6 secrets successful people use to control their mind

a lot of us are sitting around waiting to feel ready waiting to feel courageous waiting to feel confident waiting for the right time and that's not ever coming i always thought that confidence was a thing that you feel and i have come to prefer that confidence is something that you do you want to have command of your life you must have control over your thoughts in this video mel robbins breaks down the secrets on how to have control over your mind the thing that's so difficult for most of us is how when you're alone and you turn off this show do you push through the excuses the habits the fears and the the actual physical constraints that you have in your life right now so that you can make the pivot and so i often say that i am not a what speaker or a wise speaker i'm a how and that there's already incredible information about what you can do and why you should do it and i find that the place that i get stuck is okay well that's great and i do a lot of thinking but how do i get out of here and make it happen our thoughts are our biggest killers of our dreams totally they're the biggest killers or our biggest cheerleaders and if we don't know how to really i guess i don't know not manipulate them but to really hone in on them then we can have a messed up life and i've gone through many years of self-destruction growing up just because i didn't know how to manage the thoughts i didn't know how to i was never educated on it really on how to how to not control it but i don't know what is it what is it what is it yeah not control it but what is the word i'm looking for well see i talk about it this way so i i like to simplify things because it makes it easier for me i'm almost 50 for crying out loud there's only so much that you can remember you know when he's 33 that's a whole different ball game but um i think about your brain as being in two modes two modes to your brain that you need to know about there's autopilot and we've all experienced that you know you drive to work and get there and you're like who drove the car oh my god like i don't even remember driving the car here well you did louis you drove the car but the thing is is that you were in the mode of your brain that's called autopilot well what is autopilot autopilot is the interior part of your brain you'll hear neuroscientists and psychologists talk about the basal ganglia very important thing to understand is that there's a part of your brain that its entire job is basically to execute your habits habits big fancy word means something very simple behaviors that you repeat without even thinking about it when you pull your pants on in the morning i guarantee you you either put your left or your right leg in first and you have to stop and think about which one it is don't you but not when you're putting your pants on right because that behavior is what researchers call a habit loop it gets enclosed as it gets encoded as a closed-loop system right here now the problem for most of us is that half of the day we're on autopilot and that's not me making a guess that's what researchers that study habits and study psychology say that half of your day you're basically kind of checked out and you're on autopilot and when you're checked out and you're on autopilot any behavior pattern that you repeat can take over and guess what are behavior patterns that we repeat thinking patterns so self-doubt worry procrastination overthinking analysis paralysis fear those are all thinking patterns that are habits one of the most important things that i want people to understand is that you're actually not a worrier you have a habit of worrying big difference you're not a procrastinator you have a habit of procrastinating big difference and when you understand that any behavior pattern whether it is a thinking pattern like you doubt yourself all the time or you get trapped upstairs noodling everything and you can never get started or whether it's a behavior pattern like you drink too much or you snap at your kids or you micromanage your team every one of those behavior patterns and thinking patterns can actually be interrupted and replaced using science now let's talk about the second part of the brain drive that's this puppy right here this is what you want this is your prefrontal cortex drive is the mode where you're in charge of your thoughts okay it's where you are fully awake you are present and you are driving your thoughts and actions when you're doing that your prefrontal cortex is active the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that you need in order to learn new behavior in order to do something difficult in order to do something uncertain in order to do strategic thinking so i'm going to give you an example so i'm a righty if i were to try to write with my left hand like louis is going to torture me and tie my hand behind my back and make me like do this i could do it it would look like i was writing with my foot and if lewis came up to me and said hey mel you want some bulletproof coffee i'd be like louis i'm trying to concentrate i can't do this my prefrontal cortex would be el fuego because it is firing on all cylinders to communicate to my hand new behavior so the thing that's cool about that is that you can use a simple trick the moment you feel yourself hesitate the moment you've got one of those moments where you know that you need to this is that moment that lewis talks to you about where you got to step outside of your comfort zone and you've got to lean into your passion and you've got to really take some risks and you've got to feel the fear and you've got to do it anyway that's the moment where you just woke up and now you got a decision to make are you going to drift back into the habits or are you going to awaken your prefrontal cortex and drive forward and focus and do something new and so the work that i've been doing and speaking about is all about the five second rule which is a trick that i invented by mistake that helps you manually switch no joke your brain it turns off and interrupts the part of the brain that is where all your habits and your behavior patterns are encoded and it awakens your prefrontal cortex which in five seconds flat allows your brain to help you change and so anyway i was rambling on and on because you you went on this thing about how your patterns can be destructive and nobody teaches us and that's absolutely right and what i want everybody to get out of this conversation between us is that you cannot control how you feel you cannot control what triggers you and the fact that you may rise up with anger you may rise up with self-doubt you may have anxiety fill your body but you can always control what you think and how you behave and we spend way too much time trying to focus on manipulating how we feel about things and not enough time practicing the skills of controlling your behavior and your thoughts um because if you can control your behavior and your thoughts the way you feel will be different 100 and a lot of us are sitting around waiting to feel ready waiting to feel courageous waiting to feel confident waiting for the right time and that's not ever coming ever ever you're not going to change your life up here you only change it through action and and so to me you know i i i did this this you know interview with you with your friend tom and we talked about how motivation is garbage and this somebody memed it and went crazy and so the point that i was trying to make is this is that yeah motivation is great if you feel like if you feel motivated but it's garbage and it's it's it's it's a losing bet to wait to feel ready because it's your body's not designed that way and neither is your brain and so i want everybody to understand that first of all you can't control the things that trigger you and the fact that you're going to feel afraid and you're going to feel doubt and you're going to feel uncertain but you can always interrupt that feeling and take control in the moment and actually shift what you're thinking and shift how you behave yeah and you know the bigger the dream the more fear you're going to have you know even if you feel like you've conquered the fear of something in order to grow you've got to take on some new challenge and there's going to be uncertainty there's going to be some stress or there's going to be some worry or there's going to be some ego checking and there's going to be some identity crisis so there's always going to be this fear that could arise always always i mean did you do you feel like once you've mastered this that you have no more fear me yeah no the fear still comes but i have 100 control of what i think and do so one of the things that that is important for for me to um to to put on the table is that a lot of times um you know people look at your where you are now and so they'll see me on television or they see that ted talk or maybe you'll be in an audience of 20 000 people in in the american airlines center and i'm on stage you're like wow that chick must have just been more incompetent i hate her the fact is uh that's not at all how i how i was i i when when i was 19 i started having crazy panic attacks and they got so bad that i took medication and medication was a godsend for me i took zoloft for two decades when i had our first daughter who is now 17 years old the postpartum depression was so bad that they put me on ativan which turns you into a zombie and i could not be left alone with her so when it comes to self-doubt and to how we can torture ourselves with our thoughts boy have i lived that nightmare and as i started to use the five second rule which we're going to get into um and everything about my life changed because when people first learn the rule what you're going to learn what you're going to start doing is you're going to start using the rule to push yourself to do things that are annoying you're going to push yourself to get up on time you're going to push yourself to work on your business plan you're going to push yourself to make calls that are scary you're going to push yourself to get to the gym you're going to push yourself to speak up more at work you're going to push yourself to put the boos down behavioral behavioral behavioral and then you're going to start to actually use it to change the thinking patterns that are self-sabotaging so i