Shadowing Practice: Why trying to make the “best” choice can make you less happy - Learn English Speaking with Video

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If you're anything like me, and you often struggle with trying to make the right choice, this episode of immersion could possibly change your life.

Doing research for this episode with the book,

The Paradox of Choice has honestly been one of the first episodes in a long time where I know

that I'm going to be living differently after this research.

So let's start this out with a brief question for you regarding making the right choice or being happy with your choice,

because those don't always go hand in hand.

For example, would you rather go on a vacation that is about 70 % perfect or ideal, but you love it, you have a great time?

Or would you rather go on a vacation that is 95 % ideal or close to perfect,

but you end up not being able to enjoy it as much?

I think most of us, given those two choices, would choose option A.

We'd rather be happy with the vacation option

but due to this really interesting way of living called maximizing

which we're going to get into many of us end up living closer to that option B.

Today we're going to be unpacking the difference between satisficing

or choosing an option that is good enough and learning to see the good in it and appreciating it.

I know it sounds a bit trite but stay with me.

Or maximizing where we try to make the best optimal choice,

but then we often get plagued with regret or social comparison or wondering if it was the right choice later.

And it really is not an enjoyable way to live.

So today we're going to unpack what these terms are, some interesting nuance in the research, and then we're going to talk about practical steps for

when we might choose to satisfy how to do it a bit more often

so that we can be happier with the decisions we make and thus the lives that we're living.

And don't worry, this doesn't mean just settle

and just choose to only see the good in things

because actually this can open up more bandwidth or energy for the things

that are important for us to focus a bit more on.

Welcome to Immersion, 30

Minutes Beneath the Surface.

I'm your host, Pamela, and here we focus on psychology and philosophy topics to find meaning in the modern world.

Let's dive in.

So where do these terms come from?

Herbert Simon introduced the term satisficing in the 1950s as a model of bounded rationality,

discussing the idea that humans will often choose a good enough option rather than exhausting every single option.

And we know this is true.

When you're dating, especially if you live in a place like

New York City.

You're not going to date every possible person that could be a viable prospect in the dating market.

You're going to date a few people and then choose someone or choose to be single.

You won't try to meet every single person.

So we know that this is how we make any sort of choice.

At some point, something has to be good enough.

We cannot look at every single pair of jeans in your town before choosing a pair of jeans.

And this idea of satisficing was popularized in Barry Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice, which we're discussing in this series.

And he came up with the term maximizing to describe the opposite.

When people try to get as much information as possible, to compare as many options as possible, to try to make the best choice,

as opposed to satisficing, which is making a good enough choice.

And just hearing about these two modes of living, you're probably already coming up with the pros and cons for maximizing and and satisficing.

But before we get into some of those, let's do a really brief quiz.

This is adapted from the quiz that is in Barry Schwartz's book.

We're going to just do four questions instead of a longer one,

and it'll help you get a good idea of where you're at on this spectrum.

Question number one, when you're choosing a song to listen to or a show to watch on streaming, do you often take a while to decide?

And even after you decide, do you sometimes flip around or wonder if you made the right choice out of all the options.

When you shop for a new appliance like a coffee maker,

do you choose pretty quickly and find something that meets your needs and then you're done with it?

Or do you feel inundated by research options and overwhelmed with trying to find the right option?

And then for questions three and four, you'll see how much you agree with the following statements.

Three, no matter what I do, I have the highest standards for myself.

4. I often fantasize about living lives that are different from my own

and other paths that are quite different from my actual life.

And of course you can check out

Barry's book for the full quiz and there probably are some quizzes online.

I can link one if I find one in the show notes.

But here you get the sense that maximizing and satisficing is not across the board.

So for instance, when I'm choosing a consumer good, like if I was choosing a coffee maker, I would be able to choose that pretty quickly.

But numbers three and four, when it comes to standards for myself or what life path I'm on,

these more macro views, I really sometimes struggle or I especially have in the past and it's something that I'm working on.

So it's helpful to note what are the areas that you satisfy

and what are the areas that you maximize because generally nobody is across the board one or the other.

And you might notice these trends for yourself too.

