Shadowing Practice: When Women Don’t Talk About Money, They Lose It | Emma Grede Explains - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Modern CEO started out as a newsletter designed to help executives and leaders navigate the world of modern organizations.
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Modern CEO started out as a newsletter designed to help executives and leaders navigate the world of modern organizations.
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This is our video series.
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Emma Greed is the co-founder and CEO of Good American, founding partner of Skims.
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She's a philanthropist, a podcaster, and an author.
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Her new book is Start With Yourself, A New Vision for Work and Life.
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Welcome, Emma.
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Thank you.
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What an introduction.
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That's so lovely.
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You have so many mediums and platforms available to you, whether it's your podcast, your appearances on Shark Tank, Dragon's Den.
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You have plenty of social outlets.
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Why a book?
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When I speak to women, you know, whether it be at a conference or people sliding to my DMs or stopping on the street, I think they imagine that I've magically found this 25th hour in the day.
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And the fact is, I haven't.
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And what I've tried to do in the book is to create this tool for self-leadership.
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It is the stories and the mindset that have got me there.
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And I really felt like it needed to be done in a longer form.
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In the book and in many of your interviews, you've talked about how hard you had to work as a young person.
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Do you feel like part of the message of the book is that everyone's got to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty?
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That is a huge part of it.
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But I think I'd go one step further because where we are in the culture right now, Social media has trained us to believe that there is such a thing as an overnight success.
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We don't see any of the messy part of what it means to actually start something and to fail and to learn and to try again.
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We also don't afford women the same type of ability to make mistakes as we do for men.
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A man can, you know, have a total failure of a business and go out and raise money the next day.
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That same privilege doesn't apply to women necessarily.
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I think if you want an extraordinary life, then that has to be coupled with extraordinary effort.
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But because of where we are in the culture, it's hard to say that without people being really offended, especially when you're a woman and you're supposed to lead with empathy and care and be a nurturer.
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When I say to people that, you know, you can't expect a pay rise on a three-day week, you know, I mean it.
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I'm deadly serious about it.
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You were really candid in the book about some of the missteps that you've made in your career.
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Have you always had an ability to talk candidly and openly about failure, or is that something that you feel you have permission to do now that you've been successful?
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I think it comes down to this idea that women are held to really unrealistic standards in business, and so talking about where I failed, why I failed, what I did differently next time, I want to be an example.
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I want to show people that you don't have one chance.
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It isn't like boom or bust.
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Life happens in chapters, and guess what?
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Like, I'm a million times better in my 40s than I was in my early 20s.
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And so there's an element of me really having learned to get out of my own way and be honest about what it takes because nobody gets it right first time.
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My life is just a series of me making mistakes and trying it again next time and hopefully getting it better.
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What is one tool that you use or one approach that you've taken in all the companies that you've managed that you think is really helpful in motivating people?
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What are some of the ways that you've been successful in getting teams on the same page?
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I don't know all the answers.
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I shouldn't be expected to know all the answers.
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I also look outside of myself for people to come in and to be experts and I allow them to own what it is that they contribute.
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And I think that when you build trust with partners in your business, when you build trust with your teams, magical things happen.
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Everybody understands what they bring to the party, everybody understands where they need to patch in for you because that's your natural weak spot, but there becomes almost this idea of value creation, like what is everybody bringing?
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And when everybody knows what they bring, you create this amazing culture for people to do their best work.
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thing that you're very passionate about is women and money.
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And we've had a couple of conversations.
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By the way, I really enjoy your sweater.
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I will say that.
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As we start to frame up women and money, I won't back down.
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It just feels really appropriate.
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You just like zoom in.
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Go for it.
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We are not going to back away from the conversation about women and money.
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Why do you think in 2026, women still don't talk about money?
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There are manifest reasons in our culture that we have been trained out of speaking about money.
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But, you know, my point of view is if you kind of elegantly avoid the subject of money, money will somehow elegantly avoid you.
