How to REPROGRAM the POOR Design of Your BRAIN! | Mel Robbins MOTIVATION

wanna be happy build a life not just a business hey it's evan carmichael and this channel was created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back a lack of belief in yourself you watch these videos because you know there's something more inside you two you've got michael jordan level talent at something so today let's live your best believe life and get some of the best mel robbins motivation of all time enjoy we bought into this this complete falsehood that at some point you're going to have the courage at some point you're going to have the confidence and it's total frankly are we allowed to swear okay um it's it's complete garbage and so there are so many people in the world and and you know you may be watching this right now and you have these incredible ideas and what you think is missing is motivation and that's not true because the way that our minds are wired and the fact about human beings is that we are not designed to do things that are uncomfortable or scary or difficult our brains are designed to protect us from those things because our brains are trying to keep us alive and in order to change in order to build a business in order to be the best parent the best spouse to do all those things that you know you want to do with your life with your work with your dreams you're going to have to do things that are difficult uncertain or scary which sets up this problem for all of us you're never going to feel like it motivation's garbage you only feel motivated to do the things that are easy right why do you think that is oh i know exactly why that is because i i've studied this so much because for me one of the hardest things to figure out was why is it so hard to do the little things that would improve my life and what i've come to realize and what we'll talk a lot about today is that the way that our minds are designed is our minds are designed to stop you at all costs from doing anything that might hurt you and the way that that that that this all happens is it all starts with something super subtle that none of us ever catch and that is with this habit that all of us have that nobody's talking about we all have a habit of hesitating we have an idea you're sitting in a meeting you have this incredible idea and instead of just you know saying it you stop and you hesitate now what none of us realize is that when you hesitate just that moment that micro moment that small hesitation it sends a stress signal to your brain it wakes your brain up and your brain all of a sudden goes oh wait a minute wait why is he hesitating he didn't hesitate when he put on his killer spiky sneakers he didn't hesitate with the uh really cool track pants he didn't hesitate with the nasa t-shirt now he's hesitating to talk something must be up so then your brain goes to work to protect you it has a million different ways to protect you one of them is called the spotlight effect it's a known phenomenon where your brain magnifies risk why to pull you away from something that it perceives to be a problem and so you can truly trace every single problem or complaint in your life to silence and hesitation those are decisions and what i do and what's changed my life is waking up and realizing that motivation's garbage i'm never going to feel like doing the things that are tough for difficult or uncertain or scary or new so i need to stop waiting until i feel like it and number two i am one decision away from a totally different marriage a totally different life a totally different job a totally different income a totally different uh relationship with my kids not like one decision i'm divorcing you in in the marriage example but one decision on you know you could be having a conversation with your spouse and you feel your emotions rise up and within a tiny window those emotions can take over and can impact how your marriage goes or you can learn how to take control of that micro moment and make a decision to act in a way that actually shifts your marriage your life comes down to your decisions and if you change your decisions you will change everything when i was 22 right after i graduated from dartmouth i was so focused on making everyone happy that i almost chose the worst possible career for my personality it's not a bad career it just would have been horrendous for me i was interested in the environment so i decided oh you know i'll go get a law degree and then i'll go work in washington and i think maybe i'll work on environmental policy and i'd probably end up in some cube farm and everyone was thrilled with the plan everyone it turns out but me so here i am i'm driving a u-haul across country to go to law school and to get a degree in environmental law and something started to gnaw at me and with every single mile that i drove my thoughts were getting louder and doubts were starting to pour in my gut was telling me mel turn the damn u-haul around but the problem was that everything was already in place right i mean i'm already in the u-haul the thing is already packed i'm already 10 miles into my drive the tuition had been paid for the first semester i had signed a lease i mean i could not undo these things isn't that why it's so difficult for you to make changes in your life because you think that things can't be undone the fact is any excuse that you come up with you can undo tuition can be reimbursed apartments can be leased plan b can be invented so i got up i repacked that u-haul and i drove out of town i let myself make a u-turn in life if you ever find your gut battling your head save yourself the drama i guarantee you your gut is right guarantee you your excuses can be undone and i guarantee you you can make a u-turn in your life right now if you want to one night chris had gone to bed i had been struggling struggling struggling we still had all the same problems i we stole a lien on the house still facing bankruptcy still fighting like crazy i was still unemployed he still they still hadn't figured out like the solution yet for the business and i was about to turn off the tv and there on the tv there was this rocket launching and i thought oh my gosh that is it i am going to launch myself out of bed like a rocket ship like nasa right here had launched me out of that bed and i'm gonna move so fast that i don't think i'm gonna beat my brain now here's a really interesting point um i talk a lot about your instincts and inner wisdom and we can get into this a little bit later but a lot of us talk about the fact that you have a gut feeling but what all this research that i've done for the book and and all the speaking that i do what i've discovered that's fascinating is actually when you set goals when you have an intention on something that you want to change about your life your brain helps you what it does is it opens up a checklist and then your brain goes to work trying to remind you yeah of that intention that you set and it's really important to develop the skill and i say that word purposefully the skill of knowing how to hear that inner wisdom and that intention kicking in and leaning into it quickly so for me my brain saying that's it right there move as fast as a rocket mill i wanted to change my life and i think most people that are miserable or that are that are really like dying to be great and dying to have more we want to change we want to live a better life we want to create more for our families we want to be happier the the desire is there again it's about how do you go from knowledge to action so the first thing in this story that's important is realizing that the answer was in me and my mind was telling me pay attention it could have also been the bourbon manhattan's that night anyway the next morning the alarm goes off and um i pretended nasa was there it's the stupidest story i literally went five four three two one i counted out loud and then i stood up and i i'll never forget standing there in my bedroom it was dark it was cold it was winter in boston and for the first time in three months i had beaten my habit of hitting the snooze button i couldn't believe it and i thought wait a minute counting backwards that is the dumbest thing i've ever heard in my entire life well the next morning i used it again and it worked the next morning i used it again and it worked the next morning i used it again and it worked and then i started to notice something really interesting there were moments all day long all day long just like that five second moment in bed where i knew knowledge what i should do and if i didn't move within five seconds my brain would step in and talk me out of it every human being has a five second window might even be shorter for you you have about a five second window in which you can move from idea to action before your brain kicks into full gear and sabotages any change in behavior because remember your brain is wired to stop you from doing things that are uncomfortable or uncertain or scary it's your job to learn how to move from those ideas that could change everything into acting on also if you want to have unstoppable confident self-love and learn from successful women entrepreneurs check out my 254 series they're free the links to join are in the description below i know that everybody's problem comes down to one pattern you're repeating that you can't see i first had to learn how to have the courage to speak up and have hard conversations in my life in order to get to the next level in your business you got to decide right now what habits do you have as a leader that you have to change now i think you have to be really in tune with your impulses and with your natural state of curiosity and your curiosity and the things that you're naturally drawn toward that's the guide if you could spend hours singing if you could spend hours baking if you could spend hours writing if you could spend hours learning code that's a huge signal that that's something that you're really innately interested in and so if you're curious about something if you notice that you daydream about being a writer if you notice that you daydream about starting a tech company if you notice you daydream about building bridges follow your curiosity and you can do that a number of ways first of all google it there are millions and millions of pages out there on the web that are related to what you're interested in secondly find an online course most of the major universities are offering their courses online for free third buy a book about it put yourself in a collision course with the thing that you're curious about and you will get closer and closer and closer to figuring it out what about when someone can't realize or identify their own negative feelings someone that has been conditioned to live in negative feelings and believes that that's normal this question comes from baso anna dinagada um it is your normal you're right it's a really um first of all i'm sorry that that's been your experience of life because that really stinks and it doesn't have to be that way but here here's where i want you to go what's interesting about what you said is the fact that these feelings are normal okay normal just means you're used to them but you don't have to live with them so even though you're so used to these negative feelings and these feelings of doubt you still don't like them you still have the ability to stop that so i want you to think of a moment in time when you were really happy like it could be a memory from being little it could be something that you dream of doing and i want you to come up with something really specific about that moment okay like think about what you're wearing or think about the the the blue sky that is going to be what i call your anchor thought every time from this moment forward that you wake up or you find yourself drifting to those normal feelings of i'm a loser i'm worthless i'm never gonna find love they may be things that you're used to thinking but that doesn't that doesn't matter because you can change them the second that you feel that you've drifted over into that thought and i keep coming over here because when you start using the rule you're going to start to literally feel which part of your mind you're using the worries kind of happen here i want you to five four three two one and then i want you to insert this vision of yourself this vision of yourself where you felt really good and if you can't think of one invent one how would you feel if you were in love how would you feel if you loved yourself how would you feel if you did that thing that you're scared of that you keep talking yourself out of that's your anchor thought now when you first start using the rule particularly when you're breaking a habit a habit of thinking negative thoughts when you first start doing it you may need to use the five second rule 73 times in one day that's okay i had to do it like that when i was first using the rule to cure myself of anxiety when i would start to worry about anything i'd start to worry about you know my kids or i'd start to worry about money and i'd feel my thoughts drift and then i'd start to feel my heart race i would stabilize my thoughts five four three two one i've activate my prefrontal cortex lower the the worries you know on the other side and then i would start to think about something that actually made me feel really calm or excited that is the battle of your mind and you know the other thing about normal that i just want to say is that the reason why it feels normal to doubt yourself and to have low self-worth is because you've thought this so long it's become a pattern just like chewing your nails becomes a pattern of behavior that you don't think about well the cool thing is is that based on science you can actually change any pattern even a thinking one so use the five second rule every single time you catch yourself thinking the nasty stuff and then activate your prefrontal cortex and force yourself to think something positive every single morning monday through fridays at 9 00 am i host a live call-in radio show on sirius satellite radio it's called make it happen with mel robbins and the thing that's been so crazy about that show is every single person that calls me on that show they call in because they're feeling stuck in their lives and they're resigned about their ability to change their lives and i'm not talking about people that are nuts i'm talking about successful people like you and me that just somehow got stuck in their lives and i'm not talking about people that are looking for cheesy self-help i'm talking about people that really want to figure out how to move themselves forward and you know i find that so many of us think that our dreams are unreachable or unrealistic and it's just so sad i mean people think that their dreams disappear and if that's what you think congratulations you're officially stuck and the truth is that our dreams are always there and they don't ever give up on us we give up on them but here's the secret if you just force yourself and i mean force because i know damn well none of you want to do anything about this and i also know you're sitting there like yeah the self-help crap this isn't for me but if you just force yourself to take a couple small steps there's always a surprise so let's talk about starbucks starbucks in 2008 um very interesting thing happened and many of you if you were in the financial services market then probably know this that their net income decreased by about 28 that year and at the time they had 16 000 stores in 44 countries and they had gone through this massive explosive growth segment in terms of going from going public in i think it was like 1992 they only had 125 stores and now here we are 2008 they've got 16 000. so what ends up happening is howard schultz who is the chairman of the board comes back in as the ceo very complex situation right you've got operations in 44 countries you've got massive reduction in terms of the profits that you have you've got the stock market and wall street screaming at you you've got customers that are going to dunkin donuts because there's a recession that's hitting so what do you do well he was very clear again back to the two rules what do i stand for like what is it what is what am i doing and what do i want the outcome to be so he was very clear that what he stood for as a leader and what starbucks should stand for is the starbucks experience he wanted to go back to the beginning and reintroduce people to the romance of having a cup of coffee because you know that's how starbucks launched in the beginning that he was traveling and was over in italy and was like god why don't we have places like these great stops to have a little cup of coffee over in the united states boom starbuck's an idea it's born it's launched so he decides he's going to do whatever he can to get the romance of having a cup of coffee back in life in any situation whether you're talking about growing your company growing your bank account getting in a relationship getting out of a relationship getting something done at the school system that your kids are going to on behalf of your kids whatever it is that you're up to in life this is the only question that you need to ask yourself what is it that i want because the truth of the matter is if you can answer that you can have it if it were easy to get what you wanted in life google would have already figured out an app you would just type in okay i'm a student and i want to go from being a student to being successful and google would tell you go to college then you get your masters then you land this killer job and then you put in a bunch of face time while you're checking facebook then you get promoted to manager and then you realize managing people kind of stinks and then you keep climbing the corporate ladder and then you start to wonder well how did i end up here and then you went is this what success looks like you're like no i'm going to go to jay hilburn that's what success looks like so keep this in mind if there's something that you want like seven people or a trip to africa or you're going to make it to mexico in the pink shirt i'm looking at you again sir i'm watching you um and rooting for you uh keep in mind this here you are this is what you want i spend a lot of time on lacrosse fields although they don't really look like this you tend to think that what you want you just march right towards it but if in sports you march right towards the goal what happens the defenders come in and what the defenders are is it's your brain saying ain't gonna happen so the second you start moving toward that thing you want be ready you're gonna tell yourself you don't feel like it you're going to have to force yourself it's happening there's no way to get around it so what you're going to have to do is you're going to basically get bounced around a lot all over the place and there are going to be a lot of times that you feel like this was a really dumb idea to start this business because it's going to get hard and i want to remind you about something unlike a sports field where there's an in and out of bounds the great thing about life is there actually aren't any and it's usually in those moments where you feel like you can't do it that you're closer than ever to having everything that you wanted and i wanted to show you this so that you keep it in mind because i think a lot of times when you look back it's the darkest moments where you realize holy cow that's what projected me forward we live in the most amazing moment in time so that thing that you have up here whatever it may be you want to use healthy eating to cure your diabetes you want to figure out how to take care of the elders and start a new hospice center you want to move to africa and build a school guess what you could walk into a bookstore right now and buy at least 10 books written by credentialed experts on how you do it you could google it and you could probably find at least i don't know a thousand blogs documenting the step-by-step by step transformation that somebody else is already doing you can find anybody online and cyber stalk them you can just walk in their footsteps and let that you know just use the science of drafting follow what everyone else has done because somebody else is already doing it so why don't you have what you want when you have all the information that you need you have the contacts that you need there are probably free tools online that allow you to start a business or join a group or do whatever the heck you want it all comes down to one word shut the front door you know what i'm talking about the f-bomb it's everywhere you hear it all the time and