Shadowing Practice: Why You’re Not Financially Free (Yet) - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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The only thing that's standing between you and financial freedom is just
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that you don't yet have the skills that you need for it.
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And the people that learn the skills are the ones that end up financially free.
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And the ones that don't are the ones that don't.
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Because it really is just a series of skills.
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Let's say your route to financial freedom is by starting your own business.
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What are the skills you need?
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Well, there is one set of skills that I like to label attract.
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So the skills of attracting customers.
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There is another set of skills that I like to call convert, which is how to convert customers from being strangers to actually giving you money for your stuff.
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And then there is a third set of skills called Delight, which is that once you've got a customer for your service or product, whatever thing you're doing, how do you give them a good experience?
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So that then they give you the four R's.
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The four R's are basically reviews, referrals, renewals, and most importantly, results.
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You actually want them to get results with whatever your product or service is, right?
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We attract, convert, delight.
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In the middle, we have the skills around operating.
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So this is sort of like operate.
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In the context of a business, this would be things like doing the taxes and stuff, right?
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You know, the basic stuff, registering a business, et cetera, et cetera.
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And then once you get to about $100,000 a year in revenue and beyond, you then have another set of skills that we like to think of as scale.
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These five categories, they're just, it's just a set of skills, man.
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In the same way that you didn't come out of the womb knowing how to drive, but you learned how to drive.
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And in the same way you didn't come out of the womb knowing how to tie your own shoelaces, but you learned how to tie your own shoelaces.
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No one comes out of the womb knowing the skills of sales
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or marketing or or customer service or delivery or finances or operations.
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But people that learn the skills are the ones
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that end up financially free and the ones that don't are the ones that don't.
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I was having a conversation with one of our Lifestyle Business Academy students the other day.
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This is our online business school where we help professionals build their own online businesses.
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Links down below if you're interested.
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Anyway, let's call the guy John.
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He was like, oh man, I found a customer who's really, really struggling with marketing her business.
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And she seemed really interested in me helping her marketing her business.
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But I was like, I don't have any marketing skills, so I can't help you market your business.
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And in that context, I sort of face pondered a little bit.
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I was like, John, John, my friend, we need to have a chat about this.
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There is this thing that we like to teach our students that we call the Teddy Roosevelt method,
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which is when you are starting out a business and someone asks if you can help with something, you say yes.
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And then immediately after saying yes, you figure out how to actually help them with the thing.
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You get busy learning the skill of doing the thing.
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This is from a quote from Teddy Roosevelt to that effect.
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Theodore Roosevelt, whenever you are asked If you can do a job, tell them, certainly I can, then get busy and find out how to do it." Really,
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really, really good as a method for building your own business and learning skills.
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And so John was held back.
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He said no to this client who wanted to give him money and wanted his help.
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And John actually had experience in the field that she needed the marketing help with.
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He just didn't have specific marketing skills.
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He was like, but how can I say yes if I don't have marketing skills?
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And I said to him, I was like, John, how do you think anyone learns marketing skills?
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And John said, I don't know, I guess like some people do degrees in it and I was like ah see this is the problem John.
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His conception of the world was
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that in order to learn a skill you need to take a degree
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or you need to study it at university or something.
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That's just not true.
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Like if we really think about like marketing skills as an example you know what's the hardest part about running a business?
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The hardest part is actually getting the customers.
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So if we let's focus on the attract side of this.
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Okay how do we actually get customers?
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Like what are the different methods for attracting customers?
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Let me just list a few.
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Number one is you can do content.
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So for example, you can do what I'm doing and create a YouTube video.
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That's a set of skills.
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Number two, you can run ads.
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So you can run ads on like Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Google or TikTok or Snapchat or what have you.
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You can do outreach, which could be warm outreach.
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I you could just reach out to people that you know and be like, hey, do you know anyone who needs a thing?
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You know, that's often the method that most of our Lifetop Business Academy students use to get their first customer, at least in 95% of cases.
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You can do cold outreach where you're trying to send emails or to strangers or trying to cold call them and stuff.
