Shadowing Practice: You were never supposed to think this much - Learn English Speaking with Video

You were not supposed to think this much.

When you look around you, at your surroundings, through your eyeballs, what you're seeing is not reality.

Everything that you call the world is not the world.

You were evolved to see just enough information to not walk off a cliff, or to be able to spot the tiger coming towards you.

You're given the bare minimum amount of information in order to not die.

I don't know if you did this when you were a kid, But I always like to, I was talking with my brothers and stuff like that, thinking about, oh, how cool it would be to see a new color.

A completely new color.

It's not green, it's not yellow, it's not a blend of the two, but just a new one.

How mind-blowing that would be.

What would that be like?

But the truth is, those colors are everywhere.

Human beings can see .0035% of the light spectrum.

And we call it the visible light spectrum.

And when we think about that, it's like, oh, this is all the light that you can see.

Yeah, it's all the light that humans can see.

But all that other light is out there, all around you, passing through you, bouncing off of you.

It's already out there.

And we are looking at life through a pinhole, thinking that, oh yeah, this is real life.

It's not real life.

It's a shadow of a shadow of a foggy reflection of life.

Which is why it's so funny when people get lost in their head.

I do it all the time.

You probably do it all the time.

In fact, if you're watching this video, there's probably a really good chance that you're a neurotic person.

The reason I know that is because people who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be into self-improvement, which means that you're just thinking all the time.

You're probably a little bit more intelligent than average.

And since you're so intelligent, you probably rely on your intellect, and you have historically relied on your intellect to get you through sticky situations.

It probably served you well in school, you know, you're probably a chronic procrastinator, but you were able to be a procrastinator because your intellect got you out of a sticky situation.

When you kick the can further and further down the road, and you have like one hour to do something that should have taken you three days,

your intellect was able to get you out of that sticky situation.

You're smarter than most people.

You were able to figure it out and get a finished product done faster than most people.

But relying so heavily on your intellect presents many other problems.

And that's because your intellect is stupid.

As we've discussed previously, you can only see about .0035% of the visible light spectrum.

What you think is reality, what you think is logic, what you think is solid thinking, is not a representation of reality.

But not only is your thinking dumb, the reason why you think is not for thinking's sake.

That might make no sense, but you only think because of emotional reasons.

Let me give you an example.

I don't know if you've ever been in this situation, but if you have ever been a single guy, and you've been out with your friends, say at the bar or something like that,

and there's a girl off in the distance, and your buddies say, hey, you should go approach her.

In that moment, if you're a shy person, if you haven't been getting out there much, when they say that, when they egg you on, when they challenge you to go approach a girl,

a feeling probably arises in your chest a physiological experience.

It's a physical thing.

You feel it on a nervous system level.

It's discomfort and it's fear.

But in that moment, that fear goes straight to your head.

You start coming up with rationalizations and some sort of logical reason why you can't approach her today or right now.

Or maybe you'll do it later.

Or maybe you haven't been going to the gym recently, so you're not very confident.

And if this person ends up being your wife

and she's not attracted to you now because you're not the best version of yourself, then you might blow that opportunity forever.

So maybe you'll circle back six months from now when you're an improved version of yourself, and this will go over smoothly.

But all that is, is trying to avoid pain.

It is the fear of discomfort.

And that fear, that feeling in your chest, hijacked your intellect to generate some sort of bullshit human logic

that makes sense to you to justify not having to experience fear anymore.

You want that feeling to go away.

The only reason why you thought was because of a feeling.

And that's how we all work.

You know, we like to think we're logical people and we have all these reasons.

Everything we do is very smart.

There is a logic behind our behavior.

We want to go to law school.

We want to make money, so we got to do the LSAT.

And all this might be true, but the reasons why we do it is so that we don't die.

Because we're scared of dying.

And all these things are concepts, but they're also feelings.

They're drives.

They're ancient mechanisms that are truer and more real than our logic ever could be.

Once you understand this, then life becomes a lot simpler.

Your problems become a lot simpler, and the solutions to those problems become a lot simpler.

I don't know if you guys ever watch body cam videos, but I have been obsessed with them recently.

I've seen hundreds and hundreds of body cam videos.

Shout out to Midwest Safety.

I think body cam videos are the perfect microcosm, the perfect scaled down example of how the world works.

Because in a body cam video, how it usually breaks down is somebody is doing something extremely unreasonable, chaotic,

dangerous, and somebody calls the cops on them

and then the cop with the body cam arrives and And eventually they end up getting taken away and going to prison.

It's easy to watch these videos and see this person freaking out, a person with low impulse control, and say, I would never do that.

This person's crazy, makes me feel really good about myself.

But what I find especially interesting is it's a perfect example of how the world works.

If you are unreasonable, if you are chaotic, if you feel dangerous around other people,

it makes them feel fear makes them feel scared of what you might do.

You are an unpredictable, chaotic variable in their life, and that feels bad.

So they call somebody to make you go away.

And a lot of the time, the police officer arrives, and the person isn't really guilty of a particular crime.

They're just annoying.

They are chaotic.

They're disturbing the peace.

But it doesn't stop the police officer from trying to retrofit

a crime onto you in order to justify putting you in a box for a

while so you stop being such a nuisance.

And nobody complains about that, right?

It makes perfect sense.

If you are crazy enough, people want you gone.

You don't get treated worse by the police officer for being more guilty of a crime.

You usually get treated worse by the police officer for being more unlikable.

And you might think that's unfair, and of course it's unfair.

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But it's also how the world works.

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Everybody is operating on emotion.

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And your logic is simply a lawyer for your emotion and your instinct.

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The thing that gets you up in the morning, the thing that propels you forward, the thing that staves off depression, is emotion.