i honestly don't understand what the appeal is of the word i mean you don't sound smart when you say it and it's really not expressing how you really feel it's sort of a cheap you know shot to take and of course you know i'm talking about the word fine how you doing i'm fine oh really you are dragging around those extra 40 pounds you're fine feeling like roommates with your spouse and you're fine you haven't had sex in four months you're fine really i don't think so but see here's the deal with saying that you're fine it's actually genius because if you're fine you don't have to do anything about it but when you think about this word fine it just makes me so angry i mean here we are at a conference about being alive and you're going to describe the experience of being alive as fine what a flimsy and feeble word if you're crappy say you're crappy if you're amazing say you're amazing tell the truth and this not only goes for the social construct oh i don't want to burden you with the fact that i hate my life or you know hey i'm amazing but that would make you feel terrible the bigger issue the bigger issue with fine is that you say it to yourself that thing that you want i guarantee you you've convinced yourself that you're fine not having it that's why you're not pushing yourself it's the areas in your life where you've given up where you've said oh i'm fine my mom's never gonna change so i just can't have that conversation i'm fine you know we gotta wait until the kids graduate before we get divorced so we'll just sleep in separate bedrooms i'm fine i lost my job i can barely pay my bills but whatever it's hard to get a job and you know one of the reasons why this word also just annoys me so much is scientists have calculated oh yeah i'm coming down scientists have calculated the odds of you being born that's right they've crunched the numbers i see you up there they've crunched the numbers on you yeah i know you guys standing up you want to sit down for this they've crunched the numbers on you being born and they took into account all of the wars and the natural disasters and the dinosaurs and everything else and do you realize that the odds the odds of you yeah right here put your computer away stand up for me doug so the odds of doug here turn around say hi to everybody the odds yeah of doug doug being born at the moment in time he was born to the parents you were born to with the dna structure that you have a hundred or one and 400 trillion isn't that amazing i'm so lucky yes you're not fine you're fantastic you have life-changing ideas for a reason and it's not to torture yourself thank you thank you doug you know christine was right when she said all of you could be on stage because all of you we're all in this category one and four hundred trillion all day long you have ideas that could change your life that could change the world that could change the way that you feel and what do you do with them nothing hopefully i won't moon you you didn't pay for that 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 riding 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 are you going to awaken your prefrontal cortex and drive forward and focus and do something new get up 30 minutes earlier than you normally do and push yourself to work on the most important priorities first this isn't just me research shows that your most productive hours are the first two to three hours after you wake up and get ready this means that for peak productivity you've got to do whatever you can do to make sure the most important work to you gets done first during that window of time if you're living in the past you're going to be depressed because you are rehashing things that happen to you that are not going to happen again if you're living in the future you're going to be anxious because you are anticipating what's coming or you're wishing for things that aren't happening yet being in the present is where the gold is being in the present moment is where you will have the greatest control where you will feel the most at ease and where happiness flourishes there's a super tight connection between happiness and the ability to live in the present moment a lot of people believe that happiness is tied to the things that happen to you not so at all in fact there is a professor of positive psychology he's one of the grandfathers of the movement he teaches at the university of pennsylvania his name is martin segelman and he's studied happiness for decades now one of the things that we've talked about a lot is that forty percent of your happiness levels are preset by genetics 60 you are in complete control of and one of the things that this professor has has discovered is that it doesn't matter what's happened to you in fact some of the people that have had the worst things the worst things happen to them like people that have survived the holocaust are actually the happiest and most grateful people in the world happiness comes down to this right up here comes down to your thoughts comes down to your mindset it comes down to your attitude and you are 100 control of what you're thinking you may not be in control of how you feel in the moment but you can always always always always be in control of what you think and that will change how you're feeling one of the most powerful things that you can do in terms of think and this gets back to strict's question is how do you be present being present is literally nothing more than the skill of having your thoughts be in this moment not in the past not in the future but right here the way that you teach yourself how to do that is that the moment that you catch yourself being distracted the moment you catch yourself starting to worry the moment you catch yourself drifting to the future drifting to the past that's a moment of tremendous power because you basically just woke up you basically just noticed that you're not here in this particular moment so use that wake-up call 54321 and ground yourself in this moment the best way to ground yourself in the moment is to look for something in this particular moment that you can savor i'm using the word saver on purpose because it's the word that psychologists use to describe what happens when you find something in this moment right now right here right now to focus on and to appreciate it could be literally the questions these are these are printed out questions from people on social media and if i were to stop and look at these and savor them what i would feel in this moment is a tremendous amount of gratitude because people are taking the time to write and that makes me feel incredibly grateful and it also makes me very happy because it means that that the folks that are writing are taking control of their lives and seeking out the information that they need another form of savoring that we can all relate to is eating as you're eating instead of drifting to the future and thinking about all the things that you need to do or hanging out in the past and rehashing everything that's happened during the day be in this moment in this meal slow down think about the food that you're eating think about the people that you're sitting with and how you feel about them and if you want to take it up a notch actually acknowledge them hey this food tastes amazing thank you for cooking or i'm so glad to see you and that we get the time to have this meal together those small simple acts of savoring are how you expand your happiness inside the present moment so how do you be more present simple the moment that you catch yourself in the future in the past worrying whatever refocus yourself right here right now and then find something right here right now that you can savor and when you do that you're not only going to be present you're going to feel more grateful and you're going to feel a little boost of happiness i want you to start seeing something bigger i know you're all successful i'm talking about something really big for your life and in order to do that you have to answer this question what do you really want now i'm not talking about something small i'm not talking about a little haiku not talking about renovating your kitchen i'm not talking about signing on 10 new customers this month i'm talking about what you really want know three years ago i was a lawyer and a business coach working with private clients and big corporations all over the country and i came to a seminar just like this one a big leadership seminar and i went there with my husband we're both business owners and i went because i wanted to be more successful and i went because i wanted to make even more money than i already did and i was sitting exactly where you go are in fact i was sitting about i don't know 15 rows back right where that woman with her hand on her hand like yet you yeah she's like hi um was sitting and i was taking notes and i'm like okay i'm here to make more money and then all of a sudden she walked on stage that is martha beck she writes a column for oprah winfrey she travels around the country speaking she's a best-selling author and when she walked on stage i literally stopped listening please keep listening to me right now and it hit me i said i want to be doing that i'm ready for a bigger state like that's it and what's so interesting about when you answer that question is that you don't answer it up here you answer it here that's how you see something bigger for yourself you know you guys are really cute because everybody's like i don't see it what do you i don't see anything for myself right now and now i'm just confused i thought i knew what i wanted you know and now mel i'm not really sure and right now the economy is so bad i mean it's so bad that even if you're successful i know sometimes i feel embarrassed talking about my success around some of my friends because i know that they're really struggling and i get calls every day into the radio show people saying oh i've got this great idea but i just don't know if it's the right time and you know what i say to them i say yeah you know you're right the recession it's huge you should wait those dreams yeah put them on hold that's right you you should you should stay in that job you can't stand just a little bit longer you get college bills to pay i mean you know what you're doing it's fine you're busy right that guy you're dating he's good enough for you but for the people in this room baloney you know that's right you know exactly what you want and the only thing that you need to do is to admit it now this may sound weird because i know most of you came in here because you're like i know what i want i'm here at success i try to figure it out i'm talking about something bigger much bigger i'll admit to you what it is that i'm up to and the truth is it's embarrassing because when you lock on to something way bigger than where you're at it is downright embarrassing to tell people because you're not there yet but i mean at this rate i've already admitted you that i stalked martha beck and that i brought a haiku to the best you know lit agent in the country so i got nothing to lose at this point so this is what i want well not him i'm married i want what he's got i want 600 radio stations i want 2 million listeners and i could certainly deal with the 400 million dollar salary in fact if i got it i'd renovate everybody's kitchen and you know the the thing is though that's so interesting about this is that i didn't pick him i mean i i'm not looking to become a cigar smoking conservative political guy that like stirs the pot makes everybody all mad i'm the liberal lifestyle gal that's trying to help people out but what i want to do is i want to use radio to entertain people and help them achieve their dreams and when i really think about it he's the one that's in the front i want to not only reach what he's doing i want to surpass him i mean do you think i like it when my friends come over to my office in boston at my house and they're like what is that guy doing on your board no it's embarrassing when you admit the big thing that you're up to it's embarrassing i have 40 stations he's got 600 there's a big gap so admitting where you want to get to is embarrassing but you got to do it mel robbins your media radio show make it happen helps people go for success you actually say there are three red flags we should look for that will actually tell us it's time to change big ones whenever you start feeling in your life like oh my gosh is this all there is huge red flag number one number two when you spend your energy being jealous or having the grasses greener over there another big wake-up call for you that you're ready for a change and then the other final red flag is if you're spending your life waiting to be happy i'll be happy when i'll be happy when i get married i'll be happy when i change my job i'll be happy when i watch a business it's time to change now because that moment's not coming unless you make it come but how do i know that i'm maybe just not living in a fantasy land that i'm never gonna no matter where i am the grass has always greener concept that i'll always say this could be better and then i might be making change for change's sake but it might not be really what i need baloney if you're still saying that to yourself over and over and over again and you're complaining it's what you're really good at is ignoring your gut and so it's time to start tuning into your gut and making some changes okay so if people see these signs why don't they make changes then i mean what you just described is very depressed i can tell you why the reason why they don't make changes is because what happens is you say okay i want to do x and then immediately what you see next are all the obstacles and so you're actually smart you're not necessarily afraid you're smart because you think how am i going to go from being a lawyer to a carpenter when i have a mortgage to pay i've got tuition bills to go my wife is going to kill me if i make this kind of change and so you get stuck because you see obstacles and then you never do anything those are very real obstacles okay so how do i kind of get past those obstacles very easy let's say i recognize the warning signals okay time for change danger oil robinson this is not the right path but it does seem herculean the hurdles have to go on first don't quit your job that's number one second thing is i think most change in life is not about putting on a big cape and jumping off a cliff or out of an airplane it's more like leaning into something so if you find yourself daydreaming about something or wishing that you could change your life start investigating start having conversations about it start leaning into change right you know i've heard a lot of experts say that fear isn't real that is such a bunch of baloney fear is so real in fact there are probably things that you're afraid of doing right now in your life in your relationships at work and the fact that you're afraid that's robbing you of all of the experiences that you want to have in your life i mean if you're afraid to fly that's going to limit your ability to travel and see the world or go visit friends if you're afraid of public speaking that's going to really limit your ability to express yourself and share your ideas if you're afraid of talking to your boss or asking for a raise that directly impacts how much money you make or what if you are dreaming of starting a business or you've already started a new business but you're afraid to talk to people and you're afraid to share your business with people i mean fear is something that stops us all and that's why i'm here to talk to you because it doesn't have to fear is real but i am going to share a secret weapon that i have used for years to beat every single fear that used to stop me now first before we get into this secret weapon i just want to cover a few facts about fear what it is what it isn't and some things that you may not know about fear so first thing fear is a physical state in your body that is exactly the same as excitement let me say that again fear and excitement are the exact same physical state your heart races you might sweat a little bit you might feel tightening in your chest you might feel a pit in your stomach you have a surge of cortisol it's basically the way that your body goes into a hyper aware state because it's readying for action now what's the difference between fear and excitement really simple the only difference between fear and excitement is what your brain is doing as your body is all agitated if you're excited your brain's going oh wow this is going to be so cool to ride this roller coaster if you're afraid your brain's going oh no way there's no way i'm doing that this is dangerous get out of there don't do that it's saying something different so what's critical about understanding this is that we're going to use the fact that your mind is either working for you for excitement or against you with fear to your advantage i'll tell you about it in just a minute how you're going to do that second thing i want you to understand is that you may have heard the advice feel the fear and do it anyway you may have heard the advice oh just try to calm down think positive thoughts it doesn't work does it and there's a reason why it doesn't work so let's go back to fact number one when you're afraid your body's in a state of arousal and agitation and your heart is racing and you're all like amped up and you're hyper aware of what's going on and you're freaking out a little bit what is it like when you're calm ah you just kind of chill right you got like this low arousal state very very difficult to go from a state of agitation and being all jacked up and excited and weirded out to a kind of state it doesn't work it's like trying to stop a train by throwing a boulder on the tracks it's going to make the train jump off the tracks it's going to cause a disaster in fact they've proven in research that when you try to ignore your fears it actually makes them worse they've also proven in research that positive thinking alone also can make your fears work worse so what do you do what do you do when you're about to go talk to your boss and you feel afraid what do you do when you have to get on a plane and you're actually terrified of flying what do you do if you got to give a presentation and you are afraid of public speaking here's what you're going to do you're going to use a strategy the same one that i use that has helped me beat every single fear and turned me into somebody that is terrific when it comes to a high stress situation this is how you do it you're going to use my five second rule in combination with what i call an anchor thought and that is going to reframe what your mind is doing so that your mind goes from feeling agitation and making you afraid to reframing it from agitation to excitement it works like magic now i have used this technique for years literally for years and one of the ways that i want to introduce you to it is i want to take you backstage i want to take you backstage to a speech that i delivered this year and what you're going to see is you're going to see me behind you know the major set i'm about to walk out you can kind of hear the crowd roaring my introductory video is playing my body is in a state of arousal i am literally my heart is racing my arms are sweating like it's like you're going to see this i'm going to tell you about it and you're going to watch me use this same technique i'm going to teach you to reframe my nerves into excitement check this out all right i'm about to go on stage there are 7 000 people out there and it's so exciting because what they don't know is they're about to learn the five-second rule and their lives will never be the same again now i gotta tell you my heart is racing um my armpits are sweating i have the exact same physiological feeling as when i'm afraid but i'm not afraid i'm excited excitement and fear is the exact same thing in your body it's just what your brain calls it here's a trick that's proven by science that i use every time i speak when i start to sweat when i start to have butterflies when i start to have my heart race i say i'm excited i'm excited to get out there i'm excited to talk to these people i'm excited to share the five second rule and what that does is it sends a message to my brain that tells my brain why my body's all agitated and excited and that way i don't feel afraid remember excitement and fear exact same thing in your body the only difference is what your brain calls that's why you want those go get them now i want to give you one more example just to make sure that you really get how you can use this so a lot of you have written to me about