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Again, that's a skill.
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You can totally know the skill if you want.
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You can join communities, go to networking events, you know, this sort of stuff.
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Now, speaking of skills, content creation is one of the big high income ones
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that like so many people are making a bunch of money off of.
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And if you are or are interested in becoming a content creator, then you're definitely going to want to check out Epidemic Sound who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
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I have been using Epidemic Sound since pretty much day one of this YouTube channel back in 2017.
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And so for the last nine years, Epidemic Sound has been our source for royalty-free music that makes our videos, like, elevates them a little bit, whether it's a vlog, whether it's a sit-down video, or a study with me from back in the day.
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Everything in the Epidemic Sound library is restriction-free, so there are no copyright claims, there are no muted videos, and you can publish your stuff on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, any platform you want, without any issues.
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All of their tracks are also made by real professional musicians.
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This is not some AI music that they just like use a computer to generate
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and the artist gets paid whenever the music gets used and so you'd be directly supporting the artist as well.
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And one of the coolest new features they've added is the assistant feature.
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Now back in the day I used to spend hours
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and hours and hours browsing the Epidemic Sound library to find the perfect music for the vlogs
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or for the videos but now their assistant feature is really cool
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because you can just describe the scene in plain English
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and their assistant will automatically then look through the library and give you curated suggestions which is super nice.
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So if you would like to bring your videos and your stories to life with nice music, then check out the link in the video description.
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And if you use the code ULLI50 at checkout, then you will get 50% off your Epidemic Sound subscription for the first two months.
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And that offer is valid until August the 30th, 2026.
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So thank you so much to Epidemic Sound for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it.
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Let's take something like ads, for example, and let's say, you know, Instagram ads are your thing that you're going to try and do.
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Instagram ads are the sort of thing that John's client was like struggling with, but John didn't yet have marketing skills
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and didn't like double click into marketing skills to know that like Instagram ads is like an option, for example.
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But let's take the skill of Instagram ads.
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How does anyone learn how to do Instagram ads?
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Do they go to university and take a course taught by some old professor about how to do Instagram ads?
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Probably not.
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Almost everyone who has learned how to run Instagram ads for
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any business in the world learned it by giving it a go, watching a couple of YouTube videos, Googling it, these days asking ChatGPT to help them out, and that's about it.
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That's how you learn the skill of running Instagram ads.
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The concept of I can just learn how to run ads is
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scary like oh my god there must be
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so much to it it must be really really hard people
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do degrees in this stuff well you try it out you're
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like oh actually facebook makes it really easy there's the thing
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called meta ads manager you just go on it you upload creative
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if i go on canva they've got like five zillion templates
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for instagram ads oh wow could i just like take one of those templates
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and replace the the contents of the image with like my own business
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and now i have an ad
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and then whoa there's all these like settings oh this is confusing let me ask chat apt
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or let me like watch a youtube video about it oh interesting i've learned
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that in the last few months there's this new andromeda update to the facebook algorithm
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that actually means i don't I don't need to twiddle around with all these dials.
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I can just let the algorithm do the work.
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Okay, budget, you know, how much should I set my budget as?
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Talk to chat, talk to Google, watch a couple of YouTube videos.
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People telling you, you can start with like $10 a day.
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Okay, cool.
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Could I start with a $10 a day budget and just see what happens?
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Okay, nice.
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And within about a weekend or less, I would know
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because I learned the skill of running Instagram ads over the course of about a weekend
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and a bunch of friends I know who make millions from their businesses, running Instagram ads, taught themselves the skill in about a weekend.
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And then of course they refined the skill over time.
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You realize this shit is not that hot.
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And I think that is the fundamental mindset shift that I am trying to, that I would love everyone to have.
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And in particular is the one that I spend a lot of time on with our Lifestyle Business Academy students, which is that everything is a skill and everything can be learned.
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Something that feels like a black box to you right now, like marketing or sales or operations or finance or customer success or AI,
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all of it is just a skill and it can be learned just like driving.
