DO THIS First Thing In The Morning To Stop Procrastination & NEVER BE LAZY Again! | Mel Robbins

i'm on a mission to get every human being in the world to add one simple thing to their morning routine this takes five days to work five days before you have an enormous breakthrough in how you see and relate to yourself [Music] people struggle despite knowing what they should be doing they procrastinate they have these negative thoughts that get in the way of them taking action what do you think the reason is well i think knowing what to do is really simple i'm serious like if you in any year of your life where you feel stuck you know what you need to do to move the needle to improve the situation at work to change your career to improve your health to make yourself happier to work on your marriage the information is everywhere and in fact if you're listening to me right now and you go mel robbins you are wrong i have no idea what to do i just know i'm stuck actually you know what to do go to google and type in i hate my job and you will get hundreds of millions of links you will probably find a hundred thousand videos that are made by people who have been stuck in their jobs who will walk you through a step-by-step process that you could take in order to change the what is easy the issue is how how do you make yourself take actions when you're afraid when you're scared when you're overwhelmed how do you break bad habits how do you break the negative thinking that is causing you to feel paralyzed see the problem for most of us is we think about what we need to do but thinking won't change your life the only way you're going to change your life or change your career or change your health is to take action and so the reason why so many people get stopped by procrastination and stopped by fear and stopped by anxiety is because they never get past the part of just thinking about it and i believe that we all have a habit that i call the habit of hesitation and in psychology psychologists and researchers say there's basically two types of people right there's people that have a bias towards action and those are the kinds of folks that when inspiration strikes or when confidence strikes or when courage strikes or when opportunity strikes they tend to lean toward it and to take action and based on research those folks tend to be happier healthier more successful more fulfilled in life and then there's the rest of us and those of us that have what psychologists call a bias towards thinking which means in a moment of uncertainty a moment of opportunity a moment uh where you need courage or confidence instead of leaning toward it you lean away from it and you start thinking what should i do and it's that habit of hesitating in moments of change that is keeping you stuck we call it procrastination we call it overthinking we call it a lot of things but it's just a habit of pausing and then you trip into patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior that have been holding you back for years i mean people say information is power and based on what you're saying there and i actually agree with this information's not everything is it like we can have the information we can have the knowledge you know knowledge is power it is but it's it's not everything is that you can have the knowledge and not take action i know a lot of really smart people that are miserable yeah i know a ton of people that do nothing but read self-help books or watch videos on youtube about inspiration and do nothing yeah and the reason why is they gather information as a way to feel like you're working on something and learning is a really important thing to do like understanding becoming more self-aware it's critical to you improving your life it's critical to you being happier and more fulfilled if you don't understand yourself and you don't understand the patterns of thinking the patterns of behavior that are keeping you stuck you'll never be able to break them and replace them but you can get yourself comfortable with learning and duping yourself into thinking that somehow being smarter about what you need to do to be healthy will make you healthy that's not true just like reading about launching a business doesn't launch a business and so you know one of the other things that i find to be really interesting and i think this is one of the reasons why um people really resonate with a lot of what i have to say i don't know if it's the dyslexia the adhd what it is but i can't remember a lot of information in terms of a list so if i'm trying to get healthy and you give me 11 things to do i will do none of them if you give me one simple thing that i can grab onto i will likely try it and i think a lot of times what happens for folks is and i know it certainly has happened for me is that even if the information is empowering if it feels complicated i'm not going to do it yeah that's the beauty or one of the beauties i'd say of your approach whether it's in your you know you've written multiple books but the one before this um and including this one the high five habits you know the subtitle i think says all take control of your life with one simple habit and as you talk mel i really i can't tell you how much i connect with what you're saying because it's a it's very similar to the approach i've tried to take with patients for over 20 years now is keep it simple you know what is that one keystone habit that's going to unlock the door to all the o's to all those other habits um before we get into the new book i have a new team member uh-huh and she's a huge fan of yours okay and last night i said to her hey so i've got mel come to the studio she was losing it with excitement and she said mel robbins changed my life if it wasn't for mel i'd still be in a job that was stressing me out so i couldn't stand anymore if it wasn't for male i'd still be on antidepressants if it wasn't for males 54321 rule i wouldn't have pressed send on the application to join your team rongan and she only joined a few weeks ago and that just really hit me at how profound and how life changing your work is because this is one individual who has shared how it's helped her health it's helped her well it's helped her physical health her mental well-being and it's helped her to get a job which as she said to me last night has pushed her out of her comfort zone that she knew she could do but probably wouldn't have had the courage to go for yeah well thank you for sharing that and um there's a couple things that i want to say about that that story does a beautiful job of explaining my mission in the world and that is to uncover simple tools that anybody can use to help them make changes in their life and so the reason why what's her name her name's steph so the reason why steph was so excited and i hear it every day like one of the coolest things uh about you know being on youtube and being on social media and putting work out and speaking on stages around the world is when you have a super simple idea it's so sticky yeah that anybody can share it it sounds kind of stupid that count backwards okay you know you're not going to forget that because it sounds kind of dumb and the idea itself is so simple and so sticky anybody can try it and anybody can share it and oftentimes people don't even know my name they're like oh my gosh you're the five lady or robin you know they like mix like they don't even like they've been watching me and they've and i love that yeah because for me it's about the tools and in steph's case what's super interesting about her excitement because i literally cannot go through a day at this point and have somebody not walk up to me and say you changed my life and i always say the exact same thing when somebody tells me that i say thank you so much for telling me i appreciate you acknowledging me and following me but you deserve the credit because you did the work i just gave you a tool that i happen to discover that helps you move from thinking to doing yeah so she moved herself from thinking about how much she hated her job to 54321 stopping the thinking by counting backwards and pushing herself to move she moved herself from thinking about applying for the