your fear of flying and i can really relate to that fear because i used to have the exact same fear but i use this same strategy to conquer it here's how you're going to do it so first things first if you've got to do something that really makes you nervous or that you're afraid to do before you're about to do it come up with an anchor thought what's an anchor thought well an anchor thought is something that's going to anchor you so that you don't escalate any situation into a full-blown panic attack or into a situation where you screw things up it's a way for you to anchor yourself so you maintain control over what you're thinking and how you behave so here's an example with flying it's important when you're creating an anchor thought to pick something that is in the proper context of what you're afraid to do so for flying pick an anchor thought that has to do with the trip that you're taking so if i'm boarding a plane to fly back home to michigan an anchor thought might be a picture in my mind of my mom and i walking on the shores of lake michigan where i grew up that's a thought that makes me happy it makes me excited and it's also related to the trip that i'm taking if you have a conversation that you need to have with your boss pick an anchor thought about how you feel after having that conversation maybe it's you picking up the phone and calling somebody that you you love and saying oh my gosh it went so well or you know you walking out of the meeting and feeling like yeah i survived that conversation i feel pretty good about myself so now that you have your anchor thought you're ready to beat the fear if you took money off the table if you didn't get what anybody else thought what's the thing you would love to be doing with your life seriously do you dream of being a professional photographer do you want to open your own restaurant you always thought about traveling the world and entertaining kids with your juggling skills i don't know it's your life you get to choose what you want to do be honest with yourself what is it that you would want to do with your life if you didn't have to pay the bills doing it another thing you can ask yourself who do you find yourself sort of envious of you know like you look at their life and you just think gosh how awesome that they get to do that well once you have that answer for yourself you've gotten really honest you've pushed the [ __ ] aside and you've really asked it for yourself and answered the question honestly all you gotta do is explore it that's it just find one thing that you can do to enrich and expand your knowledge about it find one course online google the topic stalk people that are pursuing this line of work that's how you start to do it one step at a time so start with answering the question what do you really want with a massive dose of honesty google the topic and find one thing that you can do just one push yourself and start to explore if you were to wake up and do that every single day spend 10 minutes a day you would be startled astonished by what your life looks like in a matter of a year or two what is the biggest obstacle that we face thiago it's simple it's self-doubt it's not fear it's not lack of money it's not lack of supporters it's the fact that deep down inside you will doubt yourself at critical moments and here's the problem with self-doubt self-doubt doesn't have to stop you the problem with self-doubt is that the second that you feel a little doubtful the second that you start to question yourself you physically hesitate that hesitation has become a habit that stops you because the moment you hesitate it wakes up your brain your brain starts thinking and then you hold yourself back you guys know i talk about the five second rule incessantly it's the title of the new book that i'm writing that's coming out in 2017. the five-second rule is a tool that battles self-doubt because in those moments those those tiny micro moments when you're faced with should i do this or should i not should i speak in a meeting should i hold back my ideas should i have this tough conversation or should i wait till later the second you doubt the option of moving forward you hesitate then you think then you hold back that's how it happens every single time that's how you sabotage your success that's how you rob yourself joy that habit of hesitating the moment that you feel down is killing your dreams the single biggest obstacle in life thiago is the doubt that you feel and the single biggest mistake that you're making is that you hesitate when you feel it if you start to use the five second rule in those moments to just physically move forward within five seconds of feeling that doubt you'll win i need a volunteer coming up hi how scared are you right now about a 12 or 15 or 30. on a scale of 10 yes good you're perfect okay so i have an envelope you can either open this up and read what it says but you have to do it [Music] how afraid are you for her or you can give it to somebody else now what are you managing right now my heart rate is just like out there yeah what do you want to do life's about change so i'll open it okay come up on stage with mel give her a standing ovation she deserves it so again same rules open it up read it to the audience and then do what it says how scared are you i'm a little nervous because i'm not sure what you're going to want me to do i'm shy really that's baloney tell everyone in the audience the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you all right you ready for another one sure how scared are you less she'll be speaking at the next conference you watch yes i will congrats lifevantage is paying for your registration and three-night hostel stay at the elite academy in orlando [Music] it's overwhelmed joy um just the peace i think that could come with really choosing to change i believe that passion is another word for energy that's it what do you have energy for what energizes you and that we naturally have a tremendous amount of body wisdom about that and that every one of us has an internal fuel tank that is either empty or full and if you're empty you feel depleted if you're full you feel energized and so if you simply are in any situation i mean any situation and you um pay attention within five seconds to does this person energize me do they deplete me where are they in the scale you just gain some tremendous wisdom and you the simple way to start to figure out who you are and what you want is start aligning yourself with more things that energize you so situationally if you're lying in bed and the snooze alarm goes or the alarm goes off and you feel depleted and you start reaching for the snooze button that's a really big sign that you need to get out of bed now being depleted versus energized has nothing to do with whether or not things are hard or easy it has to do with what naturally actually either expands you or shrinks you and so if you look at your client list and measure it depleted versus energized what shrinks versus expands me you have the actual map and when you start to find the courage to make decisions that energize you and that expand you whether they're scary or not that's when everything changes and so that's how i actually make business decisions is this i don't even like the money conversation comes second it's does this deplete or energize me and if it depletes me how do you move it in that direction or how do i say no if it energizes me how do i do more because if you are energized or expanded by something you will do it for no money you will do it happily and you will suddenly wake up and say oh my gosh like my i'm pursuing my passion how did that happen a lot of you feel stuck because you're waiting for some kind of external force to either push you and pressure you to change and to be great and to be amazing or you're waiting for somebody to give you permission you're either sitting back because you need some sort of external motivation from somebody that's going to push you or praise you or pressure you in order to change or some life circumstance like maybe in your past you've experienced trauma or you faced something really scary and that was the thing that made you change and then the second thing that people wait around for is permission look those may or may not come in your life if you are somebody that is sitting around waiting for some external force to come and do the work for you that is such a losing bet it's unbelievable maybe you'll get lucky maybe somebody will come but more than likely no one is coming the only kind of force that will truly create change in your life is you the internal kind of force i hate to say it but for those of you that feel really really stuck and you keep thinking that somebody's got to pick me or somebody's going to discover me or somebody's got to give me permission to write this book it's it's ridiculous this is external versus internal force and what you have to figure out if you're stuck is are you the kind of person that is guilty of needing wanting and waiting for external forces people an event some outside force to kick you in the ass so that you'll finally do the stuff that you've been dreaming about doing i want to tell you something no one's coming no one the people in life that get what they want are the ones that aren't waiting for an external force to validate their dreams to inspire them to give them permission it's the people that realize that success that happiness that control it comes from the internal force and what is the internal force it's you it's you it's you being able to realize that no one's going to do the work for you it's you realizing that you're never going to feel ready in fact even as you start working toward the things that you really want to do you're definitely not going to feel ready and you're going to feel outside your comfort zone and that's normal when you start to feel like you're stretching yourself and you're sticking your scrawny neck out there and you're taking some risks that's amazing because you're growing i'm trying to become a fashion and beauty blogger and mer and earn money from it full-time but i have some kind of mental block and procrastination problem this is something that we see over and over and over again and it's this idea that you don't ever start you stay trapped in your head and if you feel paralyzed if you've been spinning the same ideas over and over and over again then you know what i'm talking about you see many of you are thinking way too big you're attaching way too much pressure on the things that you're interested in until you start blogging about fashion you won't even know if you like it so thinking that you have a dream about doing it and thinking that you have this grand plan that you're going to do it full time it is a complete and utter waste of your time to be dreaming that big and let me tell you why because oftentimes if you're the kind of person like vicky that's getting trapped up here the bigness of what you're thinking about is what's stopping you what i want you to do if you're in vicky's situation is i want you to stop dreaming and i want you to just start doing small things i want you to go back to curiosity and less into crushing your big goals the thing about life and business and success is that you have to be willing to start and for people that procrastinate starting is the hardest part for people that worry for people that think too big starting is the hardest part folks that study procrastination talk about the fact that the only way to beat procrastination is to create what they call a starting ritual which is a way to push yourself to get started because all the research shows that if we can push you to get started on something you'll likely keep going i'm the kind of person that believes you should always make decisions with your heart and soul you can use your brain for math you can use your brain to look at the fine print in a contract but when it comes to the actual feel of the decision you always want to go inward and check it against your heart and soul how do you do that here's the simple test does the decision that you're about to make expand you expand your future or expand the possibilities of your life if the answer is yes then the decision is yes no matter how terrifying it is if you conversely look at the choice that you have to make and the decision will shrink you will silence you will inhibit you in some way then the answer is no no matter how easy the decision is no matter how safe the decision is the answer is no now one of the things i want to point out that when you start to use this does it expand or does it shrink me does it open possibilities or does it keep things closed does it raise my voice or does it silence me right is that there's always a short-term and a long-term impact to the decision the short-term impact to making an expansive decision a decision that's faced in your heart and your soul sometimes it's terrifying because sometimes it means moving or it means changing a job or changing a relationship or having a difficult conversation or starting something new and those sorts of things are always uncomfortable so brace for impact put the force fields up but make the decision anyway because the long-term impact of making a decision from your heart and soul that is where the best life comes from because you're living for what's true for you not what's safe in the moment i hope that helps we spend a lot of time talking about mindset from the standpoint of think positives to positive things happen and i do believe in having a positive mindset obviously i think that the actions that you take are way more important in terms of developing that mindset but we don't spend enough time on what you were just talking about which is understanding how the automatic nature of worrying about stuff all day long how that is making you less money how it is making you less happy how it is disconnecting you from your spouse how it is keeping you unhealthy and how it is a habit that robs you of joy and opportunity and power and it is one of the easiest habits to break number one your life happens in five second windows number two in five seconds you can control what you think you can decide what you're gonna do and you can change absolutely anything which changes absolutely everything and so the five second rule is a mind trick that's all that it is a fancy way to call it is a you know it's a form of metacognition but it's basically a hack it's a cheat code okay and the way that it works and this is the challenge with getting it out there is that it sounds so profoundly stupid like a gimmick that it took a while for people to actually take it seriously i get that and to really stack up the science to make you know anybody that interacts with it go holy sh like this actually works yeah so here's what it is basically the moment you catch yourself hesitating or doubting or starting to worry or about to chicken out or shrink or shut up or whatever it is that you're about to do that is shrinking your power you just go five four three two one you count backwards five four three two one um what happens when you do that don't do it out loud because it'll scare somebody like a psycho and i mean i'm talking yes exactly yes exactly although you know we i i say it's it's so simple that people this is a saturday night live skit in the making right here i can see this i would love that because that means i've really made it true um uh your kids will use it on you so my kids will use it on me so if i have a certain tone that comes out i'll hear my childhood go 5 4 through watch that tone mom you know just um or mom five four three two one i thought you're gonna go to the gym um yes so uh by counting backwards the the uh kind of cheat code that you're doing in your mind is you are interrupting what are called habit loops that get encoded in the central part of your brain and you are starting up the prefrontal cortex it's a little trick that causes focus and it's it's a lot like having a mantra because you're shifting gears but the thing about having a mantra is and i suppose that as you count backwards more and more and more you become used to it but it becomes a habit that triggers action so what you do is go 54321 cut off this part of the brain awaken this part of the brain and then move and what happens with the counting backwards is there's nowhere to go after one and your mind is socialized in a count down situation to go and so um counting up won't work because you can keep going forever and you do it in many aspects of your life so it's actually not something that requires any focus here's what i do specifically to help myself stay focused first things first when i wake up in the morning i do not sleep next to my phone the reason why i don't sleep next to my phone is because if you sleep next to it or use it as your alarm your tendency is to look at it while you're in bed that means that you're checking email before you've even thought about what your priorities are do not do that that's tip number one tip number two i have a pad of post-it notes yes post-it notes next to my sink in my bathroom why well because after i brush my teeth i haven't looked at my phone yet i take a post-it note out and i write the three things i need to focus on today and then you know what i do with it i stick it on the back of my phone now why would i do that because i have my phone with me all the time and so if it's on the back of my phone i'm going to get a visual cue to remind me and keep it top of mind so i stay focused on it third thing that i do it's a little trick i call 30 before 7 30. what that means i spend 30 minutes before 7 30 a.m just focused on getting my day organized and getting a few of the things that are my top priorities either finished or further down the field so that's 30 minutes before 7 30 a.m that's time for me if you utilize those three things don't sleep with your phone right after you brush your teeth write out your three priorities and stick it on the back of your phone just like this and spend 30 minutes before 7 30 for yourself i promise you you'll be shocked at how much more focused you are and you feel what fascinates me about human beings and it fascinates me about um myself is that we have such a high tolerance for suckiness isn't it crazy as long as the suckiness is a routine but the second you get thrown out of your routine or the second that whether it's because you lose a job or somebody moves or somebody dies or somebody breaks up with you or you break like all of a sudden that awakens the courage in you to make a change because you know either you have no choice or now you got a problem to solve but fighting that inertia of life is the most difficult thing in the world you know i ended up getting a job with a law firm because it was the path of least resistance in boston in boston i hated it because i went from being in the courtroom to writing briefs all day and luckily i got pregnant with our first daughter who just is starting college which makes me feel so ancient i just want to like punch myself in the face i have a 18 year old freshman in college congratulations um thank you um but i got pregnant with her and when she was born i had horrific postpartum depression wow i mean the really scary kind where you can't be alone with the baby you're on crazy meds that turn you not not the kind you take recreationally yeah these are the kind that like turn you into a zombie and it was a really scary thing and i i when i kind of came out of the eight-week trance of that i looked up at chris and said i've made a decision and he said okay what would that be and i said i don't ever want to answer the question what do you do for a living with the response i'm a lawyer and he said okay you realize we've just bought this house and we have a kid and uh we have bills to pay and he said so here's the deal you've got exactly four weeks before your maternity leave is over you need to make sixty thousand dollars i don't care what you do for a living that's your problem go solve it and the night before i was supposed to so i networked like a crazy person because again if you're a human being with a problem you'll solve it yeah and so if it matters enough to you and so uh i i got a job and this was the first.com boom in boston i got a job the night before i was supposed to go back too many of you are sitting around waiting to feel ready you can still move forward when you're not ready too many of you are waiting to feel like you deserve to make six figures it's about the action your mind your history your past you will always have a million excuses not to do it not to feel like it not to believe in yourself they're all the