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Before you've learned how to drive, driving seems really fucking hard, doesn't it?
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It's like, oh my God, you're literally in a metal thing.
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You could like kill someone, oh my goodness.
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And then you learn how to drive.
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You didn't sit around for absolutely ages thinking, no, my goodness, in order to learn how to drive, I need to do a degree in it.
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Yeah, probably you've got a driving instructor, which is why I think it's useful to have a mentor and a coach when teaching you stuff.
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Driving is a life and death skill, so it's useful to have a driving instructor to do it on the road.
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And it's the same with almost any skill you can think of.
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If you want to learn marketing skills, marketing skills is a broad topic, but like Instagram ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, TikTok ads, all of these are different types of ads you could run.
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There's content.
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So you could learn how to do content on Instagram Reels, Instagram posts, carousels, YouTube videos.
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I literally have video videos on how to make YouTube videos.
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You can film it with your phone.
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Cold outreach.
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There are people on YouTube who have made videos about how to do cold outreach, how to send emails to strangers and get them to respond, how to use tools like Apollo and these other things to like enrich leads and send emails to them.
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It's all easy stuff.
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And it's easy stuff because there's literally people who are world-class at doing the thing, who are teaching it for free on the internet.
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I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
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I went to Cambridge University Medical School, one of the best medical schools in the world.
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and to be honest for me
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and most of my friends 99% of what we learned was
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actually through YouTube videos it was not actually through the lecturers
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that we had at university I mean some of it was
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but for the most part university lecturers are selected on the
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basis of their research output not on the basis of how
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good they are at teaching at least in the fancy universities in the UK and even
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if the lecturer is really good you attend the lecture once maybe you watch the recording of the lecture
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but then there's like other things you have questions in
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and turns out there's people on YouTube that have done deep dives into all of this stuff with amazing diagrams amazing animation.
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In medical school, you learn how to do a cardiovascular examination, for example, like, you know, how to listen to someone's heart and like what order of operations to do it in.
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And yeah, you do it in a lecture or in a seminar for the first time.
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But then how does every single medical student in the world actually drill the skill?
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They watch a YouTube video about it.
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You know, there's a YouTube channel called Geeky Medics, where some guy has put together these videos where you can just watch it repeatedly
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and they can download a PDF with like the mark scheme.
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It was those PDFs that we printed out, me and all my friends at Cambridge, to learn the skill.
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And it was those videos that we had on the background.
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It wasn't the fact that we taught, we got taught it at a lecture like two years ago.
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Even doctors are learning the skills of medicine, not from medical school, but from YouTube videos.
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I have some friends who are surgeons now.
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They're literally learning how to do operations.
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Now, of course, a surgeon learns the operation by like observing the senior surgeon doing the operation
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and like assisting it and stuff.
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But how do they know the steps of the operation?
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They watch a YouTube video about it.
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Thankfully, and this is a great service to the world.
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There are all sorts of surgeons all around the world who have literally recorded their operations
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and are talking through the steps
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and you can in a way learn at least the theoretical
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component of the skill of literally taking out someone's appendix by watching a youtube video about it
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and then of course you're actually putting into practice
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when you're in a surgical residency or when you're or
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when you're on the job for that kind of practical skill
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so if a surgeon can learn how to do an appendectomy from watching some youtube videos
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and then putting into practice why can you not learn how
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to run an instagram ad by just watching some youtube videos
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and then putting into practice once you start seeing life this way
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that every single thing is is a skill and every single thing can be learned.
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It means that the thing of, I don't have the skill for X gets replaced with, I don't have the skill for X yet.
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The word yet is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because you know that everything is a skill, everything can be learned.
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And if someone else has figured out how to do it, you can as well.
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I was doing a Q and A on Instagram the other day and someone asked, how do I build a business when I don't have any AI skills?
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If you replace that, how do I build a business when I don't have AI skills yet?
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Then it becomes like, well, learn the AI skills that you need.
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What are the skills you need for a business?
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Well, you need to know how to attract, convert to like customers.
