Hybridization represents the idea of balanced shell atomic orbitals mixing to form hybrid orbitals. And we're going to say in order to form more bonds and increase stability, elements must hybridize their atomic orbitals. The way we can think about it is we have our S orbital and our P orbitals. These are known as our atomic orbitals. They're going to mix together and doing this helps to create hybrid orbitals.
Now a hybrid orbital basically looks like this. It looks like almost like a P orbital, except one end is much smaller and the other end is much larger. So here we have S and P orbitals mixing together to give us this hybrid orbital. Now we're going to see how hybridization can connect to molecules and their molecular shapes.