four years ago wondered as i started to see myself go from facing bankruptcy to building a figure um i um i what what what happened for me is i started to say okay this is a really cool little trick to bring out the most powerful side of you but can i use this to actually cure myself of anxiety and the answer is yes you can and four years ago i went off zoloft and i started using the five second rule which i'm going to explain in one second to interrupt the patterns of worry and self-doubt which by the way anxiety is nothing more than the habit of worrying spiraling out of control and body feelings triggering now the habit of obsessive worrying that turns into anxiety and then kind of escalates to panic um i started using the five second rule to interrupt my thoughts every time i would feel that kind of worry kick in and because the prefrontal cortex is awakened when you use it your mind is now ready to take on a totally different thought it's a very different strategy than just trying to switch the channel on what you're thinking because you're actually inserting the step that nobody talks about which is switching the gears in your mind so that your mind can actually take and believe the thinking so the five second rule wait first off when you discover the five second rule okay so 2009. that's when you first tried it or discovered it or oh it's a total horror show mistake okay yes okay so 2009 um i was unemployed and feeling like are you unemployed how well okay too much charisma too much passion uh yeah because everything's working right now i'm not like this when things are not working ask my husband of 22 years um uh well the what had happened is um i i had had all these career changes and i got into the media business again by mistake i had a coaching business and um inc magazine was writing an article about coaches and they featured me in it and cnbc called and that led to me doing some stuff with cnbc and um i spent a year still coaching people and then doing some stuff for cnbc and then fox called and they were interested in having me host a television show now you got to understand i'm from north muskegon michigan i mean the media business the closest thing i had ever seen to a celebrity lewis was the muskegon lumberjacks the farm team right right from our for for the pittsburgh penguins yeah yeah my dad was the hometown doc for the hockey team there right right right so i thought the mayor was a celebrity wow my life's about to change i'm about to be a celebrity wow we're going to solve all this is amazing you know so um i was originally going to be hosting a show for fox where we were making over small businesses nice yeah pretty cool right we show up we like do extreme home makeover for the office everybody's happy we all know that doesn't solve business problems but it makes for a nice television show by the time i get to la they've changed the format it's now called someone's gotta go and i'm gonna be firing people on national television from real jobs wow uh-huh that sounds fun horrible oh my god plus we haven't told the offices that this is what we're doing oh my gosh so you show up in act one and you've got everybody all like this because they're gonna think they're gonna get new ikea furniture and a paint job and this is gonna be the best thing in the world for their small business now meanwhile i'm a fourth generation small business owner so that's like my people grew up at a kitchen table with farmers and you know my mom at a retail store and my other grandparents were bakers and so when it comes to like the heart and soul and what's so important when you launch your own business and how personal it is i mean this was like gut wrenching so i show up the first act you kick out the the owner of the company who then freaks out then all the employees freak out act number two we announce that somebody's getting fired and then that's that's the the bad news the good news is that i'm not picking we're gonna have you vote somebody out so it's survivor in an office place oh my goodness so that's awesome when when i learn all this i i have a panic attack even though i'm on zoloft and i call the guy that got me the gig and say you got to get me out of this like this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me and he said um well i'm sorry but they've already cast the entire show and you're out there for five weeks and you don't have a choice but they're gonna sue you and i said then fine get me some xanax because i don't think i can get through this thing like this is awful luckily um we taped two episodes and um legal tabled it but here was the problem i was attached to the show and i only got paid if the show was shooting and being an entrepreneur i also kind of yes put all my energy into this shut down the coaching thing um uh really thought that it also kind of negotiated a deal that was a sort of a back end deal thinking i'm a you know entrepreneur always thinking about gotta have a piece of the action yes yeah that was a dumb move um and i was in a contract for a year while they figured out what to do um so you couldn't do another show yeah so you know i just felt like i had made a huge mistake and i felt really embarrassed and i didn't know at the age of 41 what i should be doing with my life and while it's neat that i had jumped careers so many times i started to feel like somebody that actually wasn't successful at all because i didn't have a career track i had a bunch of jumps from one thing to another now looking back it makes perfect sense but standing in the middle of the mess it just felt like everything was caving in probably just like when you were sleeping on your couch feeling injured and like everything i thought that was about to happen isn't happening now meanwhile my husband had opened up a restaurant business it had been his dream he worked in high tech and came home one day after getting laid off and said i i'm never going to get on a plane and do a powerpoint presentation for a company i don't care about her own and i said great what's your plan and he said i'm gonna open a pizza restaurant and i looked at him and i said was there a trust fund that was part of this marriage that i was unaware of cause i'm not quite sure and he said no and um uh i then said the most famous lines of our 22 merit 22 year marriage lewis i looked at him and i said listen buddy inspiration is for strangers you get your ass back to that job and you pay the mortgage and you forget the stream you're not going well because change is scary yeah so we fought and he won and the first one was a real home run and you opened a pizza store oh he did yeah 40 40 seats right outside of boston massachusetts he and his best friend and they won best of boston it was incredible what do you do when everything's funny though they did on the first one so what do you do when everything's working let's go all chips in let's put in the home equity line let's put in the kids college savings let's get friends and family and because you're so excited you you think it's gonna work so you go big big big well the second one did not work at all and it did not work at all so badly that when it was finally closed it was close to an 800 000 loss and it meant our entire home equity line kids college savings everything went right down with it that was right when i lost the fox show so i'm unemployed the liens start hitting the house um the phone starts ringing all the time and it's collections calls so you unplug that out well you just unplug the phone that's how you deal with that but i i i remember like there were i remember two things from that period in my life that were really painful and one was having to call the town and tell them that we could not afford the 175 bucks for our sixth grader to play soccer so we needed to pull her out and i remember there being times because i was so afraid to look at the checking account that i would stand at the grocery store and items would scan and i could just feel that wave of anxiety rising thinking i don't i don't think the check card's going to go through and so i would stand there i always had an excuse and it was to look at the person and go oh that's strange it just worked at the gas station oh my gosh because i what would have been more empowering is to probably say oh well i guess i don't have the money for this let's take this this and this and just kind of like the easiest thing to do is to tell the truth but i was so filled with shame yeah so i started to develop this habit of hitting the snooze button because what would happen is the alarm would go off in the morning and the first thing i would think about is all the problems that we had and how awfully things had gone off the tracks you didn't want to deal with them no and i also didn't know i didn't know i didn't think i could and this goes back to the feelings like you you think that you need to feel confident or courageous in order to get started you don't you actually just have to start and that's the riddle of life that lying in bed hoping that you wake up some morning motivated to change that's not the answer you actually have to learn how to push yourself you have to learn how to how to leverage the power of your decisions and you've got to learn how to take action when you don't feel like it because every morning when i woke up i did not feel confident i felt like a loser i felt like the world's worst parent i felt like i had failed at every single turn i did not know if chris and i could pull out of the spiral i did not know if we were going to go bankrupt and lose the house and move from our community i did not know if our marriage would survive i knew i wanted it to and see this is the knowledge action gap you can know what you want you can know what you should be doing but how do you make yourself do it when the feelings and the motivation isn't there when all you got is fear and so every night i would i would lie in bed and i would say to myself all right that's it mel tomorrow it's the new you tomorrow you're gonna wake up and be motivated you're gonna you're gonna get up you're gonna exercise like everybody says you should you're gonna meditate you're gonna get those kids on the bus you're gonna screw fox you're gonna look for a job you're gonna cold call cox media and you're gonna you're gonna do auditions come on girl let's go let's go let's go you're gonna