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And what I want to do is to connect this idea that you can do deeply meaningful and impactful work and still be paid for it.
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I've always had companies that have done really great, important work and being able to give back once they're profitable.
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And so we have to put money at the center of the conversation.
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We have to start with money in the same way that we're going to start with ourselves.
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And one of the other areas where we've seen women hold back is as investors in startups and as angel investors.
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Are you seeing a change in that?
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I know you talk to a lot of fellow female founders, many of whom have cashed out or have seen a big exit.
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Are they investing?
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Women are exceptional.
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But the, I guess, our exceptionalism isn't fully realised in the halls of power, on the cap tables, in the places that matter.
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And I think that that is partly about our aversion towards risk and partly about our inability to speak freely about money and then to understand it.
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But I think it's really about starting to understand the connectedness between money.
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How do you take something and grow it into something else?
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And that can sometimes be a little bit of a foreign concept for women.
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I see far too often women thinking about everybody else in their lives before they think about themselves and before they think about their ability to be able to grow that money to make more money.
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Skims made the Inc.
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5000 list.
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That is the list of the 5000 fastest growing privately held companies in America.
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You made the list in 2024.
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The number was 1168 on that list.
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Skims is an example of a company that was maybe underestimated by people in the existing industry, in the shapewear industry, in the loungewear industry.
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Why do you think so many big established companies in this space missed the opportunity that you saw with Skims?
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I don't know why they missed it.
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You know, sometimes I think that being a woman and solving for something that is a problem you have
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is really, you know, only and can, you know, is only really uniquely and can only really uniquely be solved by another woman.
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You know, maybe there's just too many dudes that don't know what they're talking about.
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I don't know.
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It feels so obvious and so simple on the face of it.
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Like, make fantastic, beautiful, quality things that fill a need and solve solutions and sell them a price-value equation that makes sense.
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And, you know, it will work.
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And the people will come.
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The people will come and they did come.
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Emma, thank you so much for your time today.
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Thank you.
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will focus on listening and speaking skills by practicing shadowing techniques with Emma Grede's insights on leadership, perseverance, and women's issues related to finance. You will learn how to express complex ideas clearly while improving your pronunciation and intonation through shadow speech exercises. This engaging content not only hones your English-speaking skills but also offers valuable perspectives on empowerment and resilience that are relevant in today’s professional landscape.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Self-leadership: The ability to lead oneself towards success through personal accountability and decision-making.
- Overnight success: A term that implies achieving success quickly and without hard work, often misleading in the context of real-life achievements.
- Missteps: Mistakes or errors made in judgment or action, especially in a career context.
- Motivating: The act of inspiring or encouraging someone to feel enthusiastic about and committed to a task or responsibility.
- Value creation: The process of generating worth or benefits through various contributions within a team.
- Trust: The firm belief in someone's reliability or ability, crucial for effective teamwork.
- Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of others, often stressed in leadership roles.
Practice Tips
To maximize your learning experience using shadowing techniques, follow these tips:
- Use a shadowing app: Tools available in shadowing apps can help you record your voice while you practice shadowing Emma's speech. This allows you to compare your pronunciation and intonation with the original.
- Start Slow: Begin by listening to short segments of the video at a slower speed. As you become more comfortable, gradually increase the speed to match Emma's natural pace.
- Focus on Key Phrases: Pay special attention to the key vocabulary and phrases identified in this lesson. Repeat them as you hear them to reinforce your learning.
- Practice Shadow Speech: While listening, repeat Emma's words in real-time. This technique is crucial in shadowing and helps improve fluency, especially useful for IELTS speaking practice.
- Record and Review: Record your shadow speech sessions and listen back to evaluate your performance. This self-assessment helps identify areas for improvement.
- Engage with the Content: Reflect on the themes discussed in the video. How do they relate to your experiences? This reflection will enhance your understanding and retention of the language.
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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