dream job of yours and 54321 hitting send she moved herself from thinking about going to the gym to five four three two one cutting the procrastination loop in half and then replacing it with a push to take action and so what's so elegant and simple and empowering about the five-second rule or the high five habit or all the other simplistic stuff that i tend to share with the world because that's the stuff that works for me is that these are all tools that cut through the [ __ ] that's holding you back and it just so happens that your nerdy friend mel has done all the research to be able to explain to you why science and research and decades of psychological academic work actually is encapsulated by counting backwards 54321 or in this particular new brain hack the high five habit how simply high-fiving the human being you see in the mirror every single morning as part of your morning routine will build the habit of self-empowerment self-respect self-worth self-encouragement self-love like this is powerful stuff and it sounds dumb you know like it's like and here's the other thing and you and i were just talking about this i think that that that life is so freaking overwhelming yeah and when your problems seem overwhelming or when that dream job seems impossibly far away we all make this fundamental mistake of believing that because your your problems are so big the solution must be big or because the dream is so far away that the the way that you're gonna get there is so enormous and the fact is it's the exact opposite the exact opposite everybody that when your problems are enormous it is the littlest thing that moves you in a different direction and starts to chip away at it when your dream is enormous it's the littlest thing that gets you moving and when you understand that you can get started towards something by doing the smallest little thing and it'll crack open something inside you and let some light back in that's powerful one of the reasons i think so many people around the world resonate with you is because you have a real knack and making people feel that you get them you get their life and you share a lot of that in the new book the high five habit you share a lot of your own struggles there where things didn't quite go as well as you wanted them to on multiple occasions and when i hear you say that people come up to you on a daily basis i'm interested in how do you really take that feedback and does the mel robbins of 2021 take it in a different way from the mel robbins of let's say 2011 because i get this real impression that you have evolved you are taking your readers with you you've spoken about you know and we'll get to this you've spoken about guilt about shame um you know insecurity jealousy all these things nice stuff that's the nice stuff crying out loud when are we going to talk about the cheating and the anxiety attacks and the the quitting jobs during a panic or the homesickness or the i mean holy drinking myself into a ground anxiety postpartum depression like i mean i have just had a roller i was a very high functioning screwed up human being yeah i think there's a lot of them around i think most people are like i mean you're either i think we're all sort of like finding our way back home to ourselves so so was it as you felt um i guess more secure in who you are in your skin because the reason i'm asking on this i think a lot of people myself included have struggled to take praise in the past and you say all kinds of things to sort of you know battle it off or just you know you take it but you feel a bit uncomfortable maybe with that praise and i'm just interested on a personal level yeah how has that been for you well um was it hard at times i'll tell you when it's hard it's hard when i'm with a friend or when i'm with um like a family member and um i know that it's annoying to somebody else because they see it sort of in the lane of celebrity and it's not a celebrity experience at all i have no interest in being famous i have no interest in being considered a celebrity i personally don't consider myself a celebrity so much so that up until four months ago my freaking home address was on my linkedin account that's how dumb i was about the kind of reach that i have and so um i love those moments and i'll tell you why i don't think those moments are about me at all i see a moment like meeting somebody like steph who walks up and says oh my gosh holy cow i can't believe you're in london because of you i've got this new job and because of you i i stuck to my dieter because of you i i i got control of my anxiety or be and i'm like thank you actually you know you deserve the credit don't give me the credit i just shared with you a couple tools that worked for me you need to keep the credit because you're the one that did the work and so every person like staff that comes up to me or that writes to me or that messages me or that puts something in the comments to me that is evidence that the work that i'm doing in putting up a youtube video is having a real impact on people's lives around the world you know i'll tell you a story where it was a real turning point for me and so it's like this incredible validation that is the source of my drive and it's why i am maniacal about what thou the thumbnail looks like on youtube i'm maniacal about what we're putting up on instagram i microm there is not a caption that goes out that i don't write and we put out 19 pieces of content a day there is not a thing that gets posted that i have not personally signed off on that i haven't looked at the edit that i haven't picked the music that i haven't like literally done everything no i don't i haven't done everything but i i take so much care and intention and what we put out and here's why so we were on vacation in iceland as a family for my dad's i think it was his 75th birthday and we were three hours outside of reykjavik and we stopped at a little ranger station outside of a national park to walk in and go the bathroom and to grab a cup of coffee before we drove into this national park to go hiking in the middle of nowhere and i am wearing a parka with a hood up i have a hat on a little beanie i have my glasses on and my coat zipped up like this and we go walking into the ranger station and my husband chris says hey mel you want a cup of coffee and i say oh yeah i'd love one um i'll take it with cream and sugar and the ranger a woman in her mid-40s all of a sudden looks up and says mel robbins is that you she didn't even see me she heard my voice and i turned and she goes and i'm like hi oh my gosh take my hood off my bean how are you what's your name you know and and she got so overcome and she said i have to tell you you got me through an abusive marriage your videos made me feel like i would be okay if i left your videos gave me tools to find the courage to reach out for help your videos and look i don't feel like i'm responsible for her changing her life i feel like i'm a human being that has had a lot of struggles and because i've met so many other human beings that are trying to change their lives i understand the patterns i understand the holes we dig for ourselves and we fall into i understand all this because it's both a lived experience and because i've literally talked to coached helped uh inspired so many just normal real people going through stuff and you know i also happen to be a trained crisis intervention counselor who worked a domestic violence hotline for four years i happened to have been a public defender that did criminal defense work for people who could not afford attorneys and there's tons of of mental health services and addiction counseling and thing and training that goes along with that and so when i hear that there is a woman in an abusive relationship in the middle of nowhere in iceland who is watching youtube videos as a way to have a lifeline to be able to find the courage to face the things going on in her life and find the strength within herself to be able to take those actions and to hold on to the hope that things are going to be better if she does that to me like we're done here if i were to die on the plane crash home i have lived an extraordinary life because i