take a cold shower you know here we go and i meant it when i was saying it maybe it was the alcohol that was talking but but then i would wake up and i didn't feel any of those things so i would hit the snooze and i would hit the snooze now why was i hitting the snooze when i knew it wasn't the right decision i'm going to tell you why and this is something that i was blown away by when i discovered it you don't make decisions with your goals you don't make decisions with your prefrontal cortex you don't make decisions with logic do you know how we make decisions i didn't invent this a neuroscientist by the name of demacio who does his research in brazil who gave an incredible ted talk and wrote about this forever and ever and ever we make decisions with feelings 95 of our decisions are made by how you feel in the moment and that is the problem you need to take control of the moment and leverage the power of your decisions and make them up here because when i was lying in bed i wasn't saying to myself i should get up because that's going to help me start my day right i was saying do i feel like getting up no you don't no do you feel like making that cold call no you don't do you feel like doing that third set of reps no you don't do you feel like having that hard conversation no you don't do you feel like ending this relationship whether it's in business or in your life that is sucking you dry no you don't we make decisions based on our feelings and that is robbing you of joy and opportunity and it is blinding you from the fact that all how you change your life is one five second decision at a time one push at a time and if you if you accept the fact that you may never feel ready and you may never feel motivated and you may never feel confident you may never feel courageous and that's okay but you can still push yourself forward what happens over time is as you start to see yourself becoming the person that takes action that you start to see yourself becoming the kind of person that speaks even though your voice is shaking you're the kind of person that that that has a bias toward moving instead of a bias toward thinking guess what happens you build the skill of confidence and courage and so what happened for me is i was stuck louis i mean i was so stuck i was on i mean we were heading straight for divorce we were heading for bankruptcy i knew i wanted to change things and so one night i see this commercial this is the stupidest story on the planet but this is what happened i see this commercial and you know again i i also was drinking too much i mean i probably had a couple manhattans in me that's my drink i'm from the midwest just like you all right little manhattan there bourbon um and uh there was a rocket ship launching on a commercial yeah and i had this instinct this innovation this disruptive idea right oh my god mel that's the answer tomorrow morning you're going to launch your ass out of bed like a rocket ship you're going to move so fast you can't even think about your problems dumb right totally dumb seems like this is the toughest idea i've ever heard i cannot believe i have this chick in my pocket i understand i understand it you got to get moving first yes that's the thing you just got to wake up at 6 00 a.m or whatever it is and go into the gym when you're in the gym you're going to start moving the first weight yes and then you'll start because actually people people use the five second rule at the gym because you know how much time people waste at the gym standing around thinking about the next thing probably 70 of the time five four three two one so so the next morning the alarm goes off and nothing had changed in my life i woke up to the lien on the house the fighting with chris the unemployment the lack of confidence the lack of courage that like the whole thing but i did something i had never done before i went five four three two one just like nasa i actually counted and then i stood up and i was like [Laughter] what the hell just happened what that is the dumbest thing i've ever heard the next morning i used it again it worked the next morning i used it again it worked and then i started to notice something and this is this is one of those things so we have a we have an 11 year old son who has dyslexia and when they finally diagnosed him it was as if of course it was as if like how could we have possibly missed this are we the worst parents in the world i mean the kid can barely write he can't cut his food he doesn't like no wonder he doesn't do team sports it was right under our nose and what i'm about to tell you is right under everybody's nose there's a five second window between the instincts the shoulds the urges the inner wisdom the things that can change your life if you listen to it got a five second window from the moment you feel that instinct to move and if you don't your brain is actually designed to kill it five seconds is all you have the second you hesitate it's actually you feel yourself hesitating that is a moment of huge power because what's happened is you've just started to pull back from something that you need to lean into and if you count backwards five four three two one and this is the neuroscience behind why this stupid little trick works counting is an action counting backwards requires focus it's also not a habit for you yet so when you feel yourself hesitate you're you're triggering your mind that something's up like lewis didn't hesitate when he pulled on his pants he didn't hesitate when he's drinking his coffee he didn't hesitate when he walked out the door to the gym but now he's hesitating to make that call your mind now goes into a cognitive bias called the spotlight effect it magnifies whatever it was that you hesitated doing the moment yeah like all of a sudden you're like hey i don't feel like it like i don't i don't know maybe i'll do it later and your mind is doing it because your mind's trying to protect you hesitation signals a red flag to your mind that something's up just that small hesitation it's a habit that we all have should you hesitate if you're getting a tattoo yes should you hesitate if you're gambling yes should you hesitate if you are signing a legal document yes you need your prefrontal cortex for those things you need to interrupt it make a power make a decision should you hesitate on making a phone call no should you hesitate on speaking up in a meeting no should you hesitate when you feel yourself starting to procrastinate and you know you got work that you should get done no you shouldn't hesitate at all should you hesitate in saying the thing that you really feel in your heart no you shouldn't should you hesitate and edit yourself when you're talking no you shouldn't but we've all trained ourselves too so it's actually this habit of hesitating you start catching yourself it's a huge moment of power because you have a decision to make and you got to make it in the next five seconds are you going to go on autopilot and get trapped in your mind or are you gonna five four three two one and awaken your prefrontal cortex and drive forward so um i started to use this rule as i noticed that every day all day long i had these moments of inner wisdom where i would know that i needed to pick up the phone and stop isolating myself i would know that i needed to call a bunch of media companies and start auditioning for radio show hosting gigs i knew that i should get on get out of bed on time i knew i should stop myself before i snapped at chris right self-monitor yeah i knew i should not feel let the frustration be the things that was driving me and so i started to use the rule all day long whenever i felt this i should do this 54321 and i would make myself do it and slowly five seconds at a time my entire life start started to change and my husband used it in his business and he and his business partner dove in they went on to open seven more restaurants um i went on to launch and sell two businesses and get recruited by cnn and join their team i had a syndicated radio show that that um ended up winning the gracie award which is kind of the female media you know awards for the number one talk show in the country um and you know i never intended to tell anybody about the five-second rule first of all because it's stupid right i mean come on count backwards that's the dumbest thing that's stupid to me though anything that works works for me that's true i mean i'll take any stupid thing that's true and so i but i also was like how do you start talking about something like that right yeah so um i was asked to give a ted talk like six years ago and ted six years ago not the brand that it was today they weren't even putting the talks online yet really yeah the tedx talks were not online yet and so that was the first speech i'd ever given in my life if you want to see what somebody looks like having a panic attack for 21 minutes straight watch that speech i was backstage and it was like one phd after another going out there i'm like what scientists you know what have i gotten myself into this that's not my thing um and so at the very end i wasn't even planning on talking about it i say oh by the way there's this thing i do that's it i don't even explain it and you know why i didn't explain it lewis i didn't know why it worked hmm sitting on the science the research you're just zero zero and then something crazy happened they put that talk online a year later and people started to write we've heard from more than a hundred thousand people in 90 countries that have written to us that i are using the rule in ways big and small to change their lives to change their marriages to change their thinking patterns to grow their businesses um we know of 11 people that have stopped themselves from killing themselves wow um in the moment there's a gentleman that we talk about in the book and you can see his social media posts in london he was a he was a veteran and he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and he boarded a ferry with the intention of jumping overboard and he got to the railing and he was standing there and his inner wisdom kicked in and this is another thing i want everybody watching to understand i don't care what you're facing or how low you get your inner wisdom is always there it is and the thing is is that we often don't listen to it and so he's standing there intending to kill himself