Maybe when it comes to media, like the first example, you start watching something

and then you five minutes later click out of it and try watching something else.

And by the end of the evening, you've watched a little bit of like four videos and weren't really that invested in any of them.

We're going to get into a little later why that happens,

how often the more options we consider it makes us less invested in the option we end up going with

because that lack of satisfaction that's part of what happens when we evaluate this way.

And so as you might already be starting to gather, it is really important to learn about this for our well -being.

Maximizers tend to report more regret, more social comparison, or at least more negative views of the self when they do participate in social comparison,

less satisfaction, more depression or depressive symptoms.

And it's important to note that the direction is not necessarily causal.

This is something

Barry notes in his book is that we don't know

if these things are just correlated or if maximizing actually makes us less happy.

I personally think that it is cyclical.

Barry has noted that maximizing probably makes us feel worse about a lot of things.

If you think about it, if you're trying to make the perfect choice, even after you make a choice,

you'll often wonder, was that the right choice?

You remember that question from the end of the quiz.

Do you often think about other possible lives?

Because if you're really trying to make the best choice, you might think, oh, I'm a teacher,

but I've always wondered about going into administration within the school

or maybe going back to school and actually becoming a therapist instead.

And, you know, when I was younger, I wanted to be a marine biologist.

And I wonder how my life would have turned out if I had done that.

And maybe you log on LinkedIn

and you see someone doing something totally different like they went from teaching more into consulting

and oh it looks like they're making a lot of money

and traveling and what would

that life be like versus someone satisficing in this area might be more likely to say

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this is the life I chose this is good enough

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it meets my standards why would I think about all those other paths

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it's not relevant for me going back to some of my personal theories I personally think

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that a little bit of it has to do with personality types.

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If you're very creative or imaginative, or if you have perfectionistic tendencies,

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or if you believe you have a lot of control over your life, a high internal locus of control and a lot of agency,

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all of these things are going to lead you to try to optimize

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or might lead you to imagine other lives for yourself.

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So I think there's a lot of reasons we might be a maximizer.

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Maybe your parents had really high standards.

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Maybe you have a bit of diagnosed or undiagnosed OCD.

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So you feel a bit of a compulsion to keep coming back to a certain thought.

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And maybe working with a certain professional on that would help.

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I think that there are so many causes that could lead someone to be a maximizer that are not as simple as,

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oh, you just want to make the best decision.

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There's a lot that could lead you to be that way.

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Now, you might be wondering, why would having a very high sense of agency lead to issues?

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Isn't that a good thing?

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And largely it is.

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But if you believe that you have a lot of control over your life and you have all of these options,

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you're going to feel bad about yourself if you made a choice that wasn't as ideal.

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You're thinking, I could have prevented that problem and I didn't.

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And the problem is with the more options we consider, we see all of these great options we could have had.

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Let's go back to that example of a vacation.

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And Barry uses a pretty similar example in his book.

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Let's say you're choosing between a getaway to a beach

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or a very cozy cabin in the woods

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or a family trip to the suburbs with some movie nights on the couch and dinners you make together.

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And maybe you end up choosing between five potential trips.

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As you start adding more and more options, you start thinking, why can't I get the relaxation

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that this one would bring and the excitement that this one would bring and the community that this one would bring.

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You start to think I'm missing out on all of these different things, when you're really not, because as we know, we are finite humans.

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And this is why economists always say, opportunity cost is really only the second option.

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Really, you're only choosing between A and B.

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You're not choosing between A, B, C, D, and B because you can't have all of those.

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So you're choosing between your top two choices.

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The problem is, is that as we evaluate A, B, C, D, E, we're thinking about all the good parts about all of those.

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And we feel like we're missing out on all of the good parts of all of those.

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And in our world and life that inundates us with all of the wonderful things about all these other paths, all of these other consumer choices,

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all these places you could go, all these foods you could eat, all of these people you could be with on dating apps,

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like we're going to get into next episode.

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It can feel so overwhelming.

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It can feel like I'll never be able to find the

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optimal path out of the thousands of options surrounding me all of the time.