only thing that matters in your life and your business is the actions that you're taking and the more consistently that you take action the faster you will start to believe in yourself because you will see proof that you are not the kind of person that sits around and feels unworthy that you're not a victim that sits by and gets sucked into other people's stuff that you're not that kind of person so it won't make sense to believe it anymore but it starts with action i believe in all of you and i believe in your ability to get it done but it's going to be up to you who is the problem yeah who's the solution i am that's right don't wait to feel like that is the biggest mistake you could possibly make remember that you're smart remember that you know what to do and just get it done i've been in the media business for 10 years when i tell you that things have changed 1 000 let me just give you an example my first media deal i was signed by abc that's right abc the big dog crazy syndicated shows i was signed by them to do a talk show deal now do you know what that meant there was some executive that was looking out over the sea of talent they were meeting with agents they were picking people they were doubting you and then guess what if they did pick you they owned everything they told you what to do oprah's an anomaly the game was gatekeepers a few media players a sea of competition total scarcity now what is it today holy it's unbelievable if you have an iphone you can have a show if you have an idea and you're willing to put it out there and you're willing to start sharing yourself on social media you have a syndication platform there is no one doubting you except for you and that's why i'm sitting here imploring you i'm telling you right now if you have a business if you have aspirations if you have a dream the single biggest opportunity in front of you is to put it out on social media to start talking about the things that interest you to start sharing your ideas sharing and documenting what you're up to i guarantee you you start doing that and you're gonna start amassing an audience that you had no idea was out there dying to connect with you to learn from you and to grow with you i gave a speech yesterday in dallas after the speech it was a big audience of people in financial services a guy dressed to the nines and like one of these super slick suits comes up to me he says hey mel you know really love the five second rule do you mind if i give you some feedback feedback don't you hate getting feedback and then when people actually preface it by saying can i give you some feedback i don't know about you but literally my butt's like it just cannot stand it i immediately go on edge but here's the thing about feedback you have to take it you have to take it it is critical critical critical critical so i want to tell you number one what the guy said to me my reaction and then i want to give you my philosophy about feedback because what the guy said to me was so valuable and it was also really hard for me to hear here i am after the speech we're surrounded by a big group of people he walks up to me and says when it's his turn in the line can i give you some feedback i immediately tense up and this is what he says mel i love the concept of the five second rule super cool idea can't wait to try it okay now comes the punch in the gut he said you called it so many times during the speech it was off pudding doesn't that sound terrible that word and he said i could tell that you were doing it on purpose he's right in fact you called it so many times and yet you have these insanely powerful examples of how people are using it you came off as defensive when he said this to me i literally you know how you feel like you're shrinking in life or you're like standing in your full size then all of a sudden somebody says something you're like i just want to disappear right now and the reason why i was such a zinger is he was right he was absolutely right you see i do call the five second rule because i'm in front of so many analytical audiences i'm in front of skeptics all the time and so i use it as a preemptive way to disappear the biggest pushback on the five second rule which is on its face it sounds so so simple there's no way it could be so powerful the problem is i've gotten lazy and i say it too much he's 100 right and by hearing that feedback i can make a really simple tweak to my speech i can call it once or twice in the very beginning and then i can transition to calling it something that's very simple and powerful now that's going to help me reach more people with the five second rule and here's what i want to say about feedback feedback is intense to receive it really is because you are exposing yourself to critical opinions it will make you feel very vulnerable the way that i handle feedback and process it i'm very clear about the things that i will receive feedback on and i'm very clear about the things that i will not receive feedback on and the reason why is if you don't listen to any feedback at all guys you're never going to improve you're not going to ever do anything new so no feedback means nothing new if you listen to everything that everybody says in terms of feedback if you allow everybody to weigh in on everything it's going to become so paralyzing that you will do nothing new so the key with feedback is knowing yourself and knowing what you actually accept feedback on and knowing what you don't accept feedback on my life changed a couple years ago when i discovered something called the progress principle it is a principle that was written about in the harvard business review it's based on a tremendous amount of research done by a professor over there and what she determined is that people that feel uh happy and successful and fulfilled by their lives and work they all have one thing in common they feel as though they're making progress on something that matters so i read this little bit of research and i started applying it to my life and what i do as as this sounds it really works i don't focus on balancing everything i focus on just making sure that i make progress on one thing a day that's right you heard me one thing a day that matters to me now if i can make progress on one thing a day that matters to me then i can let go and let the rest of my day get hijacked by kids by spouse by phone calls by emails by social media by all kinds of things that come up and tend to hijack your day when you're a busy person when you have a family when you're married when you got a lot going on and so by focusing on one thing a day i feel the sense of control and the sense of progress that science tells us will make you happy and make you feel more confident and actually make you more effective at getting things done it also frees me up to be more present with my kids so many of us have this perfectionism gene and the reason why we're perfectionists is we're trying to insulate ourselves from criticism that if you get it perfect no one will give you feedback if you get it right nobody's going to criticize you if you do it perfect then no one will be able to attack you and the problem with that and that's just another side of the same coin which is the fear of disappointing people you're managing not disappointing people not by lying and not by being codependent but by actually trying to be a perfectionist so that nobody criticizes you so let me tell you a story about the fear of disappointing people in my own life because this is the biggest trigger in my life i mean it goes back to being in fourth grade right it's there and this is another thing i i literally have to remind myself of this everybody every single day you cannot remove the things that trigger you you can't if you've been doing a pattern since fourth grade there will be things for the rest of your life that will trigger that pattern to come up but you can always choose not to repeat the pattern so you'll be triggered and be afraid that you're going to disappoint somebody that's real that's normal it's natural it's part of being a human being i think it's interwoven into every relationship where you love somebody but you don't have to behave the way that you always behaved when you're nervous about disappointing somebody so let me give you a dumb story you ready when my husband and i got married my father gave us this really incredible gift he gave us an antique pool table i grew up in muskegon michigan where brunswick was founded and my dad has a hobby of going to garage sales and estate sales and buying old dilapidated pool tables and then he restores them so when chris and i got married he bought us an old dilapidated pool table from the same era as our house which is the 1870s he restored the whole thing and then recently he and i rented a u-haul and we drove this sucker from muskegon michigan to boston massachusetts my dad and i took a road trip get there and we assemble the pool table in what used to be our playroom fast forward three or four years the speaking business takes off my business starts to grow we have people that work for us and my kids are older we don't need a playroom we need an office the pool table is in the middle of this thing for the first two years of having the office we kept the pool table there why because i didn't want my dad to be disappointed because i love him now he visits our house twice a year for two or three days with my mom and i kept this thing occupying a third of our office for two years and then i realized i'm being ridiculous i'm being absolutely ridiculous now here's the thing will he be disappointed if i take the pool table down absolutely definitely there are always going to be things that you do decisions that you have to make in your life in your business for your family that will disappoint other people it's unavoidable but the fact that he's going to be disappointed should never be the reason that i don't do something that is aligned with my values now let's take it a step further when you make a decision that is likely going to disappoint people or that does still make the decision because it's your life there's nothing worse than when you start to rob your future and your life and your happiness because you're so focused on other people however if you love people you can still take care of them when you make that decision so let me go back to the example of the pool table so i knew i was going to take it down i knew my father was going to be disappointed i was disappointed i don't have a big house so i don't you know i don't have the room for a huge pool table i don't have a finished basement like a lot of people i don't have like a cool garage game room thing like i just don't have it i called him first and said i need to talk to you about something you know the pool table i love the pool table dad my business is growing so much i actually need an office and oh great it'll be great in the office and i'm like well yeah it would except i have you know three or four people showing up and we got to put some desks in there for now even went down well you could put a piece of plywood they could work on the pool table and then they could do the thing and then the thing and now my heart is racing because i don't want to disappoint my dad and now he's fighting for the and i had to just say for me dad here's what's going to happen i'm going to hire professional movers in the pool table business to disassemble this with love and care we're going to store it beautifully when i either get a full-time office off site or i build a barn or i build a different house this will have its own beautiful room dedicated to you so we had this beautiful conversation now was he disappointed absolutely when they come to the house and visit which they just did and they walk into the office do i feel a pang you better believe i do it doesn't matter that's all normal i still need to make the decisions that i need to make and the difference what's changed is how i relate to that fear so instead of what i would do in the past is i would make a decision that doesn't serve me i'd leave the pool table and then i'd be all about it i'd leave the pool table as a way to make my dad happy but it makes me miserable to leave it there because i need the space right and then i'd be kind of annoyed and then he'd come and i'd fake play pool because i kind of want to run you know you know what i'm saying like we do all this that's not real and what i've been able to do for myself in some instances when i catch it is to hit it head on and to be authentic and to still take care of people and what i've also come to learn is that people can be disappointed in you and they still love you you know you're never going to get around this everybody in your family is going to be disappointed with you probably once a day probably and you have the ability to retrain how you respond to that trigger that rises up in you where you start to fear that you're disappointing somebody and the answer really is make the decision that's aligned with your values and the thing that supports you and then take care of the person by being honest and straightforward about it dealing with their disappointment head on because that's really the adult thing to do and that's what you do when you love somebody the way we've all been handling it myself included is manipulation lying resentment withholding and that doesn't serve anybody i'm about to change your life because this piece of research changed mine procrastination has nothing to do with work the people that write to us the most that struggle with procrastinating phd students engineers entrepreneurs people that have a lot on their plate that have a lot of things that they need to juggle and that are analytical and thinkers by nature procrastination is a form of stress relief what are you stressed about bingo and it makes you upset doesn't it yeah how many of you can relate to that she said that what's stressing her out is she wants to retire she hasn't saved up enough money what's really stressing you out is finances and money and the fear that you have what happens when you struggle with procrastinating and thank you for being so honest there's that stresses you out maybe you feel the same way and we felt that way i know exactly what you're talking about you carry around this dark cloud because you don't think you're gonna make it you're stressed about money all the time or maybe your mom's health is declining and it really stresses you out or maybe your best friends are going through a divorce or you're going through a divorce and that really stresses you out and so you walk around with this big ass thing on your shoulders all the time and then you walk into work and you sit down and you've got a list of phone calls to make which requires your prefrontal cortex and your prefrontal cortex looks at the list and it's like oh my god you want me to make 15 phone calls i've been worried about the money all day can we just look at cat videos i need a break and next thing you know two hours is gone you've been online shopping you've been looking at cat videos and then of course you look at the 15 phone calls you're like i didn't make them i didn't make them i didn't make them the research on procrastination is undeniable it's black and white number one all of you that procrastinate procrastination's not the issue at stress you're procrastinating to give yourself a little break at work it's sort of like taking a smoking break almost you know you're just taking a break so number one because you're all stressed out and procrastinators are very hard on yourselves this is going to sound super but you got to forgive yourself you have got to actually have a talk with yourself where you feel yourself starting to procrastinate you go look you know i really screwed up i know i'm going to mess financially i forgive myself i'm just going to do the best that i can so you have to address the thing that's underneath it so that self-awareness of knowing oh my god here's that stress again about finances screwing me over and preventing me from doing the small things that will actually fix my finances second thing that you're gonna do procrastination's a habit right you get triggered by stress the habit is to procrastinate so when you get triggered by stress your new habit is oh there's my stress again i'm gonna actually tell myself okay you've done the best you can it's okay we're gonna do a little bit today you're gonna create what we call starting ritual a starting ritual is something that pushes you to start the best one on the planet the five second rule so you've said okay there's my stress again i forgive myself now we're gonna five four three two one i want you to only work for five minutes that's it five minutes make phone calls for five minutes here's what we know based on the research eighty percent of you will keep going the trick is starting you see i want to break the connection between the trigger which is stress and the response which is procrastination and whenever you feel stressed which is normal you have a choice here's that gap in five seconds flat the habit of procrastinating and beating yourself up will take over or you can close the gap five four three two one and you can make a different choice i'm just gonna get started i'm just gonna be okay with where i'm at and i'm just gonna get started got it good i want to address my comments to those of you that have learned the five second rule you've tried the countdown 54321 and it's not working i gotta level with you the five second rule always works it's backed by science and it has helped change the lives of millions of people the problem is not the rule the problem is you actually don't want to change i'm dead serious i want i want you to just stop and think about that for a minute for people who try to count down but then don't actually push themselves forward for those of you that that are struggling with self-doubt struggling to get up on time struggling to make the calls to grow your business struggling to stay motivated you know about the five-second rule but you don't use it there's a simple reason why you're not using it you don't want to change look change is hard i get it if you're gonna change anything about your life you're gonna have to face the unknown you're gonna have to step out of your comfort zone you're gonna have to try something new you're gonna have to risk rejection and judgment it's scary i get it that's why most people never change so if you're like leanne and you've got all the tools at your disposal but you still are stuck the reason why you're stuck is you don't want to change yet so stop complaining about the tools and go inward and actually examine what are you afraid of seriously what do you get out of staying stuck what do you get from staying heavy what do you get from not making the money that you want what do you get from dating a string of losers you get safety i don't know you get the ability to complain are you the one that's constantly dominating all your friendships because you're constantly griping about how bad your life is i don't know what you're getting out of it but you're getting something the moment you decide that you're sick and tired of it the moment that you decide that you are so ready to change the five second rule this puppy right here the five four three two one it'll be there and it'll work and look when you start deciding that it's time to change you may have to use five four three two one five thousand times a day for weeks on end because you're pushing through self-doubt and you're pushing through procrastination and you're pushing through resignation and you're pushing through fear over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and then what's going to happen and i see this happening around the world i know that it works we have proof that it works if you use 54321 and you push through everything that's stopping you right now because you this is your year this is the moment that you're going to change at some point something's going to click and the momentum is going to kick in and suddenly change isn't going to be scary change is going to be what's happening worrying about things that could go wrong and staying in that space undermines my ability to solve it to be present and it robs me of my full thinking capacity if you catch yourself chronically worrying it means you have a habit and it will very much lead to anxiety there is a direct correlation between your habit of worrying and then that becoming anxiety so worry is a baby anxiety is the big sister because anxiety just means that the bad thoughts are now manifesting as physical symptoms in your body your stomach hurts your throat is tight