Shadowing Practice: When You Finally Stop Living in Your Head, Life Becomes Peaceful Again - Learn English Speaking with Video

There's this fear that's kind of lived inside of me for a few years now.

It's the fear that one day I'm going to get to the end of my life

and realize that I was never actually here.

Like physically, my body showed up.

I sat at dinners.

I went on vacations.

I hugged people I love.

I built businesses.

I walked through airports.

I drank coffee.

I listened to music.

But like mentally, I was somewhere else throughout my entire life.

Thinking about the future, replaying the past, analyzing conversations that I had had a couple days before,

or preparing for problems that never actually even came,

or trying to optimize every moment of my life instead of actually inhabiting my life.

And so I started realizing something a couple years ago, and it really, really woke me up.

Most people, including myself, don't live in reality.

Most people live in psychological time.

Your body exists in the present moment, but your mind is either in memory or it's in imagination.

And it's not like the memory is only thinking about the best moments of your life

or when you went to Disney for the first time as a child.

It's not like your imagination is always imagining all of the amazing things that could happen today.

No, it's usually the exact opposite of that.

Your fears, your worries, your limiting beliefs, your regrets, doom and gloom.

And there's this hidden cost to living entirely in your mind.

You slowly lose contact with life itself.

You stop hearing your partner, even though they're speaking to you right there.

You stop noticing all of the details and the colors of a beautiful sunset.

You stop feeling fully in your body.

You stop inhabiting your own existence.

And you basically become like this floating head dragging a meat suit around.

And I realized at some point, I don't want to die having spent my entire life mentally absent from the only thing that I actually ever had,

which is this present moment right here.

So over the past year, I've become obsessive about learning how to come back to reality.

and I've been practicing presence.

In fact, I've said this a couple of times in the podcast, but I have a tattoo right here on my right wrist that I see all day long.

And the tattoo says, be here now.

I probably see it 30, 40 times a day.

I didn't get it because it like looks cool.

I didn't get it because it's all spiritual and that's something that Ram Dass says or any of that, even though I love Ram Dass.

It's because I genuinely need a reminder.

I had to get it tattooed on myself because I need a reminder because my mind wanders constantly.

and I'm sure yours does too.

And so I want you to know your brain was designed to leave the present moment.

There's a network in your brain that's called the default mode network.

Neuroscientists discovered that when you're not fully engaged in this present moment, this network lights up.

And so it replays the past, it simulates the future, it thinks about yourself,

it creates narratives and fears and worries and compares and it judges things and it mentally time travels.

And researchers at Harvard found

that human beings spend about 47% of their waking life thinking about something other than what they're currently doing.

And we will be right back.

Hey, real quick, let me interrupt you for something exciting.

On June 10th at 7 p.m.

Eastern, I'm doing a free live Zoom session called Break the Ceiling 2026.

This is for anybody who knows that they're capable of more, but they just keep self-sabotaging and hitting the same ceilings no matter what they try.

I'm gonna teach you exactly why that keeps happening and how to finally change it so that your income, your relationships, your happiness, your mindset, your entire life is better.

You can register for free by scanning that QR code right there

or by going to BreakTheCeiling2026.com and I will see you live on that session.

And now back to the show.

47%, almost half of our lives are just full of basically like mental masturbation.

And the scary part about it is the same study found

that wandering minds are associated with lower happiness levels than anything else.

Meaning the more that you are in your head, the less happier you are.

Or if you want to flip it another way, if you want to be happier be present.

So it's our inability to stay connected to reality while we're in it. And

when I first read this study I sat here thinking like

holy shit this is crazy like people are missing their entire lives while trying to think their way into a better life.

And so over the past couple years, I started noticing kind of profound.

The only thing that actually is ever really in this present moment, like right now, a lot of times is our body.

That's it.

Like your mind can leave, your thoughts can leave, your imagination, all of that can leave, but your body is always here.

Your breath is always here.

Your heartbeat is always here.

The feeling in your hands is here, like the sensation of the bottom of your left foot right now is here.

And so if your mind is always wandering, the portal to come back to reality is getting into your body.

Anxiety lives in the mind.

Peace is accessed through the body.

And this is where a lot of self-development people accidentally get trapped.

They stay in cognition forever, the brain forever.

More podcasts, more books, more learning, more journaling, more more analyzing, more understanding.

Believe me, I've done this.

I've got a freaking podcast called The Mindset Mentor, right?

So don't get me wrong.

I understand.

I understand all of it, that it is important.