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It can feel incredibly overwhelming.

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Something we're going to keep diving into in this series, but let's focus here specifically on maximizing and satisficing.

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So I think now let's dig a little deeper into the psychology elements.

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For the areas that you are maximizing in, there is probably something really important to you tied to it.

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If you maximize a lot, for instance, with consumer decisions or how you spend your money,

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it's probably because you really value money or maybe even underneath that just security in general.

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If you're someone that maximizes a lot with your standards for work, that's probably because you tie maybe some of your worth to

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that or maybe you were brought up in a family where delivering high results was expected of you constantly.

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So it can be helpful to ask what are the areas where I'm maximizing

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because I attach a great importance to the results of my decisions

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and what are the areas where I satisfy because I recognize

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that good enough is good enough

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and at the end like I said we are going to get into more specific action steps here

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but I think that

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if we want to go even one layer deeper this is a personal theory

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that I have this is not something in the book like we talked about

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but we're going to touch on from a different angle here.

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I think that certain personality types are associated with maximizing.

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And one of those aspects could be sensitivity, big emotions, maybe even a touch of neuroticism.

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And my take here is that what happens is we have this sensitivity

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and emotions and we're scared of pain because we've felt pain deeply before.

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Then there's the desire to avoid making the wrong decision to try to avoid pain.

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So we deliberate, we think we maximize, then for all the reasons we're talking about this here, this leads to more comparison,

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more regret, more uncertainty, and perceived opportunity costs of Oh, I could have made the right decision, I should have made the right decision.

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This then leads us to feel worse, and have a worse experience with what we chose.

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And this can lead us to feel motivated to avoid future pain with more deliberation.

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This can unfortunately be a negative cycle.

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So it's not necessarily just that maximizing causes regret, fear of regret can cause maximizing.

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So let's look a little bit closer at two more downsides of maximizing and then get into some action steps.

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One of them is the negative aspects of social comparison.

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From a 2002 study, Schwartz et al found in a study of maximizing versus is satisfying.

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Happiness is a matter of choice is the name of the study.

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They had maximizers and satisficers do a anagram puzzle.

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While someone also in the lab that they assumed was a peer,

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but really was someone that was part of the research team also did a puzzle next to them.

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If that peer did the puzzle faster or better, this had a greater negative effect on their mood or self -evaluation.

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So the way we could think about this is a maximizer, if they're around someone doing better than them, they're going to feel worse about themselves,

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the way they view and evaluate themselves, and also they're going to be in a worse mood.

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This begs the question again, how self -esteem is tied into this.

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Does someone become a maximizer because maybe they have lower self -esteem?

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Or do we develop a lower self -esteem because we're trying to maximize, we're trying to optimize and do it all and be the best

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and that makes us feel bad about ourselves when we can't do that?

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And all of these are interesting questions we can maybe get into more another time,

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but we can just let them kind of sit in the back of our mind for now without a clean answer.

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And the final thing

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I want to talk about in the negative side here is a bit more on this aspect of regret.

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It's one thing to sort of wonder if you went to the right college

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and occasionally maybe that pops in your mind of,

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oh, I wonder what it would have been like in my educational experience if I'd gone to a different school.

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And maybe that doesn't impact you that much.

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But if you're maximizing across the board, if you're constantly wondering if you made the right decision for where to send your kids to school,

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or if it really was right to follow through with that divorce, or maybe you should still be with that person,

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or if you're wondering if this course you just signed up for actually was the right decision

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or this other one would have been better, and you're constantly second guessing yourself, it's a really debilitating way to live.

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And unfortunately, I think a lot of people live in this state more than they realize.

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This is an easy thing to kind of think we can compartmentalize like, oh yeah, don't have regrets and don't overthink things.

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But this can be extremely pervasive.

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If you again, just let this concept hang out in your conscious and subconscious mind for the next couple weeks,

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notice the many areas you're doing it and how it affects your well -being.

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I think you might be surprised

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and I also think you might be surprised how quickly your life can change

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when you start to make changes to be more of a satisficer.