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It's your physiology.

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It's not your reasons.

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And if you fully understand this, this can give you a huge leg up in life when it comes to dealing with people, with overcoming bad habits, building new habits,

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and overall just living a more satisfying and enriching life.

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And we'll go over all the ways you can do that after I pay some bills.

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Okay, so now that we know that you're an idiot and so am I, and we're all just balls of emotion operating on instinct,

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then you'll know that that truth is the secret to succeeding in every domain of life.

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For instance, say you're stuck in a bad habit.

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Say you've watched hundreds of videos about how to stop doing this bad habit.

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Maybe you've read a handful of books, but no matter what, you seem to not really have the correct information to get you to stop.

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So you figure maybe there's a video out there.

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Maybe there's just one more video that will help contextualize this problem

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so that I finally understand it enough to stop doing it.

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But the problem with that is that you're not doing the habit for logical reasons.

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You can't reason yourself out of a situation that you didn't reason yourself into.

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You're doing that habit for emotional reasons.

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There are physiological reasons why you're doing it.

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It feels a certain way to do it, and you feel a certain way before you do it.

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You likely feel a way that you want to run from

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and you run towards that thing because you think it will give you a feeling.

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You think it will make pain go away.

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It'll make fear go away.

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It'll make anxiety go away.

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And ultimately, you do what you do because you think it will make you feel good in that moment.

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And the reason why you want to stop doing it is because it turns out when you do it, it doesn't feel so good when you do it.

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If you get out of your head and enter your body and are more aware of the sensations at play,

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those feelings are far more reflective of what's actually going on.

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Right?

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This doesn't exist.

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This has nothing to do with anything.

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These are the things that you've applied to your situation to try to make sense of the emotions.

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And if you're fully present with those sensations and sit with them and breathe deep, A lot of the time you can resolve them on a physiological level.

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Then all of a sudden, urges go away.

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You melt the tension away.

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And you realize that, okay, it was all just about trying to feel okay.

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And feeling okay is something that's available to me at all times.

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Clearly your thought patterns on this matter are messed up.

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Thankfully you don't have to think anymore.

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Another way that you can take advantage of the fact that you are an idiot and so is everyone else,

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is when it comes to making more friends and deepening the relationships that you already have.

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Or maybe having more success in your romantic life.

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Since people operate entirely on instinct, entirely on subconscious cues and mechanisms they're largely unaware of,

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then succeeding with people is not about saying the right thing, it's not saying things the right way, it's about how you make somebody feel when you're around them.

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How do people feel about themselves when they're in your space.

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Success with people is all about aura.

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People want to talk about looks maxing, bone smashing, cancel tilt, all of that stuff.

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But what you should really be doing is aura maxing.

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Making sure that people in your orbit feel good

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and they want to continue to feel good about themselves when they're around you.

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And how do you give people good feelings?

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Well, have you ever been extremely nervous on a date?

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You're super uptight, you don't know what to say, your heart's beating really fast.

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And because of that, you make the other person nervous.

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You don't know whether they're awkward or you're awkward.

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But the answer is yes.

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The energy that people give you is often a reflection of the energy that you've been giving to them.

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If you're an extremely negative person, and you tend to suck the life out of the room, you tend to monologue about yourself, all you do is take from people,

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you take from the energy, you take from the positivity, then you'll notice that people are kind of repelled by you.

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They want to wrap up the conversation with you as quickly as possible.

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Nobody really wants to be around you.

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They'll tolerate it for a little bit, but ultimately it's not something that they want to be drawn towards.

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And again, the reasons for all these things has never been about the things that you say.

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It's the vibe that you're giving off.

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And that's why it's so important to Auramax, right?

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So Auramaxing is to develop a better aura.

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It's to have a positive, abundant, virtuous, benevolent, generous, calming aura.

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And the way you do that is to basically just have a better relationship with yourself.

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In order to radiate that kind of energy outwards, you have to feel that way inwards, right?

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If you hate yourself, if you have a terrible relationship with yourself, you're disappointed in yourself and you berate yourself all the time,

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then where are you going to get your encouragement from?

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Where are you going to try to get your life from?

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Well, you'll probably need to steal it from somewhere else.

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You'll probably have to steal it from the person you're talking to, right?

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You're going to talk about yourself all the time, hoping that that person encourages you, hoping that that person says, oh, wow, good for you, right?

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You're desperate for other people's approval because you don't give yourself your own approval, right?

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You're not okay with yourself.

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You don't allow yourself to be okay.

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So if there's one takeaway from this video, like I'm not some sage, right?

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I'm kind of tired of giving sermons on this channel.

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It's just some thoughts I've been having.

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But in my opinion, the best bang for buck thing you can do is essentially to be okay more often.

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And it's funny because I feel like social media

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and short form content gets you stuck in a way of thinking that makes you not feel okay.

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It's because it's dopaminergic thinking.

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You think that the answer to your problems is just one swipe away

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and it's not so it's the other swipe away

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And you just keep on doing that keep on doing that

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That becomes the way that you see the world you are not okay right now, but you could be it's an addictive mindset It's an addiction

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mindset really it's like there's a problem with being you you are not okay right now You are wrong in some way, so you have to do some things so that you can feel okay

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But that thing never ends up making you feel okay

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because there are remarkably few things in life that can make you feel okay because okayness is a state of mind.

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It's not something that you can just apply to yourself and you're okay.

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It's something that you have to practice.

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I'm getting attacked by a wasp right now.

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Anyways, hope you liked the video.

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Catch you in the next one.

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: You were never supposed to think this much - Learn English Speaking with Video

Context & Background

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

What is the Shadowing Technique?