have helped somebody and so that experience made me go whoa this is so much bigger than a book than a video like i i put so much intention into what we put out because i know there is a human being on the other end of it put it there high five yeah i mean that's such a powerful story and you know i think about that melon i think well your podcast does the same thing you take your expertise your intellectual curiosity your wisdom your humanity and you produce a show where you're putting this out like can you what is the difference for you in terms of going from treating patients in a one-on-one capacity and their families yeah to do to to spreading life-saving life-changing information knowledge empowerment stories yeah to help people it you know i resonate with a lot of what you've been saying it's the most incredible journey that's the most incredible feeling it's it's made me really question what does it mean for me to be a medical doctor in 2021 2022 you know what does it really mean you know medicine like law i'm sure is a very sort of conformist profession and i know like in a conventional let's say national health service primary care clinic i can probably see 40 patients in a day at 10 minute intervals which is suboptimal but we'll leave that for another another conversation this show my books you know all the stuff like you do you know we're reaching with the show if you include youtube close to a million people a week right and i get drowned in messages on instagram or private messages or letters and it's so touching because you realize actually every time you put something out it is reaching a human yes they're hearing it they're changing their perspective on their life and it's impacting yes their health or their relationships and it's incredible and i think what a great age to be alive in because we've now got these mediums where we can do that um i mean what what i hear about you mel which i wish i really love is that so far we've talked about how you've helped a lady who's struggling with domestic violence we talked about one of my team members who you've helped leave a job she wasn't happy in you've helped change her health and get her off medication um yet you're not a doctor and i find that fantastic because i think the majority of what we see now as medical doctors i think 80 to 90 is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles how we're living and we're stressing out and we're overworking and we we get anxious thoughts and we're not you know this is what's driving our real health so the question then i for you is as you say you're not a trained i guess therapist or medical doctor yet you're helping people with their mental physical and emotional health why do you think that is um well you know i think that um there's a couple things one is i do have expertise because my expertise comes from lived experience and from sitting in a therapist's chair getting therapy for five to ten years off and on it comes from taking medication for 25 years it doesn't mean i can prescribe it but it means my life has been saved by it it uh comes from um studying this stuff because what happens when you invent something like the five second rule and perfect strangers start to tell you that they're counting backwards five four three two one just like they saw you doing on youtube mel and it's impacting major issues in their life from losing a hundred plus pounds to staying sober to st we know of 110 people who have stopped themselves from attempting suicide um for me personally i feel a responsibility to understand why something like that works yeah and then when somebody invites you to come to starbucks or jp morgan because they've seen your videos and they want you to come talk about how the five-second rule can help a company change its culture or help a company change or help people who work somewhere be less stressed or more courageous you better be able to show up and explain exactly why counting backwards 54321 can be proven using science and studies and case studies and the examples of real life people around the world and so what was interesting is when i invented the five-second rule and this little technique i was simply a woman who was 40 years old with three kids under the age of 10 who was unemployed 800 000 in debt because my husband and his best friend went into the restaurant business it was fabulous for a while and then it was the restaurant business yeah and like complete morons we had secured everything with everything we owned and so when the things get bad in 2008 and uh the market turns and the housing crisis happens and the restaurants start to go under the liens hit our house we lost everything i mean i i we we didn't go bankrupt i mean just by the grace of god i had such crushing anxiety despite the zoloft i couldn't get out of bed yeah and so the five-second rule whether you call it an act of desperation or divine intervention i think it's divine intervention because it sounds stupid i mean the idea was simply when i wake up that anxiety is so dark and i would lay at the ceiling i would lay in the bed and i would stare at the ceiling and i would think we're going to lose the house and i'm a failure and i hate my husband and nobody can find out and what am i going to do and just like how did my life end up like this and just on and on and on and on and the more i thought the the deeper the hole was i i had this idea that god maybe if i move fast enough yeah when the alarm rang if i got out of the bed fast enough maybe i'd beat the anxiety maybe i wouldn't be in the bed so i decided i'd launch myself out of bed like a rocket that's where the counting backwards came little did i know that when you count backwards you interrupt the habit loops in your basal ganglia and you draw your focus to your prefrontal cortex little did i know this would become one of the most powerful starting rituals in habit research on the planet little did i know that this little brain hack is a form of metacognition that allows you to interrupt any thinking or behavior pattern and give you a moment of what psychologists call objectivity so you can choose what you do next and so you know you see that quote all over instagram right and all over social media you know it's not what happens it's you know how you respond and that's where your power is but if you're a person and life is overwhelming and life is happening you're like life is not happening for me [ __ ] off like what do you what do you mean it's choose how i respond i don't even know i can't even get out of bed like and so the 54321 becomes a how it's the tool you need to cut through the noise and the fear and the anxiety and grab just a moment where you can take control and that's why it works that's why therapists use it around the world that's why it works with reframing triggers associated with pcsd i mean it's just an unbelievably unbelievable it is such a great tool in fact um not only does steph use it who we've already mentioned um i was telling my son about it last night it's only 11. and yeah i often talk to the kids about the podcast i said daddy who you talking to tomorrow so i'm talking to someone called mel robbins and then you know i got them to go and do high five in the mirror i'll tell you about that a little bit later but and then i told him about this five four three two one rule and this morning over breakfast he says daddy actually works i was really tired and you had to get it for school so i said five four three two one got out of beds yeah five four three two one put my school uniform on i was like this is so cool absolutely cool yeah but it's great adults use it you know grown responsible adults young kids are using it as well you can use it in any language any age any education any situation where you're thinking about what you need to do and you've got to 54321 push yourself to do it and um you know i love that you shared it with him i love also this is the other thing that i love about the stuff that that that whatever i've created is that your son can now stick it in his back pocket yeah and if he's sitting in class and um he's wants to share but he starts to doubt himself five four three two one like what he's doing