and that inner wisdom kicks in and he remembers the five second rule and he goes five four three two one and he turns and physically moves away from the railing and finds the first person working on the ferry and tells him that he's suicidal saved his life wow he saved his life because he listened to the inner wisdom and this is the other thing i love about this rule it's not something to think about it's a tool to use so the part of the problem with a lot of the advice that i've found for me personally is that a lot of advice is all about kind of doing mental battle and if i go upstairs i'm behind enemy lines and i tend to get hijacked so i love this tool because 54321 interrupts those patterns it actually prompts the part of the brain that i need in order to change and it makes changing easier because i've now got my mind working for me instead of against me and it gets me out of my head and so um i'm i'm super excited to share this rule with people because i now know not only that it's working just not not for me it's working for people around the world and you know in the book it took me three years to write it it's all the science behind the rule it's got more than 150 social media posts in it so you see stories from around the world of people using it to end procrastination to build confidence to deepen their relationships to launch businesses to explode the sales why does it help with sales i'll tell you why because you can't sell by thinking selling is about action we have we have um um groups from companies around the world sales teams that put 54321 up on the wall i'm sure they hate me that's cool yes because what cold calling it's a momentum thing if you stop and think the phone is not getting the dialing is not happening when you're thinking yeah if you're thinking about all those no's you've been getting yes you're not going to want to do it again yeah it doesn't feel good yes and if you're in the middle of a negotiation or you're in the middle of a really difficult conversation and again remember what we said earlier you cannot control your feelings that rise up but you can always control how you think and what you do so if you're in the middle of a difficult conversation and you feel those feelings come up that normally trigger you to start editing yourself or to censor yourself or to silence yourself or to think sabotaging thoughts in like a business negotiation 54321 awaken the prefrontal cortex get back in the game i'm still in the mindset that i was in in 2008 when chris and i went bankrupt which is i need to get his scarcity yeah yeah man really yes that's the big insight i've had during this pandemic yeah shut up i shut up we're gonna talk about i i like i i mean just like shut up because that's crazy to hear you say that you get into a situation where you nearly lose everything and look i know you've been on your sister's couch you've been down and out you have you've had to reinvent yourself we could be the reinvention twins the two of us we could be yes and and and the thing is though is that if you get in that moment where you can't pay for groceries where you think your car is going to get repossessed where you can't pay for your kid's town soccer league like that is low when as a parent you can't provide what you want to provide for your kids you don't ever want to be in that situation again and so when i started to claw my way out of that louis and i started making money and chris started getting his restaurant business back on the rails we were still 800 000 in debt it was three years worth of trying to make the ends meet and i when i gave that that tedx talk in 2011 i had been that was three years after i discovered the five-second rule i had a full-time job with benefits and we were still massively in debt there were still liens on the house and after that tedx talk which is what launched the speaking business as people started to book me and i started making money i was like a squirrel with a freaking nut man a dollar came in i'm like put it away put it away put it away put it away put it away and every time a speech came you know what everybody said as i started to explode on the speaking circuit is oh speakers get hot you're going to be the hot speaker in you know 2017 and then take everything you can get and then they're on to the next speaker yeah yeah and so i figured i was just a fad and so i said yes to everything and i have become addicted to being busy and it is driven when i'm present from making an impact but if i'm honest it is mostly driven from that mentality from 2008 the fear that this could all disappear wow we are you know we both went through our own i guess identity shift and and uh dream death or ego death in 2000 in 2008 with me from football and you with your career and everything uh to give people context because i'm just gonna roll with this from from what you just shared mel robbins has been a friend of mine for years you've come and spoke at some of greatness you've been on the show a few times before and you've you've exploded in the last four years really with everything you've been talking about from speaking to the five second rule to the mel robbins show which was a big hit but then you know in the middle pandemic that dream just ended and we're talking about um you know a big revelation for you which is scarcity and this is something we teach all the time to be in abundance and don't have a scarce mindset but you're saying that you feel like you've been in scarcity still for the last three years yeah like i in some way obviously abundance of like i can do everything but in some way you've felt yeah there have been modes where i've said yes to things lewis because i've been afraid that all of my good fortune would disappear and if i had to take a look at the biggest one of the biggest lessons from the pandemic that coveted 19 created i call it the great pause where all of us were forced to take a gigantic pause from our everyday life and i need to qualify what i'm about to say by uh also saying that we have not lost a family member we have not um had the you know we we don't have anybody my dad is retired so we don't have an essential worker at a hospital or a grocery store so i am speaking about the impact of covet 19 without having lost a loved one and so um the great pause that basically had my talk show end abruptly we got five minutes notice we're told to evacuate cvs broadcast center and all of a sudden it was over 139 people no goodbyes oh my goodness 175 shows no thank yous it was we finished taping i walked into the control room my executive producer mindy borman turned to me and said they found covet in the building she started tearing up everybody this has been remarkable it's a wrap we are the last show in the building cbs let us finish taping the like they're they're sealing off the building i literally ran in the middle of a show yes my my my this was march uh 11th and i we had already stopped down audiences and so i ran upstairs to the apartment in cbs which was like our green room i grabbed everything that was possibly not nailed down don't tell sony i took a bunch of the blazers and um you know so i'm still a farm girl from the midwest at heart grab them go um who's gonna know that they're missing and so i uh and that was it i mean it was so awful because it felt like the biggest dream of my life which was to host a daytime syndicated talk show and give advice to people five days a week on television who had no access to therapy you know worked didn't have the time for personal development make it entertaining accessible my whole dream boom and five minutes flat done no completion disruption that was it and then two days later houghton mifflin which was my publisher for my next book started laying people off and they called me and said we need to cancel the book contract no it did not yeah they did and then and that well in in in their defense lewis i wasn't i was a year late in delivering okay yeah so if you would have done it on top yeah it would have been out yeah okay yes you got to talk show this lexia strikes again exactly so i and then it started to be like this speech is cancelled and this speech is canceled and this speech is cancelled and basically once microsoft announced that there were no events happening until june 2021 the speaking business at least the corporate speaking business is basically on hold for in-person events for over a year and in a matter of a week i saw my entire like runway shut down and what's so interesting is you and i have both you know in 2008 like so many of your listeners the first reception just rocked my life to rock biotim and when rock bottom hits you don't have to hit with a thud often times when you hit bottom you bounce and that's where i think the power is that you when the world feels upside down you always have the power to make it right when one chapter ends you always have the power to write a new one when you know you feel like nobody loves you you have the power to learn how to love yourself and if there's one thing that covid 19 has done regardless of whatever devastation it has caused in your life is it has forced us all to experience the great pause and i read that in a medium article and i love that idea of a pause because i think in 2020 our lives have gotten so fast and so digital and when you are forced to pause and get present and to slow down you are reminded of what's actually important and what's important is your health what's important is your family and your friends what's important is whether or not you are taking care of yourself and thinking positive thoughts versus negative thoughts the world gave us a gigantic experiment where we got to practice and get to continue to practice the most important skill in the planet which is emotional resilience the ability to face hard and actually be okay the ability to face the uncertain and redirect your attention on things that you know that are certain and so i am so grateful that we had this time um because when i think about my family so we've got a 21 year old a 20 year old and a 15 year old we will never get these 10 weeks back again it was a gift as much as uh our two daughters were in college were complete goals when they got home it was a gift yeah and the other thing is for that generation by the way for them to learn the generation where everybody gets a trophy that the