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This is something

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that I've been really pleasantly surprised with even just in the recent time I've been applying this

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because I've heard of this concept a long time ago

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but I didn't actually dive deep into the research and application until doing this series.

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So let's now go into six steps to learn to satisfy a bit more often and increase well -being.

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The first step is just to simply see it in action.

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Barry Schwartz discusses why would anyone maximize when clearly it's not the better option.

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It's ironic because he said that if someone's actually maximizing, they wouldn't actually be a maximizer because it doesn't lead to a better life in general.

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So the first step is to see yourself doing it.

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To realize when you're trying to acquire more information into the point of clear diminishing returns.

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More thinking is not making this a better choice.

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And because that is easier said than done, we'll keep moving on to the other steps here.

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Another step is to learn from yourself.

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There are areas where you satisfy, where you say, I know what I want, I choose it, and it's good enough.

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And then what we want to do is learn through observing that decision making process, going to the counter, deciding that vanilla yogurt is good enough,

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eating it, being happy with it.

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How can you expand the bubble of that a bit more often?

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Something that is not maybe an area where you're really entrenched and stuck in that maximizing mindset, but something where it's sort of borderline.

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How can you apply that satisficing a bit more often and train that muscle?

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And then speaking of learning from ourselves, we can also learn from others.

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There are people in my life who do really well with satisficing.

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And I'll give you an example with relationships.

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So someone I know is in a marriage and they've always been pretty happy in their relationships in general.

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And she told me that it really just came down to knowing what she wants.

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And then once she found someone that met that criteria, that's it.

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She's not really going to overthink it.

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The list was not that elaborate.

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I think it was like five things.

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Now, I don't think that she

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She was walking around with a checklist approaching this very analytically.

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She was following her feelings as well, something we talked about in the last episode.

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But having a list of standards really helps because if you're just dating and thinking, I'll know when I find the right person,

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you might keep looking and looking and then who is a good enough fit in a sea of so many options.

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But if you know, these are my standards.

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I've met someone that meets those standards.

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I'm going to commit and move on it's a different way of approaching decisions and this can apply across the board.

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Which brings up a really interesting point that

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Barry Schwartz goes into is that it's not that satisficers have low standards.

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They can actually have very high standards but once they find an option that meets those standards they decide.

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I think sometimes maximizers are unclear what those standards even are.

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If they're shopping for a car

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and they don't really know what they want in a car of course

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that's going to lead to some interesting deliberation and being stuck between choices

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because they might not even know what they want in the first place.

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So a step could be before you make a choice or even before you get into the moment of decision,

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coming up with a list of what is important to you.

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This is where things get a bit more messy or complicated though,

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is because sometimes even the idea of thinking about how you make a choice affects how you feel about it.

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Thinking explicitly about what we value can itself alter what we report valuing.

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For instance, if you think, is safety more important to me in a car or price, you might start then thinking,

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oh, well, safety is really the most important thing.

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That's all that matters.

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And then that might even change how you think through something.

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And there was some pretty interesting stuff in the book here.

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For instance, in a study on relationship satisfaction, people would, I don't know if they were journaling or talking about it,

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but essentially they were evaluating the relationship periodically and it changed how they felt about their relationship.

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So sometimes even just trying to put something into words can change how you think about it.

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If you're making a list of five things you like about your partner, some things might be easier to put into words than others.

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And then maybe there's sort of some intangibles you couldn't put into words that aren't on that list.

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And then maybe you start thinking about your partner differently.

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It's very interesting.

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So this isn't to just say, think about your values and analyze more and it will help.

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But I do think occasionally having a clear list of standards can help

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and simplify things because satisficers are known for once something meets my standards, I choose and commit.

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So knowing your standards and being a bit more clear on them, I would think could help.

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Another step is reminiscent of cognitive behavioral therapy or simply changing our thought patterns.

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When you notice yourself

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getting stuck in these sort of loops of I should have chosen differently

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or oh my goodness I need to make the right choice right here it's really really important we can question

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and push back on our thoughts

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so let's take an example here I recently got back on LinkedIn after being off

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it for a really long time so I think

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that it works really well here because

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when you log on LinkedIn you see basically everyone from your past and how they're doing professionally and only the highlight reels.