is he's now breaking the habit and the bias of thinking and he's moving across that spectrum toward having a bias of action and of course what we know about confidence is that confidence does not begin with believing in yourself confidence begins with the willingness to try and so the five second rule is so powerful for developing confidence because it's a tool you use to push yourself to try when you're full of doubt and when you try and you raise your hand in class or you speak up more at work or you ask for the raise or you hit send on the email when you try you might fail but you gain a little competency and that competency makes you a little bit more willing to try next time and so that's where this competence competency habit loop comes in and the the the linchpin to it is now you've got a tool 54321 to push yourself to say all right i'm in i'm going to try i'm bad on myself it is just so simple yet so effective and i love the way you come up with these things and your expertise initially comes from your lived experience right your struggles how do i overcome myself that didn't work ah that's a bit but oh man this tool really works okay let me share it oh man people are sharing that back with me this is working and then you go and figure out the science yeah which i really find i love that i love that sort of approach i i think i heard someone say once that the word for experience and experiments in all languages which come from latin except english is the same experience experiments really i didn't know that this is what i've heard like i'm not a linguist who would know that for sure but i find that really interesting because you are literally creating the evidence through your experience through sharing it people are coming back to you right this is not a study in a lab but it's kind of a study in the in the real lab of life that works you know it's so interesting that we're going here because you know i personally do believe in experts and i believe in credentials and i think that it is important that there are controls that you know you need to be a medical doctor to prescribe medicine you know i do i think that there needs to be innovation everywhere of course i'm super excited about all the plant-based medicines but i also feel like they need some serious controls yeah uh in place that you can't just in my opinion um i think it can be terrifying to think of somebody with a lifetime of trauma who is not in the hands of a medical expert when they're trying some of these new therapies um i personally have tried them uh in you know with medical experts and they've been life-changing for trauma but i worry about people kind of road tripping on this stuff and so i do believe in expertise and i do believe in making sure that there are studies and that there's safety protocols and that experts are respected and so i think that's important but i think what you're saying is we have come to a point in our society where it is important to expand the categories of what we deem to be expertise so for example there is traditional medicine right the md my dad happens to be a d.o which when he was a do way more kind of poo poo'd on because it's a little bit more holistic in terms of the training but he's an orthopedic surgeon for people in the uk that's osteopath yeah he's an osteopath uh who was an orthopedic surgeon in the united states and you know now let's take a look at the fact that what clearly needs to happen in the medical um field is a way more holistic approach and a focus on the whole person and health rather than treating illness and there's so many different ways to treat things rather than just prescription drugs and so people's expertise in these areas super important to recognize it in new ways super important to you know really make sure it's safe in new ways and what kind of frustrates me at times is because the two letters after my name are jd juris doctor i'm a trained lawyer right but they're not md or they're not m.a or they're not the social work degree even though i have been studying this for 10 years and i have clinicians using what i'm talking about and i have an i had an entire wing of uh nurses from an inpatient psychiatric ward in philadelphia come to my daytime talk show and they told me aside from prescription medication the one tool that they can give somebody when they leave an inpatient commitment for suicidal ideation severe depression the one tool that really works is the five second rule because it's simple and somebody in crisis can remember it and it works and yet nobody recognizes me as an expert in mental health people call me a motivational speaker they'll call me you know whatever she's at this she's at that and the fact is i have you know with with the high five habit that was a year-long research project yeah we have a um a a study that we've done it's called the high five challenge we've had 137 000 people from 91 countries take a five-day challenge online fully monitored that we have created in the last 32 days that many people have rolled through this thing and not one person has reported that they did not experience positive change now is that an academic study probably not but it's good enough for me and so it's interesting because i often find that you know i i was really flattered when you invited me on because you are a doctor yeah and it's taken a while for people to realize because i think a lot of people hear five second rule or the high five happen they're like oh god and the truth is there is so much yeah freaking research and evidence there isn't you put that in all your books and the new one is full of references at the back full of the evidence and then the point i'm trying to make is you should be seen in the same way as you know people with the right letters after their name i'm not saying we don't need experts we do need experts but also we need to broaden out our definition of experts and expertise and also the point i'm trying to get at is that i think sometimes we we outsource expertise so much to others we sort of lose confidence in our own expertise and our own ability to try some of these tours i mean i will be using that 54321 rule with my patients now like i can already think of four or five people that come to mind straight away i think you know what i think next time i see them i'm going to mention this because i think it would really help them yeah and that's what it's about right because a lot of one of the big problems with science is that the way that science has communicated often is very dry to the public you know so what's the what so let's say there's a paper that says that you know there's a paper which says this diet or this technique is really good for your mental health right a lot of the time the way that's communicated with the lay public it's done in very scientific terms they're talking down and you're communicating powerful ideas that work in a way that people see i think people see you as their friend they think oh mel that's kind of like well i'm shoulder-to-shoulder yes a thousand percent so think about it that's why they take the advice and that's why they give you this love because they are peers off yours yes and you are their guide and their their their friend but by the way i'm learning just as much from everybody that writes to me as they are for me yeah because when people share their stories about why they've been struggling how something worked what didn't work how they tweaked it for example yeah um and i can tell you a story about that with the high five habit how one person's story about the high five habit and their experience with it blew open a whole lane around um sort of shame and judgment and we can come back let's get started why don't we why don't you explain what is the high five habit sure sure because i'd love to hear about those sort of experiences yeah so you know in its simplest terms i'm on a mission to get every human being in the world to add one simple thing to their morning routine and it is called the high five habit and here's what it is every morning after you brush your teeth and you get that gunk out of your mouth so you're not spreading that nasty breath everywhere okay i want you