you're sweating your heart races and a panic attack is when your mind gets concerned because your body state is agitated so it takes over and gets you out of whatever situation you're in and so you want to go to war against your habit of worrying use your worries as a quick signal that there's something to fix or pay attention to but do not under any circumstances allow yourself to become the kind of person that wastes your precious lifetime sitting there spinning cycles it's like washing the same load of laundry over and over and over again it's a total waste of time and it will erode your happiness and it will make you ineffective at getting the things that you want in your life i know that everybody's problem comes down to one pattern you're repeating that you can't see and that pattern is getting triggered by something that happened in your past that left you with this emotional scar and so for me the thing that i always always always have to deal with in myself is the fear of disappointing somebody so if i'm in a situation where i start to feel that it's an old trigger and so when you finally have a word that describes in a visceral way this thing you hate about yourself or this thing that triggers you or whatever it may be um that's where the power comes because now you can name the thing that was once controlling you and so if you can identify first of all the pattern you keep repeating that makes you miserable or doesn't serve you or makes you lose your power or has you go numb then you can start to go back and say well where did i where did i first start doing this and what was the experience that triggered it because that's the root of the problem right there and when you expose all of that the trigger and the emotional button like my i'm afraid of disappointing people i'm afraid of disappointing people i'm not worthy i'm not worthy you know i'm pissed off that i that this is happening to me now you have the ability to change it forever my night routine is very simple complete the day and leave no tasks that i have to finish in the morning it's that that that's it and so it's not necessarily that i have a specific order but there are particular things that i do number one totally set up the kids so that means pack their lunches it means get the backpacks ready if it's school season and get them by the door it means if there's any forms that need to be filled out or printed or anything else if they are printed they are ready to go so kids are handled second thing i want the kitchen clean i don't ever want to wake up in the morning and walk in there and see crap that i have to do i don't want dishes in the sink i don't want things on the counter and so i make sure that the kitchen is clean that the counters are cleared off and that there is no nothing i need to do in the kitchen because it will distract me in the morning i will feel guilt i will feel obligated to get that done um third thing that i do is i tend to set out the stuff for breakfast and the reason why i do that is because my kids will wake up at various times and so if i've got that thing set up i've just bought myself a couple more minutes of quiet in the morning before the parade of children come running down the stairs starving and wanting breakfast the other thing that i do is i go to my computer and i print out the day calendar for the day ahead and then i take that printout and i take my notebook that has all of my travel and kind of everything that's laid out for the the business that i run and my speaking schedule and stuff related to the kids and i move it all to the kitchen now why am i doing this i'm doing this so that when i leave my bedroom in the morning and i walk into the kitchen to have 30 minutes of quiet time for myself to get focused to plan my priorities everything's set it's all been handled there's no thinking involved it's amazing then once that's all handled i turn off all the lights i lock the front door when i walk into my bedroom the very first thing that i do i set my alarm and then i plug my phone in in my closet that is the single most important aspect of my evening routine you know i'm always looking for new ways to explain the power of the five-second rule and the power of five-second decisions and i read something that tim ferriss said that really resonated with me and he had this one line buried in a podcast somewhere that just jumped out and it's it's it's stuck and what he said is he said something about how there's a gap between the world and the things that trigger you and your response and your entire life is that gap when you start to this is not what he said he i kind of identified this gap and i of course intrinsically was like well absolutely that's the five second window between instinct or stimulus and your reaction and when you start to understand that your whole life plays out in this five second gap and that there's a gap that's five seconds long between fear and courage and there's a gap that's five seconds long between self-doubt and confidence that is your life and what's super cool about understanding that your whole life is inside this gap is it's so small everybody that you have the ability to control it life's always going to throw triggers at you and there will always be all kinds of cool things that inspire you your wisdom and you get to choose what happens in that gap do you succumb to an excuse or do you push yourself forward when you start to speak up in business you'll be shocked at how you start to speak up and your relationships when you start to make hard phone calls whether it's in a selling situation you'll be surprised at how you'll start to close the gap and have hard conversations in your personal life and so that gap is everywhere and it's the same everywhere and when you start to go to work in controlling how you live in that gap between stimulus or idea and your response that's where the magic is other than the five-second rule there is one habit that i have adopted in the last three years that has fundamentally changed me as a business person and it has also changed my ability to manage my emotions so i don't get hijacked i do not allow my phone in the bedroom i know the research deloitte just did a study based on phone use alone and 33 of people are reading emails in the middle of the night i know that if you go to bed and the phone is right next to you right so you go to bed because you need your phone you know somebody might need you and you sleep you know if this is right here and it's not closed and the blue light is on they've done studies where you have people at a table and the researcher will put their phone on the table not even my phone the researcher's phone and the brain lights up like crazy just with the presence of a phone the research around the phone and sleep is so stunning that if you were to adopt one radical thing today other than the five second rule try putting your phone outside your bedroom turn off the zip so you don't hear it tell people who need to reach you to call you my kids i have a kid in college a kid who's you know high school kid in middle school if there's an emergency call me there is nothing happening on your phone at two o'clock in the morning that's important but if you allow yourself to become a tool of this this is supposed to be your tool for selling your tool for communicating and we're all becoming the tool here's the other thing common sense wise that i want you to understand you wake up the alarm goes off what do you do so you're not even vertical and you're reading emails and what is in these emails other people's crap if you don't have boundaries with this puppy it's going to impact sleep it's going to impact how much money you make it's going to impact how much self-control you have and so when i put this thing outside the bedroom and i wake up i walk over to where the phone is it's plugged into my bathroom i turn it off i don't look at it yet i give myself five minutes five minutes before i tune into the world to actually tune in up here and say what's the one thing i'm going to get done today that really matters to me if you're the kind of person that feels like you don't have control over your day that your day gets hijacked that you can't get to the priorities that you're always behind the ball this one planning thing will change your life no phone in the bedroom turn it off when the alarm goes off five minutes five lousy minutes five lousy minutes before you tune in to the rest of the world and if you've got the kind of job where you've got to check it get up 10 minutes earlier you have control over this stuff and it is so important that you take it seriously now because you're living at the slowest moment of your entire life this is a huge mistake that people make in marketing that so many newsletters are me what am i thinking and whenever we sit and write the newsletter we're thinking about what is the most valuable thing because somebody has actually invited us into their inbox and that is a critical question in marketing that most people are not asking themselves or spamming people and they're doing only shits about them and they're not thinking about why does somebody subscribe to me and when we write that newsletter and it's why it is so incredibly successful and why people love it we're always thinking about does this interest or help or entertain the person that's reading it and you know any time that it turns out to be too much of us talking about us somebody on the team catches it thank god because there's nothing more annoying than having somebody go on and on and on about all the cool they're doing versus thinking about what are some interesting hacks and and links and cool things that we can introduce people to that might improve their work or their life langley writes from nigeria i'm passionate about film and cinema mel i tweet and i blog about it people are inspired by what i write but when i'm offered certain opportunities i clench up and suddenly feel like an imposter who will mess up and be found i'm 36 i'm single in a paycheck to paycheck situation and feel like i have wasted many years due to overthinking self-doubt and never feeling good enough or ready how can i overcome this well you can't you can't overcome the feelings that are rising up langley but you can take action despite them that's a very important distinction that i want each and every one of you to understand the things that you're feeling clenching up feeling like you're not good enough feeling like you're not ready doubting yourself kind of spending too much time thinking about how much time you've wasted all that that's normal that we all do you cannot overcome those thoughts because they keep rising up and they've become a habit and it's sort of a pattern so i don't want you to focus on the thoughts i want you to focus on taking action even though you doubt yourself you are going to feel like an imposter until you push through that clenched up moment over and over and over again and then suddenly through action langley you're gonna see that you're not an imposter at all you're actually the kind of person that pushes through and does what he or she says they are going to do if you want to be successful in business if you truly want that side hustle to turn into your full-time thing you have to learn how to let the feelings of doubt rise up but take action anyway i had tremendous success success in the speaking business my i went from zero never had been paid for a speech to literally the most booked woman in the world in three years flat crazy there's a number of reasons why number one the content's terrific i'm also a really good public speaker there's not a lot of women on the circuit but more importantly i behave in a way because i know that the number one asset in business is make the people you're dealing with know that they matter take care of everybody you deal with everybody the event planners the speaking bureaus everybody has something that they're worried about you get rid of the worry you make them feel like they're important everybody wants to be around you because at the end of the day we all want to know that we matter so if you do business with people that make you feel good you want to do more business with them and so it's a really really simple thing i call my philosophy about human beings is just be a fan just cheer for everybody there's so much success to go around people have really difficult lives they make things really hard for themselves make their life easy make them feel great give them a hug smile compliment them be generous don't be a pain in the ass like literally it's that simple i realize that i need to have a level of focus and a level of intentionality that i have not yet cultivated in my life that there's still that i do that i put in the way that was fine when i was operating and achieving at this level but now i want to go to this level and so what are those things getting up earlier being a complete hawk about how i'm spending my time and attention that in the mornings when i'm with my family literally being hyper focused unjust them so that i'm present with them and then confession i'll literally work for like 25 minutes and then the add kicks in and then i'll find myself folding laundry for 20 minutes because i allow myself to get distracted and see that's the thing about habits and the levels of success that you get to that when you recognize that jumping to the next level that you want to get to is nothing more than just tweaking your habits a little bit that it's really that simple you will start to be able to have quantum leaps and i'm realizing that i have amazing habits but they have gotten me to hear and if i want to get to the next level it's going to require a level of focus and intentionality that i haven't demanded of myself before no drinking during the week being super super focused on the stuff that's really important probably hiring somebody full-time to be a full-time assistant to help me stay organized and focused in terms of scheduling and weeding through all the incoming requests i think it's just about that about this sort of like maniacal focus on things that are important like now is the time and what's cool is you can make it happen anytime in your life like if there's some jump that you want to make look i'm an extraordinarily productive person i've accomplished a tremendous amount in the last three years but what it's going to take for me to get to the next level and not destroy the people around me with my stress and be an amazing leader and be an amazing mother and be an awesome wife and actually be an incredible businesswoman is a level of focus that i have never required of myself i've been getting a ton of questions about being paralyzed with the fear of what other people think and this is so commonplace i think every human being on the planet is is paralyzed in some aspect or some area of their life because they're concerned about with their parents or what their friends or with their friends on facebook or with their colleagues or what their upline or their downline or whatever what their neighbors are gonna think if you are struggling with this and you have not found it helpful to attack your thinking patterns then here's a trick that i want you to try to break the pattern of being paralyzed by what other people think i want you to pick one thing one thing that you've been wanting to do that you've been thinking about but you have stopped yourself from doing because you're concerned about what other people think let me give you some examples maybe you've wanted to go on a wellness retreat but you think your spouse will roll their eyes at you so you haven't done it maybe you have a particular facebook post or a blog so many of you want to start a business or start creating art but you're terrified of putting yourself out there because of what other people will think today we're going to break that pattern what you're going to do is you're going to pick one thing you've been stopping yourself from doing and you're going to do it you're going to do it and the reason why i want you to do this is because i know that if you're still paralyzed you have not been able to change your thinking patterns yet that's cool no problem we're gonna try a different tactic i want you to change this paralysis through action because if you sign up for that class if you go on that retreat if you create your art if you post that blog post if you start that business you will be proving to yourself through the actions that you're taking that you don't care what other people think try that today let me know number one what you've stopped yourself from doing and number two what you're committing to doing today because one way to break this is to attack the thoughts and change the thoughts and get into action first the other way to do it is to recognize that you're paralyzed pick one thing that you're gonna do and actually get it done i can't remember where who i learned this from but i was recently somebody else said oh well you know instead of saying sorry try saying thank you so when you run into a meeting and you're late oh sorry i'm late or to a call say thank you for your patience and that one line has changed everything for me and what i've come to realize is that when i say i'm sorry it's all about me and i'm making myself wrong and when i say thank you i'm actually acknowledging the other people around me and you can find that you can substitute that line in almost every instance and i was very surprised by how often without even thinking about it i was saying sorry i was telling everybody the story that even yesterday i was in a yoga class and somebody fell over on the you know and kind of hit me and i'm like oh i'm sorry what you know no i but just like i could have said are you okay instead of i'm sorry the other thing i use so much qualifying language when i speak and i never knew it until i was on cnn and then you have the horrifying experience of having to watch yourself on video i had no idea how often i said i think or actually or you know like all of these qualifiers maybe yeah it takes the precision and the force out of your language and the way that you speak and i had no idea how often i was being equivocal we were hiking with our kids we have two teenage kids and we were up in the presidential range in new hampshire and we were having a conversation about social media and our daughter said something that i want everybody to take to heart she said your social life today is all about what everybody else is doing and i think the same is true with business success too many of us fall into the trap of defining our business success by what other people are doing and so if you get just one thing from our conversation today other than a gigantic kick in the ass from both peter and me i want you to understand that your highest value proposition is you there is only one you you have inner wisdom you have a unique set of experiences you have struggles all of that is yours and so yes look around at what other people are doing and and and draw inspiration from it but then pull it back in and check it against what your wisdom is telling you what your definition of success is got a great question about dealing with relationships friendships where you have a close friend who's a real downer and they've got all kinds of issues and they are draining the you know what out of your energy it happens all the time i'm going to say a couple things about this i have something that i call the six month rule for the people in your life your friends your family people are going to go through ups and downs and i think it's super super super important that you be there for people that you listen to the things that they're struggling with that you give advice that you help them find resources you must must must do that this is part of being an incredible friend however when the issue sticks around so long that your friendship spirals into a situation where that friendship is nothing more than you listening to somebody complain and now it's zapping your energy now it's time for you to change how you're behaving in the friendship so this is why i call it the six month rule for six months absolutely listen to somebody give them all the advice be the shoulder they cry on let them [ __ ] and kvich and all that stuff to you all day long but if after six months your friend is still complaining and doing nothing and is still complaining and acting helpless is still stuck in that rut and refusing to take your advice it's really important that you draw some boundaries and it's important for you it's also important for your friend so here's what you're going to do you're basically just going to