things that you love can be taken away like that that there are things in life that are way more important than your prom or rush graduation or graduation not to say that you don't deserve to mourn those things but the perspective check that you got from covid19 and you know really hit home because one of our daughters has a very close friend in college whose dad died who's my age and um no prior conditions nothing and i think when change hits and it's personal that's when the perspective shift comes and so between covet 19 and the fight for social justice that we're seeing with the black lives matter movement and all of the protesting going on um it's it's been a really remarkable moment of time if you pause for a minute and you reflect on the opportunity of this moment what is the opportunity well the opportunity is to unlock the power that's inside you to create a better future for yourself for your family for your body for your mind for your spirit for this country for this world for your community yeah i always you know i always talk about since i experience many breakdowns whether it be a physical breakdown or relationship breakdown or family breakdowns i feel like in order for us to really see clearly we need to break down in a big way it's hard to make big changes when things are good or when they're so so it's it's even when it's like uh it's not good it's it's really it's hard to make changes it needs to be devastatingly challenging for a lot of us some of us maybe can make changes all the time but for most people there needs to be some devastation or near devastation either personally or close to you to say oh let me re-evaluate let me pause like you talked about and start creating a better future for myself why do you think that is in human beings that you know things are going bad we won't change if they're going good we won't change but it's almost like we need a massive breakdown near death experience divorce covid for us to see clearly to start changing well there's a really simple answer patterns so the thing about all human beings is that we are pattern learning machines and if you feel stuck or broken i guarantee you while you feel that way you're not you have a pattern of behavior or a pattern of thinking that is broken and we need to be disrupted because we love our patterns and even people that i know like i've never seen pain even when we're in pain we like pain is familiar for a lot of people yeah so a lot of people like you may be listening to lewis and i talking and you grew up in a super chaotic household maybe your parents argued all the time maybe your dad or mom were in and out maybe there was a lot of fighting maybe there was actual abuse i don't know what was going on but it was chaotic as hell and so as an adult you have vowed yourself you are not going to repeat that pattern but what ends up happening is because as a little kid you observed witness absorbed the pattern of chaos in your nervous system unless you go about the intentional work of breaking the pattern of chaos you will create it in your own life because it's what's familiar you won't understand why do i keep dating these why do i why do i go to these bosses that treat me like crap because you don't know what it feels like to be in a relationship with either a boss or a romantic partner or a roommate that is consistent because for the first 18 years of your life you lived in an estate called when's the next shoe gonna drop right and so wherever it is in your life that something is broken there is a pattern that you don't see yet that is making you continue to stay in a broken situation and so one of the things that you just asked which is why is a perspective change or losing a job or something like that that's so disruptive because those sorts of things covet 19 breaks every pattern yes yes black lives matter breaks patterns of thinking that you weren't even aware that you had about privilege or being anti-racist or what your black colleagues and friends and relatives deal with on a day-to-day basis and so having a breakdown is one of the biggest things on the planet because what you get is you get a break from your own and you can look objectively at where you are and for the first time look ahead and say well what do i want to go create and nine times out of ten if you're discouraged right now if you've got financial devastation if you've if you're facing something that is making this moment in time as hard for you as life was for lewis and i in 2008 during the last recession i beg you ask yourself honestly if what you had is actually what you wanted the thing that you just lost that that job that you brushed about all the time a relationship that was bad to you yeah yes or the friends you can't hang out with because it's convenient and you can't you're in court like actually ask yourself if this is what you wanted or were you just used to it being used to something lewis i think is the biggest reason why people don't change i asked my mother i love my mother i love my parents i've been married 51 years which is a feat because they were my mom was a teen mom but uh i asked her once if she'd go to a personal development center with me what'd you say are you kidding me why would i want to change at my age wow i might discover i hate my life wow i was like okay i'm just going to leave that right there right [Music] i mean i think being used to what you have i mean i i i even our son is so i'm i'm here in vermont at my mother-in-law's place and our son is going to go to high school in vermont and so we're going to kind of split our time back and forth between my mother-in-law's place and our place in boston because god knows what business is going to be like and you know why would you need an office after kobe 19. another amazing thing to realize um even that change i notice my own agitation my own anxiety coming up will i make friends will i like a slower lifestyle what happens if chris likes it up here and i hate it up here my own mind because it's not something i'm used to yet is making up stories to cling to the old way of life this is a moment in time everyone please this is the greatest gift the greatest gift is this moment of pause where you get in touch with what you actually want and if you don't have the skills for crying out loud look around and take an online course because if you need skills to prepare yourself for the thing that you want get them right now 54321 awaken the prefrontal cortex get back in the game um how has this rule helped you the most in what area of your life with your your marriage your business and being more productive in not having to you know take drugs when you're worried so much what's what's or on stage what's the area where you're like wow this has really had the biggest impact and i'm sure all of it but well the most important thing in my life is my marriage so my relationship with chris is like the thing that brings me the greatest joy i mean i'll just start crying thinking about it and um how many years you've been married 20 20 years we've been together for 22 years three kids 17 16 11. um it has given me mastery over myself like i get so choked up just thinking about this like i used to feel out of control and this rule allows me to be the best version of me and to interrupt like all the garbage that can trigger you um to behave in a way that's inconsistent with your values and your dreams and so that has been the single greatest gift that's great that and also you know i think the other thing that's super cool is that it is a tool that certainly prompts you to act but it is also a tool that helps you tune in to your inner wisdom like you're not only going to start waking up you'll be so in tune with those signals that come from your instincts not emotional not instinct like instinctual that um that you you get a direct line to your inner voice you get a direct line you know you all these people one of the things that's always that's always um struck me so if you if you list all the people that you admire right yeah richard branson oprah winfrey bill gates like everybody's got kind of this yeah well whatever uh louis for sure um if you list all those people jay-z beyond like everybody yeah everybody that you admire is doing the exact same thing they actually listen to their inner wisdom they have figured out how to tune out the critic up here and trust the instincts and you know i have this saying about confidence that i've only recently kind of stumbled into as i've been digging into more research around the science of confidence and the skill of confidence because a lot of people think that confidence is a personality trait it's not it's actually a skill that you build through action and a lot of people think confidence is a state of belief it can be but that's not where it begins and so i say that confidence is the willingness to try that's all that it is knowing that you may succeed or survive but you'll still try and to me all those people that we admire most that's what they're doing they have the ability to tune into those instincts that are true for them because the fact is there's only one you that's it and you matter because there's only one you and there's only ever gonna be one you and your instincts and your experiences and your inner wisdom is a gift to the world and every time that you tune it out because of the habit of hesitating or the habit of self-doubt or the habit of worrying or the habit of overthinking you are robbing the world of that gift that you have to to give to everybody and you can use this simple stupid silly tool to train yourself to not only hear it but also to develop the skill of courage to act on it um powerful and is there any area of your life where you feel like you lack courage still um you know i'll admit it's kind of easy i think we all kind of go through those those moments where you feel like you're behind and i think social media is both an incredible tool and it can also be um one of those triggers that makes you feel like look at how many followers this guy has and like i'm gonna it's so compared to this guy right here like it's easy to use technology and social media not for inspiration but actually as a way to bash yourself that you're not doing what other people are doing or whatever yes and so i think that i i use the rule a lot for patients i noticed that my insecurity rises up