to take a moment put your toothbrush down and look at the human being in the mirror that's not your reflection that is a human being who needs you a human being who's beaten down who feels forgotten who is so sick and tired of your criticism and i want you to just stand there and look at them and take a moment because the rest of your day is going to be about everybody else and then i don't want you to say a thing this is the genius of this habit you can be on your lowest morning which i was when i again divine intervention or stupidity you can be the judge right it was april 2020 and i was uh having a moment in my life where i just felt overwhelmed by life i was waking up the anxiety had come back i felt like life was unfair i had lost my dream job we were in the middle of the pandemic my kids were in a state of huge grief and anger and frustration because university you know had closed and you know now they're dealing with it um i had a bunch of speed like all of a sudden my business is imploding and you know don't forget just over 10 years ago i was in a crisis financially where my husband and i were about to lose every we couldn't even pay for groceries my dad was lending us money yeah and so it was triggering all of that and i was thinking this like what the i've worked so hard i'm a good person like i'm how could you be doing this to me like i don't deserve like just and you you were pretty successful at that point already right not successful i was the number one motivational female motivational speaker in the world i had a daytime syndicated talk show in the united states so 175 shows a year giving advice i um you know had the five-second rule book which was self-published and a huge millions of copies sold um but i think that's the powerful thing about this story even with all that success you were still wracked with self-doubt and anxiety and negative thoughts because i hadn't had the biggest breakthrough of my entire life yet and i had it one morning in april of 2020. you see the five second rule is extraordinary but it doesn't address what i believe is everybody's fundamental issue and everybody's fundamental issue is that you either hate yourself or you do nothing but judge yourself and this habit of relentless self-criticism and relentless self-rejection is the reason why you're unhappy it's the reason why you're never satisfied it's the reason why you can't take a compliment and why you're uncomfortable feeling celebrated and it all comes down to the fact that when you stand in front of the mirror every single morning you have this really subtle way that's not so subtle of starting your day by rejecting yourself and i'm gonna unpack this because it's unbelievably powerful when you start to truly understand this because if you can't look in the mirror and authentically see a human being that you respect that you encourage that you like that you're cheering for i'm gonna even leave love off the table because i think that is so unattainable for where people are right now let's just go with can you accept yourself can you like yourself can you see a person that's worthy of support worthy of your encouragement can we just start with that baseline because for my research the average person cannot from my research 50 percent of men and women do not or cannot look at themselves in the mirror because they are either disgusted by the person they see or they are disappointed by them and for those of us that can look in the mirror we're still rejecting ourselves because we focus on what we don't like or we start to mindlessly think about all the things that we haven't done right or that we didn't do yet you know on this particular morning april 2020 i'm overwhelmed by my life i drag myself into the bathroom i immediately see my reflection and i'm like oh god you look like hell yeah i start ticking off all the things the saggy neck one boob lower than the other like you know how exhausted i look the gray hair coming in how old i'm starting to seem and then the mind once it goes negative keeps going in that direction unless you're five four three two one not thinking about that but so my mind's like going down the drain i'm like why'd i get up so late i got a zoom call in eight minutes god he didn't even you know text him back yet and the dog still needs to be and i'm like the beat down boom boom boom starts and you know i don't know what came over me but that morning standing there yeah could not think of his thing to say and here's the important part when you feel like [ __ ] when you're overwhelmed by your life you're not gonna believe a pep talk anyway because it doesn't match how you feel and so for whatever reason i literally just raised my hand and i high-fived the woman that i saw in the mirror because she looked like she needed a high-five she looked like she needed somebody to say it's gonna be okay you can do this get out there and you know from that very first one you know it wasn't like lightning came crashing through the ceiling and you know stuck me in the head that's not what happened but there's definitely a switch inside each and every one of us yeah so like think about the walls here yeah even when the lights are off there's electricity in these walls even during your worst moments there is vitality ripping through your veins there is an electrical life force within you and life can turn that switch off but it's still there there was something about this high five action that felt like a flip like the switch flipped on and all of a sudden the energy could connect back and something inside me turned on now that first morning i didn't go yeah like that's not what happened i just felt this sort of shift from to all right you got a roof over your head you know your your family's healthy you've you've saved money it's not that bad yeah get out there like i didn't even think those things it was more like the electricity the the energy in me this vitality kind of kicked in but it was the second morning where the profound nature of what i was stepping into really kicked in so i wake up anxiety ankles right up the legs feel like the rush of oh god something's wrong five four three two one get out of bed i start walking to the bathroom and it's as i'm walking to the bathroom i'm not even in there yet that i feel something i have never felt in my entire adult life and it's this you know when you're about to go to a um cafe and you're going to meet somebody you're really excited to meet right or somebody you really love you're not going to see them yeah what do you feel right as you're about to walk in the cafe you're excited you're you're upbeat you know you're anticipating something good happening yeah i actually realized i was feeling that way about seeing myself yeah now i'm 53 this year i don't think until that morning in april 2020 i had ever had an experience as an adult of being excited to see the human being mel robbins i've been excited to see an outfit or a haircut or the way new eye shadow might look but the human being the way our kids when they're really really little just love the sight of themselves this unconditional support and celebration that's hardwired in your dna when you're born and so as i rounded the corner that second morning that's when the profound nature of this started to really hit me and i stood there and i stared at the woman in the mirror and i realized i don't think i've ever asked myself the question what does she need for me today i have never joined in partnership with myself i have been so busy trying to get [ __ ] done trying to make sure people like me trying to make sure the bills are paid trying to make sure everybody else is okay trying to do all this stuff that is the stuff of our lives that i have forgotten about the most important person and that is myself and again i'm going to go back to a point that that you know we have been talking about kind of in various ways which is we all know that we're supposed to love ourselves we all know that we're supposed to be kind to ourselves you can read a quote on instagram instagram you should talk to yourself like your best friend the problem is how you know you read a quote like that you're like no [ __ ] sherlock