say look i love you i know you're going through a hard time but i will no longer listen to you complain about it and the reason why is because it's not helping you and it's really starting to make me sad that you're still this stuck and you're not taking action let's definitely hang out let's spend a lot of time together but we're not allowed to talk about this anymore the second you start taking action to fix the situation we can talk about it again and you know that i'm here for you but i'm not here for you so that you can stay stuck i'm here for you so that you can get better so that you can grow i've always wanted a six-pack and i don't have it and i don't know and i've never had it and when i i finally stopped complaining about it when i got honest about what it was going to require oh i'm dead serious dead serious about this at my you know at 49 with my affinity for alcohol and my love of carbs and my taste for exercise i have a small problem on my hands if i want a six pack so if you were to go forward right and think okay well if a year from now i had a six-pack what would what would that actually what would my day-to-day life look like and you can get very clear that you're not committed to that and then you can stop beating yourself up for the sh you never intend on doing what i realized is i can spend four minutes a day in a hotel room or in my bedroom doing planks and my arms look great and everybody else will think the rest of my body's in shape and we're good we're good yes [Applause] it looks like a charm so you might want to get honest with yourself like instead of doing this i don't want to be a millionaire do you really because you can make it happen you actually can look at all the idiots that are making money you can make money but you're gonna have to roll the clock forward just a year and say okay if i'm able to put a thousand dollars a month against my debt i'm able to make x amount of dollars a month i'm able to put x amount of dollars in savings what do i need to be doing a year from now to make that happen and what are those habits that are there a year from now that i don't have right now and then roll yourself back to this moment just like i explained with exercise do i actually not want to have a manhattan tonight nope did i want to go to the gym today nope did i would am i am i willing to not eat what i ate for nope am i willing i did my four minutes my arms are looking really good but so bring it back and then you will have the formula for pivoting at any moment you time travel forward a year you investigate the patterns that you have that are giving you the result that you want and then you back your ass up to right here right now and you decide am i willing to do this now if i'm willing then 54321 through all the excuses that are going to be there when you're trying to override your operating system that's how you do it or you have the reality check like i had which is oh i just like i don't intend on changing so why don't we get this off the plate and let's focus on the things that i am actually committed to so in the ted talk i cited this this statistic that i had read uh years ago and that is that a scientist had calculated the odds of you and me being born and when you think about just even the sexual act of your parents in a lifetime relationship the number of times they would actually be intimate the amount of sperm that go the the odds of one egg and one sperm and then you throw in then you throw in the dna and the uniqueness of your dna structure some scientists calculated all of those odds and figured out that the odds of you being you who you are born the day that you were born to the parents that you have with the dna structure that you have given all the other variables that could have changed something the odds are one in 400 trillion that you are you and so what that means to me is that you're meant to be here that there is a reason why you were born and the journey of your life is to figure it out and i think it's actually simple i think that life is very simple and we complicate it because we have brains that can tell stories and we have um bodies that can sense danger and so we over complicate things and the the purpose of your life is to listen to your heart and soul and to follow it and to express the highest version of you not the self-doubt not the anxiety not the fears not the pettiness not the frustrations but to actually have the courage to be fully expressed as as like it sounds stupid but you know as the as a great human being to have the courage to be kind to have the courage to be patient to have the courage to cheer for other people and have the courage to tune into that wisdom that's inside of you and lean into it follow the things that pique your curiosity do more of the that actually expands your heart and expands the amount of energy in your body and slowly but surely if you align all your decisions and the things that you spend time on and the people that you spend time on with the things that naturally energize you your whole life will experience a that shift of like i need to get off of this because we'll be i'll be spending time with like my fiance or with my family i it popped into my head oh my gosh i need to text this person i forgot i needed to call and get this order fixed how do you find that shift to just say you know what i'm spending time with my family and i'll do it tomorrow but not like in a procrastinating it's an excellent question i think if you're present to whether or not you're kind of in the zone of time where it's cool to be fluid you're kind of with the family you're also sort of present on your phone that's cool if you've decided that because my kids are starting to complain or my fiance's starting to complain that i'm always like this then you got honor that if you're gonna say i'm putting down the phone between seven and nine o'clock tonight and i'm actually just going to be present with you you've got to honor it so what i will do is i'll just jot a note to myself so instead of picking up the phone i'll just jot a note down you've had the experience right where you got to like be in a meeting at the school or you have to catch a plane or you've got a doctor's appointment and have you ever noticed that when you've got an anchor like that your whole day condenses and you're more productive because you've got this deadline and that's called parkinson's law so parkinson's law it's a research-backed fact that when you have work to do it will expand to the amount of time that you have to do it in so if you have 20 minutes to make a call how long will it take you if you have two weeks to make it how long will it take you correct so if you every day no phone in your room you set that one priority that matters to you if you got time to kind of inch it forward just a little bit great you've already made progress you're done for the day then you look at your phone you also set a quitting time right then and there the majority of days you'll honor it and that quitting time means for me it means i'm not on my phone and everybody that works for me if knows if there's an emergency or if we have to do something they'll call me so that that helps a lot if you had to pick one word that was you one word that represented your essence and so let me explain what i mean by essence have you ever been around a dog that gets wet and they shake and then there gets all over you that to me is the definition of essence so you walk into a room what is it that shakes off onto other people what's the word right here excited anyone else determined kind energy back in the back just shout out thoughtful love sexy awesome so it was interesting because the word that fell out because i immediately thought i wonder if mine is confidence and then i thought well wait a minute actually no it's try all i want you to ever do is try that's it i just want you to try in those moments where you hear yourself i want you to try in those moments where you know that it's time to speak up i want you to try that's all that i ever ask of you because if you simply do that and i say simply as if it's so easy right you will literally unlock the potential of your life here's another massive insight so i always think about businesses levels right and i also realize that as the media landscape or the um the particular vertical or industry that you're building a business in is changing that is a constant and it's something that you can't control right you just cannot control the things that are happening in the world around us but you can always control what you're thinking and what you're doing in response to it so all of my work centers inside this gap between what's happening in your life and in your work and what your reaction is to it and how you can't control the things that are going on around you but you can always control what your reaction is and that gap there that's about five seconds long and you start to understand that you can change how you think you can change your habits you can change how you lead you can pivot and change even the philosophy of your company and you can do it through the decisions that you're making and managing your reactions you will become unstoppable so three years three and a half years ago i got into the speaking business um because of the popularity of that tedx talk that i gave and um that first year i did um i don't know i think was like 27 speeches the next year i did 87 last year i did 121 i was the most booked female speaker in the world this year i've kept it at 80 and here's why i realize just like you may be realizing in your business whatever your business is that there are aspects of your business that you love and that energize you and there are aspects of your business that are depleting as hell and that are old and that are tired and that if you continue in that lane you're going to end up 10 years from now in a place that you don't want to be it's so important for you to pay attention to what's energizing you about the landscape around you and about your own business because that's the secret to seeing around corners and so the corner that i was seeing around is that as an entrepreneur even though it's wildly lucrative to do what i do just on the speaking platform i mean anybody can do the math on 121 speeches right and the amount of money that i get paid to show up and deliver a one-hour talk and realize there's a lot of money here's the problem it's a terrible business because you can't scale it other than raising your price or raising the number of times you do it and guess what else you have to show up and i can't sell it so i found myself in a situation where i had built a multi-million dollar business highly profitable and it was depleting the academy and i can't really scale it and i can't sell it terrible opposition to be in in an entrepreneur so i made a decision that i you know what was it bo that actually energizes me about my business and i answered it with the first question it's hearing from people i would rather answer comments on instagram all day long than stand in a stadium with 5 000 people in it i get more from the one to one connection that's what fuels me and so i had this light bulb moment paying attention being clear that wait a minute i don't want to build the biggest speaking platform and i don't want to build a coaching business i want to build a content company i want to go back to my roots and build a media company and so with that insight i now have to change right because the kind of business woman that runs a multi-multi-million dollar speaking business where it's just you and your speaking management firm and your travel folks and your logistics people and maybe your social media manager that's who's on the team the kind of leader that runs that kind of team is very different than the kind of leader that is going to grow a hundred million dollar media company that's going to syndicate content every single day that is going to own what she's doing that's going to build instagram and facebook and youtube and linkedin as my personal abc cnbc fox and this is what i want you to understand about the story and that is this in order to get to the next level in your business you got to decide right now what habits do you have as a leader that you have to change now because you will not see around the corner you will not engineer that next quantum leap unless you personally change and so one of the reasons why i've gone from being the most successful female you know book speaker on the speaking circuit to launching the number one book on all of the self-publishing platform for amazon and one of the most read books in the world and selling like gangbusters still is because i am constantly innovating myself i know that i am the single biggest problem in my company and if i don't constantly pivot and evolve how i lead and what i'm focused on i'm gonna be the blockade and so you know stop looking at what everybody else is doing stop micromanaging the team and ask yourself two years from now when you think about where you want your company to be what habit do you have to change right now do you think it's a fear of being uncomfortable or failure that's really like the barrier for people the barrier is everybody gives what other people [Music] uh we are going to the country hall music the country hall of fame um no i am not singing everyone should thank whomever they pray to that i'm not thinking singing um for a big conference and so we're about to do a keynote to a couple thousand people and then do a q a and i'm excited i'll see you all upstairs do you think it's a fear of being uncomfortable or failure that's really like the barrier for people the barrier is everybody gives a [ __ ] what other people are thinking yeah and so they're on camera or they're on a microphone trying to be smart or concerned about whether or not they look good in the shot uh concerned about uh how they sound whether or not they started if their neck is turning red like whatever it may be and they're so up here that they're not actually being true to just saying what's right here absolutely whether you're speaking from the heart speaking from the gut like that is the skill to develop is the ability to be more like an 11 year old that gets on camera and can just be themselves instead of being a 49 year old person censoring themselves and that's what i'm talking about when i talk about the truth when i talk about authenticity that people really want to feel that connection and the only way that they're going to feel that connection is if you do the work to remove the own veneer and the own barriers that you put in between you and other people and the number one thing is everybody gives too much of a [ __ ] about what everybody else thinks and you know who they think the they're worried the most about their friends if i put this thing up not for my friends but for the people that i'm trying to build a rapport with online my friends are going to judge me your friends seriously if you're out to make a difference if you're out to share something that is important to you if your friends don't like it or don't support you they're really not your friends it really works as action because if you're stopping to think about what people are thinking or whether or not you're worried about what people are thinking you've already fallen into the trap the second that you push yourself to get started through the action itself you are proving to yourself that even though you care what everybody thinks you're going to do it anyway let me tell you something a big mistake that we make as entrepreneurs is we think that we've got to build everything ourselves and what's super cool about business today is that there are channels where you can make money so that you don't have to do things that are outside your core expertise you're a photographer you're amazing at it you're a networker i can already tell you're amazing at it what you should never ever do is spend time building a stock photography site because that is not your core capability but if you just focus on taking photos which you love and you upload the stuff that you're not going to monetize some other way to a stock photography site as long as it's not other you know it's not as long as you know you've got the rights to it and everything else you can make money on that stuff all day long and in fact because so many people are creating content the stock photography sites have exploded it's not just getty and stock list and some of the other ones that a ton of people use there are there are tons of them out there and so that's one thing that you should be doing okay where else do you want to grow your business i want to make sure i'm able to do that first step very well before i progress on to the to the next phase okay i don't want to do so many different things that i'm not doing each one of them very well that's right so anything where you're going to have to learn a new skill and somebody else has done it and you can outsource it just like uploading to stock sites that is you don't want to make the mistake of having your attention go off the ball which is creating a big library of photos and building something that you have no interest in building a year ago february 28th i believe it was we launched the five second rule book and there are so many lessons in not only the launch of that book and how i did it as a business woman but also the trajectory that has happened since then number one it's important for you to know that um it was one of the top five most read books on amazon last year it was the number one audiobook in the world it is the number one selling title on amazon and audible self-publishing audible platform that's really cool because as an entrepreneur for me personally it's so important for me to kind to have control of the work that i'm doing that decision to self-publish has paid off more than it's paid off financially and it certainly will pay you more in the long tail financially when you own your work and when you self-publish and if you have an idea that you have been thinking about and you're watching beau's show and you're watching evan's channel to get the motivation to continue to tell your story to do the work to get your stuff out there the one thing i'll say is if you believe in what you're doing don't sell it to somebody self-publish it because you will eventually it might not happen in the first year but eventually your work will bump into the right audience and it will grow and it will grow and you will really regret having sold for pennies on the dollar the thing that was really your life's work and so please please please if you're a content generator if you're an entrepreneur if you're a writer if you're a song producer own what you're doing at least in the beginning until you start to understand the industry and the economics of things if you're trying to stop yourself from repeating a pattern of behavior let's use drinking okay if you're trying to use it to stop yourself from drinking and you feel yourself being drawn to go pour the glass of wine because it's six o'clock right and you got home and it's time to have that glass of wine and by the way time of day is a huge trigger for behaviors huge trigger so you feel yourself being drawn toward the glass of wine go five four three two one and physically move away from it so that's one thing that you can do in terms of the thoughts and we go into this in depth in the five second rule book there's some science around something called if then planning so if then planning will make you 60 more likely to stick to a commitment and what if then planning is is it is coming up with a plan b before the you know what hits the fan and so in the case of thinking patterns that are negative or behavior patterns like pleasing people or silencing yourself what i want you to do is it can be very effective to write down all the times where you're typically triggered to do that or to think that negative thing then come up with what you're going to do instead ahead of time if this person uses that tone of voice with me and speaks in a different disrespectful way instead of standing here and taking it five four three two one then i'm gonna do this i am a productivity consultant i've had a challenge with people they know what they need to do and this is my challenge as well i know what i need to do i know it needs to be done right getting that motivation and getting over that ledge and that five second rule my goodness changed my life i haven't quite made it to not hitting snooze yet okay why oh because my bed feels so comfy in the morning let me tell you something okay are you ready i'm ready your business will go to