because right now you know look i i did a ridiculous number of speeches last year i travel way too much i don't want my life to look like that um it's a champagne problem i get it yeah but but i also have three kids in a marriage that i love and i really feel depleted when i'm not with them and so i'm practicing patients as i make an intentional pivot in the kind of business that i'm running so that i have more of a life that i want as well so that's one area um you know i i i don't feel insecure as much as you know you know the term deliberate practice right and you know the five-hour rule where is that from the talent code well the deliberate practice is actually a psychological principle i think it was in a book called the talent code but yeah oh yeah okay yeah well it's a psychological principle that you know and you know the ten thousand hours i mean deliberate practices yes so so deliberate practice is this idea that yeah you could do ten thousand hours at anything and become an expert at it but the way to do it faster is to uh deliberate to do deliberate practice which means you're practicing with the intention of improving and there's a feedback loop yeah so two thousand hours as opposed to ten thousand correct like for example if you wanna become an expert at guitar learn scales don't just sit there for ten thousand hours and play the same song if you learn scales you get the finger dexterity and the muscle memory and the neural pathway yes i saw your guitar over there i saw your guitar you know i always wanted to play guitar but instead i forced my three children to learn that's good guys you just enjoy it and just watch them my brother's uh you know the number one jazz violinist in the world what yeah and so i grew up watching the most incredible like now is he built like you too he used to be even like more jacked they used to call him the incredible hulk of violin because he was just like wow snap the thing in half he would he would like slam it like jimi hendrix style yeah uh but now he's leaned up a bunch actually and so he's he's incredible so i used to just be all awestruck by his gifts and it was unbelievable his skill and so i learned guitar i taught myself when i was 18 just because i was like i have to know something you know that's pretty much i can barely you know i'm like a hack but you know at least i could do something so yeah so i'm i'm kind of in this mode of of improving myself and i'll give you one more thing that i'm working on so i kind of think about my life and my work in three buckets so we got this bucket here we got this bucket and we got this bucket and so when you think about your business or you think about your passion or you think about work i think about okay what do i need to do in terms of how much time and what actions do i need to take in order to develop the skills so that i can perform the work so there's the deliberate practice that goes into practicing your skills and your mastery yep and your competency mastery so that when it comes time to actually deliver the work whether that's selling or standing on a stage or writing a book or talking to people or selling real estate or whatever it is that that it may that may be your passion deliver this is the one i neglected last year this bucket is what are you doing to personally develop yourself so that you are the most capable fulfilled and satisfied human being so that when you show up to do your competency and your skills and the delivery that you as the human being are able to do that yeah and so i've been spending a lot more time consuming content reading books watching you know your incredible show and learning from other people and i think that one of the traps that we entrepreneurs get into is we i i was feeling last year anyway like i was on a treadmill and when i wasn't looking somebody was coming by and turning up the speed and i was only in this alley and increasing the uh the the hills yes and so and if you're my age you need like a diaper when somebody does that you're on a treadmill and a leash to keep you attached to it exactly so um i uh i've been focusing a lot on this and it's been interesting because you and i were talking earlier too about you going to india and some of the stuff that you learned in terms of the different states to be in and i use one where i pay attention to where i'm feeling depleted versus where i'm energized and here's the thing you can be doing things that are really hard that energize you you can be doing things that are really scary that energize you same is true with things that deplete you there are things in your life that are really easy for you there are people that you hang out with by the way that you've been hanging out with for years but they deplete you and so i've been starting to become more deliberate about how i distance myself from things that deplete me and how i spend more time and energy either doing or pushing myself to do those things that actually energize me and this gets back to your message around passion right and that you know the the art and the skill of building a life that is guided by the things that you're passionate about i also know that as i set out to to write down what i want to do there is so much freaking fear that i have why is that because i think because i still feel like i'm not worthy i feel like i don't deserve it like it's old and i think that's the other thing about patterns everybody is just because you identify and for me as a kid for whatever reason i have my own version of feeling invisible and feeling like i'm not good enough and so my way of coping both with my anxiety and being a survivor of sexual abuse and um and wanting love which we all need is i was like an overachiever and so i'm the kind of person that's super busy and a go-getter because it got me attention and if i was the one that was super busy and achieving i not only got praise but it also insulates you from other people not picking you because you're the one in a leadership role doing the picking right and so there's a part of me at the age of 51 that is realizing that you know this these feelings of feeling unworthy and this hyper drive to try to achieve it's all coming from a place of feeling inadequate or like what i'm doing is not enough and so at 50 having the talk show having a best-selling book having the audible originals having the platform everywhere having the impact i still don't feel being the most booked female speaker in the world like you still don't feel so stupid it's annoying and human beings are annoying we are stuck with this wiring like if you think about it like all of the crap you believe is probably a hangover from age zero to ten that as adults we walk around thinking the same stuff we thought as kids and i can't stand that i feel that way but knowing it it allows me to catch it before it has me before it stops me from having an event or writing that next book or taking a risk what do you think the biggest fear is because you say you say not worthy or not feeling enough is that i mean it's just people liking me i think like uh you know being a people pleaser yeah um we're so similar in every way it's crazy that's great um i you know what i don't like you it's lonely dude what happened to the price what happens if 99 percent of people like you and one percent doesn't like you oh i don't get about that okay but if it's like if it's 50 50 i think that the work that we all have to do every single one of us whether you bulldoze whether you people please whether you avoid conflict whether you're impulsive whether you uh yo-yo your decisions uh whatever it is that is your pattern you know you the the constant trashing yourself i think the the the journey of your whole life is figuring out how to truly like and love yourself it's so true i mean i remember this was my whole life was never loving myself and needing to go prove to others originally that i'm worthy this was happened in sports and business until i started opening up and accepting myself and and taking off the mass when i turned 30 talking about sexual abuse and just kind of saying screw it i don't care what people think about me anymore this pain inside is hurting so much it's not worth living with it so i'm going to start sharing and allow myself to heal and allow myself to finally love myself and it's so funny that we could just write a book with two words that says love yourself and that's all the book needs to say because a lot of us never remember to love ourselves remember to acquire skills which are important remember to love other people remind ourselves to take care of our health but if we don't love ourselves internally if we don't think we can give ourselves a hug because we're not deserving of it then none of this stuff is going to matter to the point of we're always going to need to do more to feel something right well nobody teaches you how to do it and see that's the thing and you know i mean if you look at human development we're the only species that literally can't survive without another human being taking care of you and so we are biologically hard-wired to bond with other people and that is the ver from the very beginning of when you come out bonding with somebody else and making sure they pay attention to you is your survival imperative so you are born needing somebody else and i think what ends up happening is there's never that kind of clean break or pass off between needing your parents to take care of you needing your friends approval to fit in to truly having ownership over giving yourself what you didn't get giving yourself what you needed and that's the piece that i've been doing a lot of during the the great pause is slowing down because so much of my busyness was fueled by uh you know praise me love me am i doing enough you know please tell me i'm doing okay okay i can breathe now i'm okay now and when i slow down and maybe it's a function of the anxiety that's when things get scary because that's when you've really got to be with yourself and so it's in getting off the road slowing down recognizing that i'm super grateful for all the opportunity and i know the work that i'm doing makes a tremendous impact and i particularly love hearing from mental health practitioners that the five-second rule i've heard from so many people in inpatient psychiatric words louis that use the five-second rule in the videos