how do i do it i mean like what seriously right how do you do that i don't know i've been beating the [ __ ] out of myself for years how do i stop doing it i don't know and you know here's the thing like logically we know it's stupid because if beating yourself up being hard on yourself rejecting yourself trashing yourself if it actually worked we'd all be millionaires we'd have rockstar bodies we'd have the best marriages on the planet we'd never have to work a day in our life we'd be on a beach some like it would work yeah but instead we have these patterns of thinking and small patterns of behavior like not looking in the mirror at yourself is a form of rejecting yourself picking yourself apart is a habit of rejecting yourself and so when you start your day like that which you do and then you go out into the world having rejected your very being this is the reason why you are so thirsty for everybody else's validation this is the reason why you are seeking your worth in the money that you make in the car that you drive in the the downloads that you get in the likes that you have in the neighborhood that you live in you think your worth is outside of you and i'm here to tell you the secret to your [ __ ] life is grab that worth and bring it back home start practicing a physical habit an action that demonstrates to your brain that you respect yourself that you believe that you're worthy that you deserve forgiveness that you deserve encouragement that you believe in you and as you start to practice the physical action the universal symbol for i got you i love you i celebrate you i see you i believe in you when you practice this physical action the neuro association that is already in your brain with the high five to yourself in the mirror takes over it's insane how this works the science is mind-blowing i think this is a thousand times more powerful than that high five habit because it cuts down to the core of who you are you think you think it's more powerful than the five four three two one however well yes hell yes because the five four three two one is a tool that will push you to take action 54321 is a tool you use to cut off the worries that trigger anxiety 54321 is a tool that you use to create a moment of objectivity and control when you're normally triggered so you can consciously choose a different response yeah the high five habit goes all the way down to the core of who you are and how you treat yourself and when you become a human being who has compassion for yourself who likes you it won't matter what happens out there yeah because everything in here is healed and taken care of and so like you know somebody can say to me i don't love you anymore i don't like you it'll sting but it doesn't change the fact that i still like myself because i practice and demonstrate it that's the difference yeah and that's i think the hidden magic in the high five habits is because i've been trying it the last few days right yeah and what did you experience it it is powerful because well walk us through like you're standing at your bathroom sink and walk us through your experience well first of all you have to take a pause from your life whatever you were going to do it requires an intentional pause to go no i'm going to now do this action for myself and i've got to say before i tell you how it went i think it would have been very different for me a few years ago because i feel self-compassion you know not seeking your worth from outside from other people from download numbers likes what people say about you which was a huge part of my life i feel that having put a lot of that to bed now and really feeling that i actually like the person i see in the mirror these days so i kind of feel five years ago i would have had a different experience with it but it was still powerful because you are just looking at yourself and you're you're putting your hand on the mirror and i think what it is it's just that pause that moment of seeing me like you are seeing yourself and like i don't know you know obviously as a guy what do we do we often looking in the mirror um we might be looking at our beard as we're shaving right but you're not looking at your eyes right you're just looking at oh i need to shave oh i missed a bit here let me get rid of that and then you crack on right or you you look at your face and your hair but you're not really looking at yourself right you you're seeing your silhouette you're you are seeing yourself but you're not seeing yourself if that makes sense yeah and that's what i think was really powerful was that it's just another like i feel it's just another tool now which is gonna take me all off two seconds if that's five seconds tops it's not as if i don't have time to add that in there's no harm in adding it in and frankly i like adding it in it makes me feel good it's like oh and i think that's what you say it's the action yeah you don't have to say anything if you're not in the mood i don't want you to say anything actually and the reason why is the neuro association so um what do you mean by that well here's what i mean by that so um when you high-five someone else what does the action of a high-five communicate it's it's just a universal symbol of um you got this i see you you're great we can do this you know it depends on the situation but it's it's a good feeling it's a mutual sort of validation type experience what did they what tell me about the london marathon and getting high fives oh i mean what did a stranger's high five mean to you it just gave you like and that's the key to strangers right you don't know them and they're looking at you and you're looking at that oh you don't even maybe you're not even looking at them you just went through you give it a high five it's it's like you've taken a shot of feel good um it's validation it's like hey you know what we're in this together um you're standing at the side cheering i'm running but at that moment it was like common humanity it was like there was no animosity and actually it's kind of one of my big learnings from the learn the marathon actually was and it relates to this i think is that that's kind of who we are like in in what is considered a very divided world at the moment i went into the london marathon and all i saw was love strangers giving love to other people that they didn't know right and how did they get that love through cheering but more often than not with a high five correct it is a universal symbol of encouragement of love of celebration and the neuro association whether you live in a culture where you've been high-fived or not the neuro association is still there because you have seen them in sport yeah you've seen them in marathons you've seen teachers give them to kids so your brain has a lifetime of programming in your subconscious that is triggered by this action it is neurologically impossible to high-five yourself and think you're a loser you failed i don't like your face your brain will not allow you to do it because the neuro association is so entrenched it has only ever meant i celebrate you i see you i got you keep going you got this i'm behind you you know as you say that mel it makes you think of gratitude because when we are feeling grateful we can't feel down we can't feel anxious we can't feel annoyed with ourselves and in some ways this is kind of gratitude for ourselves correct because the thing about gratitude which obviously has tremendous demonstrated proven benefits in your life most of us are grateful for things outside of us yeah what i'm teaching the world to do is to unlock neural association in your mind and in your nervous system and aim it back at yourself and use this simple habit to interrupt the critic to break the default loops in your mind associated with judgment shame criticism hatred for self and to replace it with a new default setting of seeing yourself the way you see your child which is love like my kids do stuff that piss me off all the time and i can be upset with them or disappointed with them but i never stopped loving them yeah and there is something that has happened to each and every one of us that is life's pains and heartaches and disappointments and setbacks sort of stack