the next level the second you actually beat the habit of hitting the snooze and the reason why is because of the science around productivity and the brain okay and when you push yourself to walk the talk and have the first 30 minutes of your day be the most productive for your brain you will bring a level of conviction and authority and impact to the business that's not there currently right you see when you're uh an expert and you're a consultant your power is limited to the extent that you personally feel like you're not using the tools does that make sense that makes sense i say this for myself i say this because when i think about businesses that i've had in the past or when i was an executive coach and i would be giving advice but i'm not technically following it in the same regard i'm not as powerful right and so i would highly highly highly encourage you starting tomorrow morning you want to be the best productivity coach on the planet that alarm goes off notice the gap right because the more that you start to play with this five second window and you go five four three two one and you push yourself out of bed and you hate it and then you take your cold shower and you hate it and then you don't look at your phone and you hate it and then you spend the first 30 minutes of the day pushing something forward and you hate it but you do it you will now be able to coach people who do the exact same thing right you're never ever ever ever going to feel like doing the things you need to do in order to have what you want you're always going to need to push yourself you're always going to need to parent yourself so what is the net advice on this what what is the bottom line the bottom line is no one's coming no one no one's coming to push you no one's coming to tell you to turn the tv off no one's coming to tell you to get out the door and exercise nobody's coming to tell you to apply for that job that you've always dreamt about nobody's coming to write the business plan for you it's up to you and because you're only ever going to do the things that you feel like doing right now or that feel good right now unless you understand that you've got to parent yourself you got to push yourself you're not going to make your dreams come true you're just not we're not wired that way you weren't born that way you weren't that way when you were growing up and you're certainly not that way as an adult and there's a tremendous amount of liberation that comes when you accept the fact that you're always going to need to give yourself a push i want to talk to those of you that are working toward your dreams whatever it is that you're doing right now it's leading to the thing that you dream of doing and you're not going to progress until you get the skills and the experience that you need at the level that you're at i guarantee you even if you're working at a front desk job at a local gym you're learning customer service you need to learn that kind of stuff before you can launch your own business for me in order to be an incredible speaker that can command a stage with 3 000 people in the audience for an entire hour i first had to learn how to have the courage to speak up and have hard conversations in my life then i had to learn how to speak up in a small meeting then i had to learn how to speak up uh you know in a church basement then i had to learn how to give a little bit of a talk at a brown bag luncheon then i had to learn how to stand on a slightly bigger stage so if you're frustrated with where you are right now because you've got these big dreams and you think you're really far away here's one way that you can continue to be patient and you can milk wherever you're at to help you build the skills and the experience that you need as you climb toward the thing that you want ask yourself what is it that i am learning what's the skill that i'm honing by sitting here at this front desk job or driving this uber or lyft vehicle what am i learning that i'm going to take with me on my journey to do that next big thing because i guarantee you there's something in the minutia of what you're doing right now that you are developing an expertise and a skill around that you're going to need as you launch yourself towards the next thing so here's what you're going to do it's actually simple but it's not going to be easy because you're going to create all kinds of excuses and drama for yourself okay you're going to set your alarm for 7. and when the alarm goes off that's what happened that gap is going to open up and you're going to feel all rolling i don't feel like it i'm over i don't want to i don't feel like writing a song anyway you know like that's when you have to take control you have to take control you have to get up every morning it begins by getting up because if you let anxiety excuses self-doubt all the win in that first decision the rest of the day is hijacked so win the first decision then exercise i don't care about the eating as much i know it's important not to put garbage in but i would rather see you first master getting up on time do that for a week then let's add in exercise every day 10 minutes don't start with like two hours because then you're gonna find an excuse not to do it get up at seven exercise for ten minutes then the third week you're gonna add in like i'm actually gonna eat clean this week or whatever the diet is that you wanna eat right you're just gonna add in things as you master the little things but you gotta get up on time it starts right there you know we all face problems in our lives it's just part of being a human being but have you ever considered that there are really only two kinds of problems that you're ever going to face there are temporary problems and then there are permanent problems that are more like conditions that you have to learn with now a temporary problem is something that you have tremendous power to change and permanent problems though are something that require a different skill and that is the ability to just accept things as they are and let the complaining go now one of the skills in life that is really going to help you become a great problem solver and it's also going to give you more control over your life is knowing what kind of problem you're actually dealing with because we all complain about our problems but to actually solve a problem you got to understand what kind of problem you're dealing with the truth is you can't change a permanent problem so no matter how much you complain about it how much you try to change it how much energy you put into it nothing's changing it's a waste of your time and your energy to focus on those when you try to change a permanent problem you know you are stuck because you feel like you're just spinning in circles temporary problems are what you want to focus your energy on these are the decisions and the life choices that you keep making that might feel good in the moment but they actually make you miserable now here's the thing about temporary problems they're not permanent you may hate your body but you can change it you may hate and be unhappy in the relationship that you're in but you can change it you might complain a lot about how your boss treats you or how you feel passed over at work but you can change how you interact with your boss and you can change how you show up at work and you can even change your job that's the difference between a temporary and a permanent problem temporary problems you can change now here's a simple exercise that i want you to do i want you to make a list of all the things that you complain about maybe you complain about your commute where you live the person you're with your health your boss the amount of money you have now i want you to look at every single complaint you have and ask yourself what can i do to change this problem what can i do to fix my relationship with your boss because you can't change your boss's personality but you can definitely change how you interact with her and when you change yourself and your own behaviors and how you think you're going to change everything i've always been very scared and lack of confidence and thought that i was never good enough like some of my partners we've all bought into a lie we've bought into a lie that confidence is belief in self and so when you're in a situation which is normal where you don't believe in yourself you're like oh my god i have no confidence the truth is and i want you to walk out of here with a new definition of confidence confidence is the willingness to try because when you try and you take action what happens and what's happened for france is that when she sees herself taking action what happens is she sees herself being the kind of person that takes action so she has evidence that she can rely on herself and that action is what builds confidence it doesn't start with belief the real way the real way for most of us is not to wait to believe but to push ourselves to act and through the action you will build the belief so let's pretend that this right here this empty mason jar is your brain in order to do your best thinking you need to make sure that you've got the full capacity of your brain leveraged and pointed at the things that are important to you here's the problem when you go through life as you go through life what happens is you know your brain starts to fill up with information and that's what creates a state of feeling overwhelmed being overwhelmed is nothing more than having a full brain so as you go through your day-to-day life and you start checking email and looking at texts and looking at facebook and sitting in meetings and flipping through television channels and sending uh emails and writing excel spreadsheets and running and picking up the kids at work and getting another text and looking at instagram and looking at twitter and checking out the news your brain gets pretty full doesn't it and so when you feel overwhelmed what i know about you is that your brain is full of a bunch of garbage and so oh i didn't think about the drain draining i hope that's not bothering you but it's certainly going to bother me what you need to do in order to fight overwhelm is you've got to actually do a brain dump you got to get rid of all that stuff so that you've got an empty brain so you can focus again so how do you do that it's easy to do with a cup of water because you just pour it out this is what you're gonna do you are literally going to dump out everything that's in your head onto this piece of paper every concern every worry every to-do every thing that's bothering you that you're thinking about you're going to write down [Music] all right and when you're done writing down everything that's in your head and there's absolutely nothing left oh i've got something due tomorrow that i kind of forgot about um once you get that stuff all done on a piece of paper pull out a highlighter take a look you could do everything on this list you could but what should you do what are three things just three that you should do in order to advance the things that matter to you let's see i gotta do that one i gotta do that one and i gotta do that one the rest of this list is complete and other garbage it's other people's stuff it's the email stuff it's the meeting stuff it's the stuff that's not all that important to me it's not that mission critical so by dumping everything out i now not only have the three things i need to do i've got a clear head so i can get it done if you're about to do something for the first time chances are high that you might embarrass yourself but what it means is if you're willing to be the kind of person that is willing to embarrass themselves it means you're trying something new it means you're going for it when everybody else sits on the sidelines and so one of the things that i would encourage you to do is that when you feel that tingling like you're starting to hold yourself back because you start thinking about what all your friends are thinking about that's a moment to go oh this is what that lady was talking about 54321 i'm going for it you're not a procrastinator you have a habit of procrastinating big difference because if it's a habit i can teach you to use science to break it you see all habits have three parts there's a trigger and in the case of procrastination the trigger's always stress then there's a pattern you repeat and in the case of procrastination it is to avoid doing something and then there's a reward you get a little stress relief the only way to break a habit you guys is not to deal with the triggers you're never going to get rid of the stress in your life but you can 100 change your pattern of avoiding work so next time that you're in a situation where you feel yourself hesitate you spent way too much time checking out the highlights from last night's scores what you're going to do is you're going to go oh i must be stressed out about something acknowledge the stress then go five four three two one i want you to count to yourself because i want you to interrupt the habit that's stored here and i want you to awaken your prefrontal cortex then i want you to just work just for five minutes the reason why i want you to only work for five minutes is because your problem isn't working it's the habit of avoiding i just need you to start and here's the other cool thing we know based on research that if we can get you to start 80 percent of you are going to keep going if your friend is facing a problem when you have to make decisions on behalf of your friend you tend to think from multiple perspectives you think about multiple outcomes and ultimately you make a much better decision what they found in research though is if they put you in the exact same situation facing the exact same thing that your friend is you're not able to be so objective because you're emotional and you don't make that great a decision what's the conclusion well when you make decisions for other people you're great when we make decisions for ourselves decisions that can be emotional we're not so good at it that's where the power of objectivity comes in it's the ability to make a decision from a third party's perspective let me explain so if you're facing a really important decision and you can feel yourself getting emotional maybe you're thinking about asking for a raise or changing your career or changing your major or ending a relationship or starting a relationship whatever it may be if it's something that is emotional for you you're going to have a hard time thinking about all the options and you're going to be really attached emotionally because maybe you're concerned about the people who may be impacted by your decision maybe you're managing that somebody's going to be disappointed or hurt by what you need to do for you this is when the power of objectivity is really important pick somebody that you really admire i mean it could be somebody like a bill gates or richard branson or an oprah winfrey or maybe have a mentor and stop yourself and ask what would oprah do in this situation what would richard branson do in this situation what would your mentor do in this situation bringing that level of third-party objectivity will yank you out of your body and your emotions and it will help you give yourself the perspective that you need and the distance from your emotions so that you can actually assess your options and make the best decision for you what would mel do if mel were making the decision the best decision you know there's a really interesting example of somebody who did this in sports and at the time he actually got a lot of flack for it it was lebron james now lebron james as you know played for the cleveland cavaliers for a really really long time and he's arguably one of the best basketball players to ever hit the nba so he made this announcement that he was going to leave the cleveland cavaliers where he had been playing forever had rabid rabid fans and he was going to leave them and go to miami miami that was the conclusion you woke up with this morning that was the conclusion i woke up with this morning he was giving an interview to espn and what he said was this he said lebron james needs to do what's best for lebron james now people kind of laughed at him because it's a funny way to say the sentence but this guy is really smart he was leveraging the power of objectivity mel robbins needs to learn how to do what's best for mel robbins and you need to learn how to do what's best for you the thing that i'm stuck on is that i have a bazillion ideas about things that i can create and do and courses and trainings and la da da who can relate and so actually moving from the idea and even creating the whole curriculum and all of that to actually making it happen yeah and doing it so i have a cool strategy that i use and i hope it works for you so i carry a little notebook and i actually borrowed this from chris because when we lived in new york city he used to carry around a notebook like this size and whenever he had an idea he'd just jot it down then he'd stick it in his back pocket and he was just full of all kinds of stuff so i carry around a notebook and this one's new so it doesn't really have much in it as ideas come i just jot it down in that notebook and then what happens for me is i get anxiety because i'm afraid that i'm going to forget the idea then that anxiety makes me get distracted and unfocused and overwhelmed and so i think if you were to have a little notebook on you at all times and when those creative juices and those impulses go that you jot them down that's going to remove one layer of the overwhelm i think you should chase what energizes you everyone talks about passion legacy purpose the one word to pay attention to is energy i love that that's it let's simplify this okay so whatever energizes you naturally expands you feels like possibility is exciting to do it may be scary that doesn't matter it has to do with how it makes you feel right when you were in your 20s money made you feel good it expanded you it energized you chasing the money that was the game that was your passion that was your there's nothing wrong with that nothing wrong with that and i particularly want to say that to the women that are watching yeah because it is socialized into women not to chase success like that not to go after the money and so if what energizes you is amassing wealth go for it but what hap and and the reason why i say that is because people talk about the word passion yeah or purpose right and the truth is it's not a person place or a thing it's not it is the feeling of being expanded and energized right if you're pursuing your passion it means that you wake up every day and are energized so instead of trying to think what's my purpose what's my passion what's my purpose what's my passion instead of thinking like that i want you instead to ask yourself what's what could i do today that would energize me what energizes me if it's making money figure out how to make money right if it is making a difference figure out how to make a difference it could be in any single shape or form but if it energizes you that's what you need to follow and what happens is that passion also because it's energy it dissipates over time because when you first start making money it's thrilling yeah thrilling there is nothing more exhilarating than making your first million yeah nothing more exhilarating but what happens is once you learn how to do something once you can do it over and over again and so it starts to become routine yeah which means it's no longer energizing right which is why every entrepreneur out there goes through the mode of chasing the money and then you hit the money that you need to make then you're like i'm not fulfilled yeah i don't have to do it yeah i went through that you finally you know i did everybody yes yeah and it's because you were energized by the money and now you're not yeah now you got to be energized by the next thing it turns out that one of the best stress relievers on the planet is something that most of us don't ever do and that is seek out time with friends when we feel totally stressed out when you're doing twice as much work as you normally do or you're feeling twice as much stress as you normally feel studies at harvard show that what you need is you need to see your friends twice as much now shawn anchor is a really famous researcher and best-selling author at harvard and he studied this phenomenon he looked at at people that were stressed at schools and in call centers and in the military and in banks and in almost every single industry what he discovered is that the most successful people the people that were the best at selling the people that they were