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You need to learn how to operate your business need to
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learn how to scale things once you're at a reasonable revenue milestone where you can actually hire people.
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AI is a thing that facilitates all of these different options.
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And so these days, you can literally just ask ChatGPT, being like, hey, ChatGPT, I'm attempting to learn the skill of Instagram ads.
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Can you help me figure out what the best AI workflows are to make Instagram ads?
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And I guarantee you'll get an amazing response from Claude
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and ChatGPT and Gemini that will teach you the skill of doing that.
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We started running Instagram ads in our business probably a few weeks ago with one of my team members.
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And I realized I did not yet have the skill of actually running Instagram ads in a reasonable way.
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And so what did I do?
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I asked Claude to teach me the skill.
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I watched like two YouTube videos about it.
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I got up to speed and then I started tinkering around with Meta Ads Manager
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and we managed to run some Instagram ads profitably.
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So we're actually making money off of running Instagram ads.
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If someone needs something or if your business needs something, is your immediate mind, oh, I can just figure it out.
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Or is your mind, oh my goodness, I don't have the skill and it's going to be so hard and it takes so long to learn the skill.
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I don't have time to learn the skill.
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It's like, bro, when you're on the toilet, you can literally just talk to ChatGPT and ask it to teach you the skill.
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If you literally don't have the time for
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that you can put on voice mode and next time you're on a walk
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or doing the laundry
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or something you can literally just ask it to pretty much teach you anything
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and explain it to you
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and then of course that's the theoretical component like you learn what to do in order to do the thing
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and then once you start applying it in practice that's when you actually gain the
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the the knowledge and the skill seeps into your brain your body your subconscious all
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that kind of stuff
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but it really is just a matter of it's a skill everything's a skill
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and everything can be learned
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and then it's just a question of just how long it takes right i really like this line from Alex Formozzi, which I think about a lot, which is that you can train anyone to do anything.
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You're probably not a neurosurgeon, but you could train to become a neurosurgeon and you could learn how to remove brain tumors from someone's brain.
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You have the ability to do that.
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The question is just how long it takes.
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I've got two friends who are neurosurgeons.
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The way they learn the steps of the operation is by watching YouTube videos, unsurprisingly, but then the way they put it into practice is
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because they spent 15 years training to get to a point
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where they're even allowed to put the skills into practice for good reason.
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So, you know, for you to become a neurosurgeon would take about 15 years.
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I was speaking to another one of our national business academy students, that's called her Jane.
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Jane had landed her first client for her business
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and was helping this local coffee shop with their operations and automating aspects of their operations.
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And she was learning how to use Calendly and how to use Zapier
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and how to connect it up to a Google Sheets.
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And I was asking her, you know, how hard did you think it was going to be?
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And how hard was it actually?
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And she was like, yeah, you know, before I got started, I just in my mind, I thought that operations is really difficult.
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And then I started doing it.
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I was like, oh, okay.
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I mean, the software just makes it super easy and I can just watch YouTube tutorials and I can just ask ChatDubt.
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And so she figured out how to literally automate this coffee shop's like operations, never having done it before, and just figuring out how to do it to understand how it all fit together.
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And then was literally saving them hours and hours
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and hours every week where they could actually spend making coffee rather than doing the admin.
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That's so cool.
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Everything is a skill issue.
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If you're not yet rich, if you're not yet financially free, it's just a skill issue, man.
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Like you just don't have the skills.
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You don't have the skills of attract, convert, delight, and operate.
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And are those skills very difficult to learn?
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No, not really, because there's tutorials for literally all of them.
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Have you ever done a sales call before?
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You know, this is something our students in our LBA, a lot of other business academy do or are having to do now.
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Sales calls where you get on a zoom call with someone
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and you try
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and pitch them your thing before you do it for the
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first time it seems like the scariest thing in the world then you do it a couple of times
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and you're like okay
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and then you watch a couple of videos about sales training
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you attend a couple of our workshops you ask your coach whatever the thing might be
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and honestly there's loads of free youtube tutorials about this stuff
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and oh previously i thought sales was like the scary thing
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and actually it was like really really hard but actually there's a framework
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that you follow it seems really hard
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and it seems like a real black box before you're in there
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and then once you're in there you're like oh there actually
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is a method to the madness it is the same with everything
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but the reason i wanted to make this video is
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because i want to make this video as a a video that I send to all of our Lifestyle Business Academy students.