Like it is very, very important to understand yourself intellectually.

But healing and experiencing life requires sometimes you getting out of the mind and being like fully present in this moment.

You cannot think your way into being present.

You have to embody your way to being present and

that is embody through the body and

so i want to go a little bit deeper than just

a surface level here like not just like hey meditate

and become present bro like that's not what i want presence can feel uncomfortable for a lot of us

and the reason why is because thinking whether we realize

or not is often an avoidance strategy like your mind keeps moving

because stillness and boredom forces you to feel

and many people have spent their entire lives unconsciously avoiding feeling

when you stop scrolling when you stop distracting yourself

when you stop thinking so much suddenly there's like uncomfortable feelings that can come up

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like feelings that we've been like kind of trying to push under the rug

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and act like are not there So it could be like sadness that you haven't felt in a while.

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It could be grief.

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It could be loneliness.

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It could be these fears and worries.

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It could be emptiness.

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It could be restlessness.

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And so those are so uncomfortable, the brain goes, nope, let's go ahead and plan next Tuesday.

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Because it is an avoidance strategy more than anything else.

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Overthinking is often emotional avoidance, like wearing an intellectual disguise.

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Like, let that one land for a second.

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We all tend to overthink, but a lot of times overthinking is emotional avoidance, not wanting to feel something, wearing an intellectual disguise.

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And smart people are especially good at this.

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So if you're smart, you're good at this because you can philosophize your pain instead of actually feeling your pain.

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and they can explain their trauma beautifully while still being fully disconnected from their body.

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Like you can understand your nervous system and still never inhabit your nervous system in your life.

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And so how do we get out of our own heads?

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Like let's put it into a step-by-step process.

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Like I wanna give you some real practices, not just surface level stuff.

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These are things that genuinely changed my life over the past couple of years, okay?

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Number one is you need to interrupt thought with sensation.

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Most people try to fight their thoughts with thoughts.

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That's like trying to get out of a hole by digging.

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You're just going to make yourself deeper and deeper.

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It does not work.

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Your thoughts are infinite.

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You can think about like thoughts never end, right?

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So instead, train yourself to shift from like your brain and your thoughts into what you feel.

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Here's what I mean.

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The moment that you notice yourself spiraling mentally, don't ask yourself, how do I stop thinking?

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Ask yourself, what can I physically feel right now?

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Like anything.

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You can feel like, even right now, listen to my voice, right?

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You can feel your feet.

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You can feel your breathing.

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You can feel the temperature of the room.

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You can feel, if you really pay attention, your heartbeat.

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That's how you know you're really present.

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You can feel the tension that might be in your jaw.

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You can feel the palm of both of your hands.

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You can feel your body on your chair if you're sitting down right now.

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This works because sensation anchors you into the present moment.

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Sensation pulls you into this moment when your mind is somewhere else.

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Okay, so that's number one.

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Number two, try to stop narrating your entire life.

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Most people are not really experiencing life.

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They're narrating life.

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let me tell you what I mean right something happens

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and then your brain creates a story as if you're watching a movie

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and there's a narrator explaining the movie and

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so something might happen to you and you might say well this means

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that I'm not good enough or what if they don't call me back

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or I should have probably done this instead

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or why didn't they call me back like they were supposed to

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or why did they say that to me

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and it's like we're constantly narrating

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and trying to make meaning out of every single moment and

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so your inner narrator never shuts up unless you interrupt it

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and so what I started practicing in it is not easy to do was moments of intentional

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non-narration right meaning when I sit down in the morning can I drink my coffee without

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mentally commenting on the coffee or by thinking of something else. And

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so I use drinking coffee as my first anchor in the

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morning to try to like really pull myself into the present moment.

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Can I walk from one place to another in my house without mentally rehearsing what I'm gonna be doing later on today?

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Can I sit in silence without thinking about all of the stuff on my to-do list?

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Without needing some interpretation of something else.

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This is so freaking hard.

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I'm telling you it is.

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Everyone is bad at this first.

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Please understand this.

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The first few times you try this, you're probably going to get anxious because it's just so hard to do and it might piss you off, right?

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But reality, when you really work at this, reality becomes so unbelievably vivid when you stop narrating it.

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And it's real weird because I always heard people talk about how vivid reality can be like this present moment.

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And I was like, what in the fuck does that even mean?

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I was like, I don't, I don't get it.

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And then the more you work at being present, the more you realize like every moment can be so rich, but our brain is usually just somewhere else, right?

