value and beauty. Roa's poignant message resonates deeply with many, as he encourages viewers to look inward and recognize that they are already whole and enough. By sharing his own experiences and reflections, he inspires a transformative mindset that can shape our relationships with ourselves and others.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- “You are who you’ve been looking for.” - A reminder that the answers often lie within oneself.
- “Treat yourself like someone you love.” - A powerful mantra to encourage self-compassion.
- “You are already enough.” - An affirmation that underlines the essence of self-acceptance.
- “Your flaws are simply protections against all the doubts you have.” - A comforting thought that helps shift the perspective on perceived imperfections.
- “Take a good, long look in the mirror.” - An imploring invitation to confront oneself honestly.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively incorporate the teachings from Adam Roa's talk into your language learning, consider this structured approach:
- Select a Segment: Begin by choosing a short, impactful clip from the talk. Focus on repetitive phrases that resonate with you and can serve as daily affirmations.
- Listen Actively: Pay close attention to the speaker's intonation and emotion. Note how he emphasizes key phrases, using his voice to convey meaning.
- Shadow Speak: Utilize the shadowspeak technique by repeating what Roa says simultaneously. Mimic his rhythm and tone as you practice to improve English pronunciation effectively.
- Record Yourself: After practicing, record your shadowing attempts. Listen to the playback to evaluate your pronunciation and intonation in comparison to the original.
- Reflect and Repeat: Reflect on the messages of self-love as you practice. Repeat the shadowing process daily to reinforce both language skills and positive self-affirmations.
By integrating this method with the content of Roa’s talk, you can enhance your English speaking proficiency while fostering a healthier self-image. Using resources like shadowspeaks can aid in perfecting your pronunciation as you learn to communicate with confidence.
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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