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So it can encourage this line of thinking of,

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oh, what would my life be like if I had gone to law school or things like that?

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Now, first of all, I really am glad I didn't go to law school for a lot of reasons,

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but it is something that I considered my first year of college.

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And then actually a professor

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that was an attorney talked me out of it for several reasons based on what he knew about me and my goals.

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But anyway, imagine I log on to LinkedIn and I see someone that has taken a really interesting position in DC.

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They've just done some really fascinating stuff with their career after going to law school, someone that I went to college with.

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And I could think, oh, wait a second, that seems like a really interesting life path.

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Maybe I should have done that.

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Boom, boom, boom, going into a thought spiral.

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Away we go with it.

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That can really go for a while before you even catch yourself,

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especially if you're scrolling on LinkedIn for a while and seeing all of these other possible paths.

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When that happens, you can stop and say, wait a second, what are the reasons that I didn't go to law school?

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Oh yeah, the whole reason that I was considering doing

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that is because I thought it looked like it did on TV with being in courtrooms and talking to people all day.

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And that professor was telling me that that's such a small percent of what it's actually like.

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And he told me what the job was like and, oh yeah, that's right.

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And that decision actually makes sense.

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Or you could even just remember the other parts like the debt you would have had after

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or the stress that might have come with that job.

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And not to say that you're trying to tear down that career or people that do it.

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You're just trying to not get carried away with a certain thought process about my life would have been better

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if I did this.

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You're trying to question those thoughts.

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You're trying to pull them apart instead of letting them carry so much magnitude or perceived truth.

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And you can do this for any decision

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when you start to feel yourself getting pulled down by the weight of regret

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or the weight of having to make the perfect choice, you can remember that there is no perfect choice and push back on those thoughts.

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And finally, we can reduce our choice sets.

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The more options that you examine, the more likely you are to be a maximizer.

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So Barry talks about in his book, our culture these days with all the options we have encourages maximizing.

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It encourages the idea that, you know, a commercial.

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Oh, wait, would my life be better off with that product?

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I didn't think I need that product.

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Now do I need to compare that product to the one I currently have?

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I thought the one I was doing was just fine.

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And it's not just commercials.

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It's just all of the optionality that we have in general these days.

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But when it comes to where you want to live, what you want your family situation to be like, what job you want to have,

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who do you want to spend time with as friends?

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How much time do you want to spend with them?

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What do you want to do with your morning?

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Should you be on your phone right now or should you be meditating?

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Should you have gone on a trip or should you have saved your money?

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We have so much choice now.

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Many of us in many situations.

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Of course, not everyone does have the same degree of choice.

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As I'm wrapping up here, I'm realizing a couple things I didn't get to.

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So a couple more tips.

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One is to examine our expectations, not only our standards, but what we expect from life.

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I remember in college, I asked my positive psychology professor about job satisfaction.

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And I said, If you find a job that is 80 % of stuff you like, 80 % good stuff, is that pretty good?

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Knowing that there's no perfect option.

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I think we were talking about something like this and him and everyone in the class kind of looked at me appalled.

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Like, are you kidding me?

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Of course, that's really high for a job.

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You should be really happy with that job.

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But I think that often we can have these sort of distorted expectations.

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We can think I want some situation to be better than it is.

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It can be hard in a society like ours,

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a consumer society, where we can think I can pick and choose and make something better to then realize, no, maybe my expectations are unrealistic.

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Maybe 60 percent good in a certain area is actually pretty good.

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Maybe it's good enough.

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And often you've probably noticed that when your expectations are exceeded, you actually like something.

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Maybe you go into a movie and you had heard not great things about it.

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And then if you ended up enjoying it, you could end up really liking it, even if maybe it's not the best movie,

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but it surpassed your expectations.

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And we know the opposite could happen.

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Maybe everyone told you something was the best movie.

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So you were expecting a 95 % if you were to give it your own

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Rotten Tomatoes score.

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And then because it was a 85%, oh, that didn't quite meet my expectations.

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So something the book also goes into is how so much of this is relative, but we can learn to adjust our expectations.