up we stop loving ourselves we start judging ourselves more we start condemning ourselves more we start rejecting ourselves more we start trying to seek somebody else's love and approval in order to fill up this well inside of us that we've been digging because we've been rejecting ourselves and so you know it's so powerful because the action alone is what communicates it if you're looking at yourself and you raise your hand on your hardest days what the high five says is not yeah i'm amazing like this is not going to turn you into a narcissist this is grounded in compassion yeah this is basically saying i see you you're right this is hard and you know what you can do this and i'm going to be here and i've got your back and when you send yourself into your day with that physical action it leaves an imprint in your mind and spirit now there's a couple reasons why i don't even write about this part in the book because i didn't know this until i started doing podcasts for the book yeah so dr eamon told me who's you know one of the leading experts in the brain that one of the reasons why you feel better when you do it no matter how terrible of a morning it is is because your brain has always given you dopamine when somebody else high-fives you yeah so these sorts of gestures are rewarded in the brain so when you simply high-five yourself your brain doesn't distinguish between me high-fiving me and me high-fiving you it just sees oh i know what that is dopamine oh i believe in that person the second thing that happens is that your body is hardwired for celebratory energy this is that electricity that's in the walls that has a switch that you can turn on and off and so you know for example if you when you cross the finish line of the london marathon what do you instinctively do high five someone yeah and raise your hands right when your favorite team scores raise your hands when you yell surprised at a birthday party you raise your hands when you say hello you raise your arm when you go to high five somebody raise your arms and you hug somebody you raise your arms this is wired through your entire body and normally we give that celebratory energy to other people or things i'm here to tell you when you high-five yourself you flip the switch you flip the switch and give yourself a little bit of that vitality that's coursing through you to help you move into your day yeah i see it as [Music] um almost like it is about the high five but it's not in many ways as well because it's like if you're going down a road and the high five to yourself sets you off on a different path for the rest of that day compared to had you not done it right a thousand percent right so let's just use a great example that everybody can can latch on to sport yeah so if a team is about to play the championship in the league right yeah and they're the underdogs what is the best way to send the team into that game is it to be to beat them down oh you did a terrible job on the london marathon you're gonna face plant new york oh my god and i saw your split times we're [ __ ] no that's not the best way to do it but that's what we do to ourselves correct correct and so i'm here to say you don't have to say anything because you're not going to believe it so we're going to cheat this we're going to circuit your feelings by passing correct words it's like when you take like this ridiculous example but it's like when you um you take a b12 supplement but you take it sublingually so it dissolves so you bypass having to go into the gut through the liver and then insulin you get it straight in correct and it's kind of it's got that feels to me a thousand percent and so you send yourself into the game of life with that sort of optimism with that resilience with that compassion and you know look some days you're gonna laugh some days you might cry uh people report some days you're gonna just feel a little bit better and some days you're gonna high-five yourself and laugh out loud from the dopamine and walk into your boss's office and ask for that raise or quit because you're going to remember that no matter what you're going to be okay you're going to remember that no matter what you got your own back you're going to remember that it doesn't matter if nobody says great job at that presentation that you worked on because you can walk into the bathroom as people have written to us having practiced this hey i did a presentation at work nobody said a damn word the old me would have walked into my cube and cried and thought i was getting fired i knew i did a good job i walked into the bathroom and high five myself your kids can stick this in their back pocket and it's a way to reset yourself when you start going down that negative road and why is this important it's important because the high five is not going to remove poverty it's not going to remove discrimination it's not going to remove diabetes it's not going to remove the fact that somebody just said they want to divorce you it's not going to remove all of the trauma it doesn't change those things it changes you yeah and it changes your relationship with yourself and your ability to believe that through your actions and your attitude you can move the needle on those things yeah i i i love that last point mel because the similarities between the way you talk about this and the way i've been talking about certain behaviors and five-minute habits for years they are so connected and one of the things i often say and i want to just acknowledge you for what you just said it's it's not going to change your life situation you know if you're if you're in poverty you're still going to be in poverty but you're going to be a different person you're going to be better able to face the stresses that are in your life and i think this is such an important point right because i have said this before on the show but but i always think it's worth reiterating that a lot of people feel that self-help or wellness is the preserve of the wealthy in the middle classes but actually habits like this yes they'll help someone who's got a ton of money in their bank accounts because a lot of people like that are are racked with self-doubt on the inside as well but it's also going to help someone who isn't poverty or a single mom who's working two jobs and has got three kids and is really struggling that little micro moments each morning where she sees herself in the mirror she signals to her brain that she is worthy that actually she's a human being with real feelings and for all her qualities and all her you know all the great things that she's doing that has power right now it is free there's not a single person pretty much who is listening to this or watching this right now who couldn't just either pause or at the ankle all right let me i'm convinced smell like come on i'm gonna give this a go i'm gonna give this a go well first of all don't rush it don't rush it so don't go into the bathroom and slap the mirror like i didn't do anything um i want you to again as you so rightly put take a minute and just look at yourself because for most people that's the hardest part i mentioned that you know i get smarter and i learn so much from every comment and people that write their stories in and one person uh alison bird a friend of mine who made my ability to explain the depth of this so much deeper because she said one thing to me when she tried it before the book came out she said you know i think it's working i kind of feel i feel energized i said but you know what surprised him i said what she goes the resistance i said the resistance what are you talking about she's like oh first couple days i did this i stood in front of that mirror and i there was something in me that's like i didn't i couldn't even raise my hand there was this resistance and so i'm like oh that's interesting and so i of course put something out hey to the 700 000 people on the newsletter list anybody trying this and feel any resistance we write to everybody that's in our little test group anybody feel holy cow there it turns out that most people do not have an immediate positive oh i'm doing this reaction most people have massive resistance to even trying it and i want