we put on youtube in their group counseling sessions with people and knowing that it is helping so many people it is like the greatest gift on the in on the planet to know that it's making a difference but i know that in this next chapter that i consciously create i want to have more fun i wanna i really wanna love the process yeah i don't wanna make it so hard on myself and be gripping everything so tight and it's really easy for me to see it in other people because i know what it feels like in here i'm working hard to break the patterns that still hold me back and the big one that holds me back is um bulldozing that's the it's it's it's literally when i start to feel any level of tension this is particularly true in my marriage um i'm married to a saint thank god chris robbins meditates every morning it's the only reason why we've lasted 26 years um it's how he puts up with me when i feel my like whatever emotion rise i immediately raise my voice it's how i assert power in the relationship and i am so committed louis to breaking that pattern wow and being a more fun person to be around and a kinder person to be around wow that's beautiful that you're getting this during the pause what do you think was what do you think was the biggest lesson you learned about yourself during the talk show experience before the pause because you you covered so many topics you and you had to research about so many things and you brought so many people on experts but then just everyday people going through their challenges what's the thing that you learned that was new because this is something you've been studying for years and talking about and was there anything new that you were like shocked about you learned about yourself or about human behavior this is going to be a really well first of all there's two things the first one i'll make it deeply personal and the second one will be a thing that i learned okay um the talk show experience was almost like it's it's weird it almost feels like it didn't happen really yeah it was your whole life for like two years yeah but you know 175 shows it was in super intense you know it was it was almost a spiritual experience because i had dreamt about it for as long as i could remember and i stepped onto that talk show set with such a level of mastery and the reason why i had a level of mastery is because i could look backwards at my life and see that i had been heading to that moment for my entire life that the ability to create trust and take a complicated amount of information and get down to the human connection immediately that began back in 1994 when i was a legal aid attorney doing criminal defense work in new york city my ability to understand what victims of domestic violence go through uh goes all the way back to 1986 through 1988 when i was a crisis intervention counselor volunteering on a domestic violence hotline my ability to read a teleprompter had to do with being at cnn my ability to work 18-hour days was a function of the reality tv show world my ability to relate to somebody who had lost everything was a function of what chris and i had gone through my ability like just everything all of a sudden was like and it's why i can say with such urgency that you have to have faith that this is happening for a reason that this is leading somewhere and if you only just stay awake and you pay attention to what your body's trying to tell you in those moments when you have a signal come up how do you think we heal trauma if we don't have the resources to go to therapy or do workshops or whatever it may be even if we do have resources we don't have the courage to put ourselves out there how do we start to heal trauma within our body excellent question so uh we did a whole uh project for audible original um called take control that was all about the thesis was this any area of your life that you're stuck i am willing to bet everything i have that you have a trauma pattern from your past that you've never healed um you've got a boss that is abusive guarantee you this has to do with a trauma pattern from your past you can't succeed in the areas you want you can't lose the weight there's some pattern from your past so the first thing is recognizing that you actually experience trauma and i am a huge proponent as so many people are of widening the definition because i think up until about five years ago most of us thought that trauma just meant okay you uh were in active duty or you were in a huge accident or incident that was highly traumatic or you survived some sort of uh physical sexual whatever abuse trauma is just about any kind of experience that you witness or you absorb that has your nervous system light up on edge and start warning you so if you've ever had like you could have a critical parent and you just brace for them you could have a parent that that drinks like crazy and you brace at five o'clock because you know they're coming home you could have been abandoned by a parent or have a parent that was mentally ill or have a parent that was so on your ass because they wanted you to be a pro football player and so you were constantly on edge it's when your nervous system fires up to a state of alert that now gets programmed into your body as a response there's a reason why so many couples at five o'clock at night start bickering and it has to do with the fact that at five o'clock is typically when a lot of parents 20 years ago were coming home from work and that's when the arguing would start and so what happens when you witness that or you feel it is as a kid you're now in a state where you're on edge wow i see you rocking in your chair wow that's crazy well i mean i just remember you know it's funny there's a there's a lot of good things that usually happen to our our childhood but we just seem to remember a lot of the bad stuff and it's because you know why right because it's trauma just like and you're nervous yeah i guess and also your mind is wired in a way to prioritize the negative as a means to keep your ass safe from not experiencing it correct which is why you got to work on your positive mindset because your mind defaults to negative so you got to build up the programming deposit this isn't just this is actually science i know so i remember you know my the memories of the past i always have to remind myself of all the positive stuff that you know my parents did all the time and what they were going through and giving them grace and all these different things but i remember you know when my dad would get home it would be it was he didn't know what type of day was going to be for him you know it was like either a thunder coming through the the wooden floors with his wooden shoes and like being angry and upset or it was like the loving father that would take me out and play catch in the backyard so i have to constantly remind myself of like the pod which i'm i'm certain it was 90 of the time was good but those 10 of the time you know creates that clinching mode like you said well let me explain what happened so this really interesting concept called ghosts in the nursery and so trauma patterns get automated and because they're not experienced in your brain they're felt in your nervous system and so it's why you can have a pattern from your past but be completely unaware that it's running your life right now because it's stored not in your conscious thought but in your nervous system and you feel it in your body before it even gets into your head and so from there's this concept called ghost in the nursery which basically means there's all kinds of that goes on when you're little that you may or may not remember in your mind but your body remembers it so for example if you had parents that were just stressed out and they come home and they've been busy and you're sitting there playing on the floor and there's there's toys everywhere and mom or dad's reaction to a mess is to scream that creates this kind of thing in your nervous system now you may not remember that episode that happened on may 17 1972 but your nervous system remembers what it's like so fast forward you're now 51 years old and you walk in the house and there's a mess everywhere and even though you have said i'm not going to bulldoze and yell at anybody my body recognizes the situation so what do you do you repeat the pattern you saw and so what i'm working on right now is a pattern that is encoded in my nervous system i was trying to create a video yes or two days ago um for sure the mic for share the mic now um trying to create a video and i'm like doing take after take because i want to get it right and my daughter comes waltzing into the room and was like how long are you going to be doing this and i was like can't you say that i'm working i literally like screamed at her and she looked at me louis and she goes you have a real problem wow how's your daughter 20. and i said i calmly said you're right i do when i get interrupted i lose control of the response and i'm working so hard and the way that you and i'm clearly not mastering this yet but the way that you do it is as you feel it rise up you have to you know you can use the five second rule five four three two one you can use just take a quick breath you can notice the pattern and you've got to create a pause between the emotion rising up and the reaction that gets automated and for many people the reaction loss is to run away it's to leave the room it's to avoid the confrontation the it was just easy you know hold on let me let the clock go even though you you hate being interrupted by anything this is a great interview i did like i didn't do i didn't do the bulldozer i was i was calm because i wasn't a human being i'm only mean to human beings um i know like i a lot of people run away they avoid conflict they say it's just easier but if running away and avoiding conflict continues to create a pattern where you feel invisible and your boundaries are trumped on that's a pattern and you know here's the other thing about patterns running away and being quiet might have saved you when you were little because if you were quiet and out of the room you didn't get hit you didn't get yelled at you were out of harm's way so when you were little it was a genius pattern because it protected you but the issue for adults is that again we walk around with the patterns that we created when we were eight years old in