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When they have this kind of mindset, or anyone really, who wants to be financially free but has this idea that skills are hard to learn.
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Skills are not hard to learn.
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With the amount of free information you've got on the internet these days, with AI, pretty much any skill you want is literally at your fingertips.
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Certain skills mean that you become rich.
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If you have the skill of knowing how to attract customers, if you have the skill of knowing how to sell to them, you are way more likely to become rich and
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and get way richer than someone who does not have those skills or the version of you that didn't have those skills.
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And shock horror, you can learn those skills.
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You can watch free YouTube videos.
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You can ask GADPT, you can take courses.
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You can sign up to our Lifestyle Business Academy if you really want.
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But like everything around you is built by people who are no smarter than you are.
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If you're at this point in the video, the only thing that's standing between you and financial freedom is just
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that you don't yet have the skills that you need for it.
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And learning skills is easy.
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If you want to become financially free, it's just downstream of learning a few skills.
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It's really not that hard.
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So with that said, if you're in this video, there is a video over here, which is more honest advice someone who wants financial freedom.
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Otherwise, have a lovely day and I'll see you next time.
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Bye.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 294 sentences and 4111 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:54. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| attract verb | /əˈtɹækt/ | To pull toward without touching. |
| surgeon noun | /ˈsɝd͡ʒən/ | One who performs surgery; a doctor who performs operations on people or animals. |
| convert verb | /kənˈvɝt/ | To transform or change (something) into another form, substance, state, or product. |
| financially adverb | In terms of finance or money. | |
| outreach noun | /ˈaʊtɹiːtʃ/ | The act of reaching out. |
| lecture noun | /ˈlɛk.t͡ʃə/ | A spoken lesson or exposition, usually delivered to a group. |
| scary adjective | /ˈskɛə.ɹi/ | Causing fear or anxiety |
| stranger noun | /ˈstɹeɪnd͡ʒɚ/ | A person whom one does not know; a person who is neither a friend nor an acquaintance. |
| goodness noun | /ˈɡʊdnəs/ | The state or characteristic of being good. |
| delight noun | /dəˈlaɪt/ | Joy; pleasure. |
| tutorial noun | /ˌtjuːˈtɔːɹɪəl/ | A self-paced learning exercise; a lesson prepared so that a student can learn at their own speed or convenience. |
| lecturer noun | /ˈlɛkt͡ʃəɹə/ | A person who gives lectures, especially as a profession. |
| womb noun | /wuːm/ | In female mammals, the organ in which the young are conceived and grow until birth; the uterus. |
| component noun | /kəmˈpoʊ.nənt/ | A smaller, self-contained part of a larger entity. Often refers to a manufactured object that is part of a larger device. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| fit together verb | To put the appropriate parts of (something) into a whole; to combine pieces that go together to create a finished object. |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) |
| get off verb | To move from being on top of (something) to not being on top of it. |
| get up to verb | To do something, especially something that is forbidden or improper. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 71 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shock /ʃɔk/, examination /ɪɡˌzæm.ɪˈneɪ.ʃən/, suggestion /səˈd͡ʒɛst.ʃən/, animation /ˌæn.ɪˈmeɪ.ʃən/, workshop /ˈwɝk.ʃɑp/
- Long words — get the stress right: theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, fundamental /ˌfʌn.dəˈmɛn.təl/, examination /ɪɡˌzæm.ɪˈneɪ.ʃən/, repeatedly /ɹɪˈpiːtɪdli/, animation /ˌæn.ɪˈmeɪ.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like skill, attract, surgeon.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · they've added · has learned |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are asked · was held · are also made |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | convert, which is · Delight, which is · anyone who needs |
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.