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And our brain's trying to create meaning in every moment, trying to predict the next.

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And so I want you to really stop trying to narrate your entire life.

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Okay.

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Next thing is to create something that I call arrival rituals.

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An arrival ritual, like most people physically arrive somewhere long before they mentally arrive there.

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Like you walk into your house, but mentally you're still at work for the next two hours, right?

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You can sit down with your spouse, but mentally you're thinking about your inbox, right?

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So I started practicing what I call arrival rituals.

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They're like these tiny little resets between environments.

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So before walking into my house, I'll sit in the car, I'll take a really deep breath.

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I'll grab the wheel and I'll try to feel the wheel under my hands inside of the car before I go in.

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I'll try to feel my feet and I just remind myself like, hey, just be here for just be here for a moment, right?

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I'm trying to anchor myself in the present moment instead of allowing my mind to be somewhere else.

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So before a conversation or like as somebody starts talking.

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I don't just like think about the thing I want to say next.

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I look at them and I try to look deeply at the person's face and be like, I say to myself, be with this person.

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Like just notice the lines on their face.

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Notice their eye color, right?

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Before eating, I'll sit down and I'll be like, all right actually taste this like these little tiny micro transitions

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retrain your brain to stop disappearing from present moments okay the

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next one is try to learn to notice the moment

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that you leave yourself like build awareness become aware of the exact moment

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when you disappear from the present moment for me it It usually looks like I would grab my phone unconsciously

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or I would be planning what I'd be doing in like future rehearsing, right?

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Or like replaying old conversations or trying to optimize imaginary scenarios that haven't even happened yet or like mentally escaping discomfort.

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Awareness is everything.

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It's not about fixing it in this moment.

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It's just about becoming aware because you cannot change unconscious patterns.

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So the goal isn't perfection.

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The goal is just catching yourself faster.

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And the more that you do it, the better you will become at noticing when your mind actually leaves this present moment, right?

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So it's just about building the awareness first.

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The next thing, you've heard me say this on the podcast so many times, number five is to spend time in silence.

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What a novel thought.

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You've never heard me say that before, right?

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Modern humans are terrified of silence because silence removes distraction.

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And when distraction disappears, you meet yourself.

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and I genuinely believe that overstimulation is the number one reason why people feel so disconnected from life.

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They have notifications and podcasts are constantly coming out and scrolling

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and emails and music all day and content all day

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and scroll oh god it's just

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so much shit being bashed into our brains all day long

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and your nervous system never really settles and so I started doing this really radical thing.

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Nothing.

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It was so hard for me being somebody who's so obsessed with productivity my entire life, the past 20 something years of running businesses.

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I did nothing.

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No phone, no podcast, no stimulation, just sitting.

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And I thought I wanted to run my head through a

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wall right at first it is an uncomfortable as hell then

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eventually once again life started to become more vivid like i could feel the wind on my face

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when i wasn't even noticing it before like my coffee just

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kind of like tasted better like music i started like noticing

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parts of it was kind of weird especially like listening to pink floyd like i noticed like holy shit

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that guitar sound i've never heard that guitar sound in my life and i'm like

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I've heard this song 4,000 times and I've never heard that part.

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And I was like, oh my God, I think I'm actually here.

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Like I'm really here in this moment.

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Like conversations felt like they were more productive and like richer and deeper for me.

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Presence restores like the texture to our existence, right?

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And so the thing I want you to think about, I think one of the greatest tragedies in our life would be arriving at death, having never fully inhabited our own existence,

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having memories of your life without fully being there.

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And I think that's what millions, if not billions of people are doing right now.

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Their body is at dinner, but their mind is at work.

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Their body is with their child, but their mind is in anxiety.

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Their body is on vacation, but their mind is mentally freaking out about needing to check email.

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And the truth is your life is not happening someday.

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It's happening right now, like an ordinary Tuesday, a cup of coffee in the morning, a conversation with your spouse.

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Like this is your life.

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Not later.

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Now.

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So maybe the goal isn't to become perfectly enlightened and become this person who never overthinks anything ever again.

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Maybe the goal is just to be as present as we possibly can.

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Again and again and again.

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We keep losing ourselves, but we come back to our body.

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We come back to our body.

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We come back to reality.

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We come back to this moment because this moment, truthfully, everybody, is really the only thing that we have.

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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.

Shadowing Practice: When You Finally Stop Living in Your Head, Life Becomes Peaceful Again - Learn English Speaking with Video

Context & Background

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

What is the Shadowing Technique?