different situations than we are in now and now we are completely a robot to these patterns i i love that you um you had a great tweet the other day about boundaries because as uh as individuals both of us who try to help people break boundaries try to break their mindset that's holding them back try to get them to become uh greater than in their past all these different things you wrote a post that said your boundaries are there to serve you as you grow so will your boundaries what boundaries do you need to set up in order to help yourself grow why are boundaries important when we also have the mindset of like you should be breaking your boundaries all the time well i wouldn't say that break that breaking your like i don't call the the obstacles or i call them excuses and so i i think the hardest boundaries honestly are the ones that set with yourself to not drink during the week to not tolerate the bulldozing and immediately apologize and try to do better to um not waste hours on social media like all the things that the small promises you need to make in order to create boundaries with your old patterns and your excuses um to me the the hardest boundaries to set are those with myself i what was the question again uh you know breaking we we encourage people to break boundaries you know they feel like they're limited but you talk about uh your boundaries are going to serve you so obviously it's a different type of boundary but you know yeah so so here's the thing what boundaries do you need to help yourself to protect yourself and which ones do you need to grow past that are holding you back i think that the definition with boundaries that has helped me the most is understanding that boundaries are for me they're not for you and the single biggest mistake that we make in any relationship particularly romantic ones but also work related ones is we do not express what we need that's so true my girlfriend was telling me this the other day she's like i really want you to tell me what you need and when you want it and feel comfortable and confident saying it and for me i go back into trauma of past like when i used to say what i want need and it didn't get met it would have get let down my expectations i'd get hurt so i was like screw it i'll just do everything on my own which leads to resentment or whatever else yeah how's that working out for you it's like so so so luis that's an example of eight-year-old lewis created a pattern that worked when you were eight yeah but now that you're in your 30s and in a relationship that you really care about you've got to identify the pattern and break it and replace it and the good news is any pattern can be replaced change isn't personal it just feels personal change is just about identifying patterns and replacing them with new ones that's it and it'll take a little while because they're encoded in your nervous system and your default is to just do it yourself um but you have to you cannot as a rule punish other people for you didn't communicate right so i'll give you the perfect example so chris and i have been married for 24 years and when i was before the talk show and i made my living mostly by uh you know doing 100 speeches a year i would be on the road 150 days a year and when i would come home there was always something that pissed me off like what like ah the trashes are taken out the clothes are here or is it something else oh no i'm way worse than that are you kidding i would walk in after being gone for five or six days and there on the island in the kitchen was a vase that had dead flowers the ones that i had bought for myself a week before and it was as if everybody in my family had been walking around the island for six days as if there was some dead flower sculpture in the middle of the island and so i would come home and first of all the only person that's really excited to see me is a dog and my family did sit me down at one point they said you know you realize when you're not here we have our own lives so you don't put your lives on hold while you know for us and we're not putting our lives on hold so it's not that we're not excited to see you but we're not organizing our whole lives around when mom comes home right to be like a dog to be like the dog excited and running up and jumping in your arms and kissing you yeah yeah no no they don't but that but i think that's cool because that means that they're independent and doing their own thing they've set boundaries they've set boundaries with me perfect so for probably six months i would get pissy and i would walk in and put my bags down and i grabbed the flowers and i demonstratedly how many times has everyone done this throw them out loudly like everyone hears you communication yeah i'm getting my communication just throwing these dead flowers out communicate to you that you should buy me flowers like i'm not saying that but that's what the body language is right how dare i have been off i've been in four cities and then you become a mar like uh i'm disgusting when i tell this story but this is it this is like so well i see you've got some lovely flowers behind you that look alive so that's good to see oh that's nice so i do love flowers so finally i just said to chris you know what would make me feel amazing is if when i came home you had just bought some flowers just go to the just when you're at the grocery store it doesn't you don't have to order like i'm saying by the five dollar pack of half dead tulips just something okay and and then he said why and this is the most important part of expressing and look you don't have to give an explanation if you're trying to like cut off a toxic person but if you want to express boundaries with somebody because you want them to understand you more deeply give them the why i said because it makes me think that you are excited for me to come home and that you knew i was coming because i'm starting to feel forgotten so underneath the anger louis wow was hurt and feeling like i didn't matter and so i'll be darned i walk in and um there they are and i literally feel so seen and you know the other thing to do is and like another thing for us too is like chris and i i learned on my talk show because chris was on it and we did a show all about men and what men think and the secrets they keep wow i learned for the first time that my husband prefers to have sex in the morning i get a lot of men do i didn't know that well see i didn't like it because i don't like bad breath in the morning my girlfriend says the same thing says the same thing but i'm like why didn't you tell me and the reason why is because we're so funky about asking for what we need we're so afraid of getting rejected or denied or whatever or being vulnerable in that moment but the greatest thing that you can do is ask for what you need your friends need to know what you need your lover needs to know what you need your kids need to know what you need because then they can show up in a way where you feel seen and then you're gonna and they're gonna feel incredible yeah and you can't expect people to know what you need um or them to know what you need by communicating it through anger and this frustration of thro you know whatever like he's throwing away the flowers that way of communicating really unhealthy i'm to blame there as well um and i think it's that's not a healthy way of of creating love within a relationship whether it's a friend a family member or a loved one but here's the thing you want to know why you let me let me let everybody off the hook yeah because here's the reason why this happens and this is what i want everyone to know what we're up against so lewis is you and i sit here talking about the flower thing right and you gotta communicate your bodies as we're having this conversation we are present and we're using the thinking part of our brain when i walk into the kitchen i am not thinking i am in the emotional traumatic nervous system robot part of my body and that's where your feelings and your triggers take over yeah and if you can start to identify the bulldozing the anger all that stuff you will literally change your whole life by just changing one or two patterns the other thing and you know you asked me about the talk show the single greatest gift of the talk show content-wise is something called the word wheel so i don't have it right here but if you google word wheel or wheel of emotions you will find that um if you ask somebody name as many emotions as you can most people can name three happy sad angry there's literally like 113 of them from disgusted to hopeless to and if you if you start with a cor this thing allows you to start with a core emotion and go out because back to the flower example i was expressing anger that's not what i was feeling i was feeling invisible and forgotten so the word wheel is something that we used several times a week to help people go from the thing that they are expressing to them what you're feeling which is a lot like the work that you wrote about in your book yeah around wearing masks getting to the root of the core emotion you're feeling but not expressing and that gets back to the the pause thing what have i seen that i am busy that i'm that i i am so have you ever wanted something so bad that you become paralyzed yeah i so want to end the mental pain and suffering that people feel i so want to help people heal their minds and to have the power to create a better future and i get so overwhelmed by how much i want to see that happen in the world that sometimes i become paralyzed and what happens for me a lot of the time is i feel insignificant in my ability to move the needle on that um yeah because there's billions of people who are struggling yeah and it's like what do you do to make the max maximum use of your time to make the maximum impact and also create resources to create more impact i get that yell at my husband to buy me flowers that's what i do i get the feeling hey it's mel thank you so much for watching this video if you haven't already subscribed please please please subscribe to my youtube channel and if you like this video i have a suspicion you're gonna like these two next

Channel: Mel Robbins

Views: 64,105

Rating: 4.9288077 out of 5

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Id: sVB0bFZFkEM

Length: 90min 43sec (5443 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020