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And I don't think that that is settling in a negative way.

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It's just coming into contact with reality, which brings us to the final point is that we get to choose what we spend more time choosing,

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what we want to really focus on trying to maximize.

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Because if we try to maximize everything, we're going to be let down.

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We're going to waste a lot of time in analysis paralysis and regret and comparison in a negative way.

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And we're also just going to fall prey to many mental shortcuts

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or heuristics or poor decision making

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because there's just too many decisions in our life to try to make them all extremely well.

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But if we choose the areas of our life to try to really maximize

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and if it's not causing negative issues in our life and if that additional analysis actually makes us better off,

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this is something we can observe over time through experimentation, then it's worth it.

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This is a book I'm going to come back to because at least for me, decision making has been something I've studied for a long time.

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I've always known about this principle.

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And again, until applying it, it did not actually make my life better.

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Oh, go figure.

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That's like most things in psychology.

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Thank you so much for being with us.

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Speak to you next week.

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We will go into the paradox of choice with dating apps,

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how the way we evaluate relationships is so different in this modern era compared to every generation before us.

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We're going to keep going with this decision -making series for several episodes.

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Would love to hear your thoughts on any of these topics through either a voicemail or a comment.

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And lastly, if this was something that you found helpful, this idea of maximizing and satisficing.

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Sharing with a friend and discussing this topic with them could be helpful.

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Maybe they might even help you see, oh, here's an area where you have a certain tendency, maybe where you didn't even realize,

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or you can help hold each other accountable for working on some of these ways of making decisions

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because it's someone to talk it through with.

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Looking forward to diving deeper on the decision -making series and speak to you next Sunday.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why trying to make the “best” choice can make you less happy”. This video has 382 sentences and 5248 words to shadow. The speech runs for 28:24. The speaker talks fast, about 185 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
maximize verb	/ˈmæksəmaɪz/	To make as large as possible.
regret verb	/ɹɪˈɡɹɛt/	To feel sorry about (a thing that has or has not happened), afterthink: to wish that a thing had not happened, that something else had happened instead.
expectation noun	/ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/	The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen.
satisfy verb	/ˈsætɪsfaɪ/	To be enough (for)
evaluate verb	/ɪˈvaljʊeɪt/	To draw conclusions from examining; to assess; to appraise.
helpful adjective	/ˈhɛlp.fl̩/	Furnishing help; giving aid; useful.
vacation noun	/veɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/	An extended trip or journey away from home for rest or pleasure.
psychology noun	/saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/	The study of the human mind.
satisfaction noun	/sætɪsˈfækʃən/	A fulfilment of a need or desire.
dive verb	/daɪv/	To swim under water.
quiz noun	/kwɪz/	A competition in the answering of questions.
topic noun	/ˈtɑpɪk/	A subject; a theme; a category or general area of interest.
encourage verb	/ɪnˈkʌɹ.ɪd͡ʒ/	To mentally support; to motivate, give courage, hope or spirit.
ideal adjective	/aɪˈdi(ə)l/	Pertaining to ideas, or to a given idea.
boom verb	/bum/	To make a loud, hollow, resonant sound.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
come up with verb	To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it.
go back to verb	To stem from; to originate in.
bring up verb	To mention.
check out verb	To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
come down to verb	To reach by moving down or reducing.
let down verb	To disappoint; to betray or fail somebody.
look forward to verb	To anticipate, expect, or wait for, especially with a feeling of approval or pleasure; to be excited or eager to.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

You won't try to meet every single person.
Do you often think about other possible lives?
Isn't that a good thing?
Let's go back to that example of a vacation.
What do you want to do with your morning?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if someone's actually maximizing, they wouldn't actually · if you're just dating and thinking, I'll know
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has honestly been · you've watched · has noted
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was popularized · is adapted · are just correlated
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	person that could · satisficing, which is · someone that was

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 124 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, we're, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, bandwidth /ˈbændwɪdθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, vacation /veɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/, satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, psychology /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like maximize, regret, expectation.

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 technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Why trying to make the “best” choice can make you less happy - Learn English Speaking with Video

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