the most resilient the people that had the best ability to deal with stress when times got tough were the ones that saw their friends the most it was the people with the tightest social connections that have the ability to weather the storms that life throw at us i want you to write down three people three people that when you hang out with them you feel energized that when you have plans with them you're excited about seeing them when this video ends reach out to them that's right pick up the phone send them a text i want you to invite them to do something go out to lunch go for a walk in the woods get a cup of coffee go out to dinner even if you're not stressed out i guarantee you at least one of the three people that you're gonna reach out to needs you when i'm with cooler or popular guys i feel inferior and worthless which affects me and weirdly i try so hard to impress them and be like them like a chameleon i try to avoid them but i feel left out whatever i do i feel sad or useless what can i do in order to overcome this you don't have to hang out with people you don't like there's a pro life tip for everybody you don't have to one of the things that is a massive indication that you're hanging out with the wrong group of people is that you don't feel comfortable being yourself the second you try to be somebody else or you feel like a chameleon just to fit in you are trying to fit in with the wrong group relationships only work when you can be the real you people thrive on energy that's what drives connection you're with people that make you wither and hide and feel insecure you are with the wrong people you need to find your people and your people are the kind of people that the second you hang out with them you don't feel like less of yourself you feel like more of yourself you don't feel like you gotta hide or be somebody else you feel like you want to express yourself and show up and be more of yourself to address what happened you can now have the self-awareness to create a new story to start a new chapter to see the old strategy and now consciously you talk about consciously creating consciously create a different response that's what i do for people i am helping people identify the internal conflicts that are making them miserable that are ruining the relationships that are destroying their self-esteem and then once we highlight those we pick a different strategy right that's what we do and you know anybody can do it today for the next 24 hours i want you to assume that everybody else around you has the best intentions the person that cuts you off in traffic the friend that's not texting you back the customer that writes an email that has a snarky tone whatever it may be the fact that you may be riled that you posted something on facebook and and one of your best friends didn't tag you in it or didn't like it i mean we get hung up around the stuff but today i want you to assume the best intentions you know this recently happened to me where i really had to put this to use i had a situation at work where i had a conference call and it was related to a speech and it was one of these kind of kickoff calls where a bunch of people on the client side are going to be there and we're going to talk about the event and i'm going to talk about the speech and during the conversation this conference call i said something that i didn't mean to say i was totally responsible i basically said what day am i speaking now i knew the date that i was speaking what i didn't know is in the flow of the event was i the opener was i the closer was i the person that's supposed to be the defibrillator after a big lunch like what role am i playing that's a really important thing to understand if you're giving a speech because it helps you customize what you're going to do well the client misunderstood me because i wasn't precise and they were annoyed because they thought holy cow we've we've hired this person we've sent her all kinds of information she doesn't even know what day she's speaking so the client gets upset they complain to the event planner the event planner then writes me one of these emails that's like this long the planner was really upset because i had made the planner look bad in front of the client now fully my responsibility completely unintentional and also based on a gigantic misunderstanding so what did i do well i did exactly what you should do when you screw up i took total responsibility i apologized i went overboard and cleaned the mess up i wrote a long email i actually left voicemail messages when we had to deliver a bunch of things i went overboard and being great about it and you know what i got from the planner that was really upset with me nothing i didn't get an email back i didn't get a phone call back even though i had requested one nothing nothing nothing nothing and of course what happens when somebody doesn't respond to you whether it's somebody that you're dating or it's somebody that's a good friend or it's a customer or somebody that's upset with you and you've apologized you immediately think that you've done something wrong we even do it if you get an email and somebody's tone is slightly off it is bananas how quickly we assume male intent we assume we're in trouble we assume we've done something wrong so what did i do in this situation because my reaction was i was disappointed that i didn't actually get a nice email back or hey no problem let's move on and have a great event just got silenced what did i do i use the five second rule five four three two one when i catch myself thinking about it and then i assume positive intent i tell myself a different story i say oh well i've apologized twice so maybe the planner feels that everything is complete and taken care of and no need to discuss it further i also assume hey this event is a big event i'm sure they're super duper busy and this is the last concern on their list another thing that you can say is maybe they're busy maybe this isn't a big deal to them maybe i've already been forgiven oh great so excellent i hope she learned something you're never going to feel ready to speak up okay and for the girl for girls in particular super important visibility you don't get credit for things people don't see and so raising your voice and learning how to do it in a classroom before you get into the workforce before you got to raise money so important and so what i want you to know is you're never if you're somebody who's like introverted or somewhat shy you're never going to feel comfortable doing it but you've got to do it your dreams depend on it what happens in your body when you're about to raise your hand okay and what does it feel like in your body okay is your stomach hurt or is your throat tight yeah does your chest get a rash like mine used to oh see you're lucky okay what about your hands do they get clammy yeah okay so the main thing to do is when that happens just go oh that's a thing that was talking about my body's getting ready to talk so before i give a speech i give about 100 speeches a year do you know what happens in my body my stomach hurts my armpits are like niagara falls my hands are clammy my throat is tight and i feel like i'm going to throw up do you think i'm nervous exactly my body is getting in a state to do something that's why nerves and excitement are the exact same so the next time you're in a class or you're with a group of friends and there's something you want to say tell me what happens again in your body your stomach starts to hurt what does it mean yes what does it mean on a positive side yes you're getting ready to talk i love that so that's the way that we are going to re-uh label that tape in your mind my stomach's in knots okay i'm not nervous i'm getting ready to talk here we go that's that signal mel robin said she gets it in the stadium i'm getting it right now five four three two one i'm going okay any decision can be dif divided into what do i need to do versus how and when do i need to do it for the what that is intuition and by intuition i use the word energy and the way to answer any question for yourself personally that you don't immediately know the answer to is to ask this question does it energize and expand my life or does it shrink it if it energizes and expands your life the answer is yes you should absolutely do it that is what you should do if the decision shrinks you or it deflates you then the answer is no you should not do it this is an incredible tool to use in deal making by the way because uh you know i'm in the middle of negotiating a massive media deal at the moment and it's something i've always wanted to do yeah and um when you're negotiating for something you really want whether it's somebody that you're dating or you know it's a salary or whatever in my case it's a massive media deal you can get really ego driven right right you can start to get very attached to the deal or to the person or to the whatever but you have to stop and ask yourself is this deal or this person actually expanding right and energizing are or are there aspects of it that deplete and shrink me and if there's any aspect of it that depletes and shrinks you either have to change that aspect of the deal or the relationship structure or you have to say no period right if you decide that yeah it energizes me and i really want to do it then that's what you want next you've got to think about the outcome which is how and when you make it happen right have you ever heard the term attention economy if you haven't heard it you're going to start hearing it a lot because that's what we live in right now it means that people and companies make money when they have your attention and in the world of internet technology social media your attention is for sale and what i want to do in today's mentoring session is i want to shift your attitude about how you value your own attention so got a simple question for you do you use a phone or a computer to make money or to improve your life or does the phone use you to make money oh look at this i lifted it up and it started playing a video check it out it's on facebook right now every time you are on your laptop and you go onto a laptop and you start scrolling mindlessly through facebook someone else is making money you ever thought about that like i'm gonna just scroll through facebook right now oh here's a post about yoga tights i don't need oh and here's something from buzzfeed about cute group photo of 23 baby pandas trying to make you know who's making money right now whoever made this video and so is buzzfeed and so is facebook but i'm not they're making money off my attention and as i keep scrolling oh here's somebody that's doing something related to the news and here's another thing ooh chocolate chip peanut butter cup lasagna cake am i making money am i improving my life by no but guess what tasty video is and so is melissa's southern style kitchen who sponsored this post so why am i pointing this out to you i'm pointing it out to you because the engineers at facebook the engineers at every website they they understand something they understand that the longer that you spend on their website or reading their emails or clicking their stuff the more money they're going to make see you and i are up against a massive amount of technology and people that want to trick us into giving them our attention there's a reason why facebook has an algorithm where they put things in your news feed that you like it's because research shows that you'll actually stay longer and how does somebody make money in the attention economy well they make it by grabbing your attention so i want you to consider something today i want you to be really mindful about your attention i want you to be mindful about how you're using your phone and your computer are you using it to get ahead and to make more money and to do the things that are important to you or are they using you to make a buck as you're going about your day just notice am i picking up my phone to use it to improve my life or make my goals happen or am i picking up my phone and letting somebody else use me to make money you said into the microphone that you think you're not good enough so how does thinking that you're not good enough stop you from taking the action you need to take i haven't embraced technology okay now we're somewhere okay okay i now know and i know why i know why the reason why is because it's not that you don't think you're good enough you don't think you're smart i'm an atron man and the the thing that's underneath i'm not good enough is you actually believe you're not smart enough and so you avoid the things that scare you and you have a very you have a fabulous personality i love that you're making jokes about the fact that you're an eight-track man but the reason why and i do the same thing i make jokes about this i don't want to deal with either because it's easier it is scary to say i don't know how to do this and i'm scared if i actually pivot and start focusing on technology because i need to then i'm not going to know how and so it's easier to be busy and it's easier to be on television stations and it's easier to try to do all this stuff that feels good because it's in my wheelhouse we all do it and so what i want you to really take a look at is where does my story that i'm not smart where is it blocking my dream where is it lying to me because you are smart and here's the other thing you don't have to be smart you have to work hard and you work very hard and you are very committed but there are things that you know you know how many are you relating to this conversation look around you are not alone there are things that you know that you must focus on but it scares you because it triggers that button than you i just got a phd that's it i hope they don't find out i don't know what the hell i'm doing oh god oh my god how do i know this is what you're thinking because this is what i think i want you to look at where in your life that story is robbing you of your dreams and where it is giving you an excuse to avoid the things that you know you need to do okay what did you just get from our conversation i i got that i need to uh meditate and see exactly why am i not taking action and start you know doing it and embracing it and i'm good enough i'm more than enough i love vision boards and gratitude journaling because they help me think about what i want and why this journal it's going to teach you how how you make your dreams come true i created this journaling method a couple years ago because i wanted to stop thinking about what i wanted and actually make it happen this is simple it's backed by science and it's going to help you make your dreams come true with just a couple minutes every morning let me show you how it works at the very top you write down the time place and date this simple trick gets you present and grounded in the moment now notice this is guilt-free journaling there are no dates printed so if you miss a day or two you're not behind next i'm gonna give you a superpower this my friend is your inner compass learning to read your energy is the secret to greater passion productivity and living with more purpose research from the university of pennsylvania proves that if you boost your mood in the morning you actually increase your productivity all day long these next two questions will help you take control of your energy which changes how your mind perceives tasks and will make you more confident about the day ahead and this section right here it's the secret to having a great day i want you to identify one project that matters to you today not two not three just one when you focus on just one project a day you leverage the progress principle it was invented at the harvard business school and it will change your life and help you be more productive so you can make your dreams come true research proves you get more done when you focus on less and every day i want you to focus on just one thing after you write down your top project i want you to write down why this project matters to you when you know your why science says you're going to be more inspired and motivated to get it done now take that vision and make it your mission write down one small action that you're going to take today to move your dream forward it doesn't matter how small it is forward is forward according to research simply using this section of the journal makes you 76 more likely to go from dreaming to doing and if you have any other thoughts about the project here's some extra space to play around with when you move from thinking to doing it may make you feel overwhelmed so let's change that attitude with a little gratitude studies prove that grounding yourself in something that you feel grateful for will boost your happiness and your effectiveness finally i want you to write down your quitting time yup you heard me right part of your morning routine should be deciding when you're gonna stop working at night if you feel like your wheels are spinning and you don't get anything done if you have no balance between work and life if you'd love to spend more time with your family and still feel like the most productive person you know set a quitting time this is called parkinson's law and it's rocket feel for your productivity now let's go over to the next page everyone works differently so this page is designed to work for you if you love making long to-do lists and checking things off here's the spot if you want to plan out your day there's a timeline on the left and if you need a place to take notes here's a place where you put them so there you have it the five second journal now i've got a really special bonus clip that i think you're gonna enjoy but before that it's time for the question of the day i wanna know what was your single biggest takeaway from this video and write down in the comments below when you're going to take action on that takeaway this week when you schedule in what day what time and what place you're going to take action you have a 91 chance of actually following through compared to just 35 if you just got motivated but never created a plan and when you share your plan and have accountability you give yourself an even higher chance of following through so in the comments below write down your single biggest takeaway as well as your specific plan of action because i want to celebrate with you part of the self-awareness and self-mastery and the ability to move your life forward is not only in 5-4-3-2-1 finding the instant motivation and courage to push yourself forward but the true liberation and freedom is going to come when you start to understand the body signals that got programmed a long time ago long time ago in your body that are holding you back and learning how in those moments when you get a pit in your stomach to recognize it and slow the body sensations down and then move forward before your mind starts talking you out of it so a lot of what happens for us is you had situations when you were a kid maybe your mom or your dad were really intense maybe you grew up in a very competitive household maybe you um were the kind of kid that things were better in your house when you were seen but not heard and so any and your body remembers it your body remembers situations when your parents were yelling because as a kid it feels traumatic your body remembers situations were in a classroom you were nervous or afraid to be called out or be seen your body remembers moments when you were embarrassed and so what's interesting is that um your body will now face any situation where you're about to be seen or you're about to speak up or you're about to do something where you're facing uncertainty or you're about to um face judgment and your body remembers those situations and it starts to get nervous or agitated or on edge because it knows oh my god you're about to do something that's going to expose you and your body wants to keep you safe that's why your stomach starts to go grumbly that's why your chest starts to get tight because you are about to do something that exposes you you're about to do something that is new you're about to do something that is scary and your body wants to try to protect you now your body's misreading the situation by the way if you want to change your life for free check the link right there below me and if you want to see my mel robbins affirmations video click the link right there next to me i think you'll enjoy them continue to believe i'll see you soon

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 547,532

Keywords: entrepreneur, yt:cc=on, evancarmichael

Id: pAl8smjLVrA

Length: 179min 0sec (10740 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020