to explain why because this is extraordinarily sad and it also is an enormous opportunity for growth because i believe based on having a hundred and thirty six thousand people go through a five day challenge online that we're monitoring in an app from 91 countries and seeing what they're reporting i know that this takes five days to work five days before you have an enormous breakthrough in how you see and relate to yourself five days before the chemical physiological neurological physical and psychological change starts to go holy cow this is crazy this works like this and so the resistance comes from self-judgment and self-condemnation and i'm going to tell you a story to drive this home for people who [Music] stand in the bathroom mirror when they try the high five habit and they feel this resistance in their body first of all let me say it's really normal to think this is weird because it is okay it just sounds so cheesy i for those of us that grew up with saturday night live you're gonna think of stuart smiley you know i'm nice people like me that skit they used to do about the guy who talked to himself in the mirror you're gonna stand there go seriously dr charlie and mel robbins you two have lost your mind but okay if it's weird as you do it that's a sign it's working yeah so dr leaf told me oh well that's what it feels like when a new neural pathway's getting plowed so if it feels we're good because we're teaching you to do the opposite of criticizing yourself but the resistance is something else the resistance is the fact that every morning as you start your day you drag your entire past into the bathroom with you and if you're somebody who has experienced trauma or been abused or abandoned or neglected or grew up with chaos and addiction or you've been the victim of a crime or you're constantly having to deal with discrimination or violence all stuff that you're not responsible for there are a lot of people who take all of that from their past and when they look at themselves they see somebody who's damaged they see somebody who's unworthy they see somebody who is unlovable because of those things and what the high five starts to become when you do it is it becomes literally an act of defiance it becomes an act of strength it becomes a sign that i'm a survivor it becomes permission to heal it becomes this deep sense of feeling and knowing where you are and the fact that you have an extraordinary future despite all of the pain and suffering that you have endured and survived and then there are people that bring everything they regret all the shame all the regret all that so the cheating the lying the stealing the hurt you've caused yourself for other people the missed opportunities and boy did i get an unbelievable example of this in my own life so you know i was doing the high five habit myself and during the early days of the pandemic my husband had just been diagnosed with depression and he's a super healthy guy he is a certified buddhist meditation instructor he leads men's retreats called soul degree he's a yoga instructor he's wildly involved with our community and with our family he's a super high functioning guy but it's just he's just felt heavy he's there's been like a cloud there like a heaviness to him like no there's no light between his eyes and so thankfully you know his therapist uh finally got him to go see a psychopharmacologist and somebody to do the advanced testing they're like dude you have dysthymia you have like really long-term depression like you're lucky you've been doing all this stuff because it's kept you alive and you know i turned to him at one point i've been doing this for a couple days or a couple weeks rather and i'm like you know i know i'm not your doctor and i know i'm not an expert in your mental health but i really think you should try this high five thing i really think it's gonna help you with this depression he's like i'm not high five it is the stupidest thing i don't care what you're doing no and i'm like okay if you won't do it for yourself would you just do it for me would you do it for five days because we're in the middle of researching this now and i like i i haven't even shared it with my audience yet and i'm kind of like writing down in my journal what i'm feeling and i've got a couple people on the team would you just do it for me he's like all right so he kind of did the first one like are you happy you know typical spouse thing so he did it for five days and then i asked him what he thought and he said you're on to something really big and i said why do you say that and um i had no idea how dark my husband's thoughts were i had no idea how much he was condemning himself how much shame he felt um i knew that he was struggling with depression i had no idea that for the past seven years the man who has stood next to me at the bathroom sink next to me would look up at the mirror and see a person that he hated he saw a person that had failed he believed that since the restaurant business didn't work and since it left us 800 grand in debt and that his wife had to go out and make the money that he was the world's worst father the world's worst husband and he has been condemning himself every day for seven years and the reason he thought the high five was stupid is because you only high five people you care about you only high five people who are winning and he of all people didn't deserve it and for me you know i knew that he was struggling with shame around the restaurant business i knew he was struggling with the amount of debt that we had and the fact that you know he had you know that investors lost money like for me i had a totally different experience i'm like you guys worked at that for eight years you made your investors hole like you know like hello entrepreneurship like you know we wouldn't have the five second rule without it are you kidding like we're winning this is amazing like i didn't his business partner had the same like he was proud of what they built proud of how hard they were chris for whatever reason that was not his story his story was condemnation regret shame he could only see a failure and you know what was wild about that is you know i've for years talked chris up i've for years to have told him how proud i am of him i you know he's he was the cfo of the business as my company as the company was taking off like he owns half of it like he's an integral part of everything yeah he doesn't see it that way and that's an important part nobody can heal you nobody can change how you talk to yourself this is an inside job and so if you relate to how my husband feels i want you to understand that what chris said to me was that this high five and pushing through the resistance is an act of forgiveness it's an act of healing it's an act of support and compassion that allows you and shows you that you are giving yourself permission to feel good again that you deserve to be happy that you deserve and that you can continue to push on and go do better and be better and feel better and that of all people you're gonna stop judging you that's the hidden power because you had said to him you're great he was in your company our company yeah exactly working um seeing the the success loving wife loving kids but it didn't matter because that can only take you so far if the voice and the narrative that's playing in your own heads is negative for many people it doesn't matter what the world around is telling them they're not telling it to themselves and therefore the high five habits it kind of breaks that even if it's just for 20 or 30 seconds it is still that micro moment of compassion of companionship yes right companionship with yourself forgiveness like all of it all the stuff that we know we need to do but we don't know how yeah because all we see is this the stuff we regret and so you weigh that in your mind and you start thinking about it and and this what i love about this is not only the science which is just like and it's all there in the book oh yeah you can understand that but i think the more powerful thing is that it's a simple action and so let's go a layer deeper because the other thing that's happening is we can we can dip into behavioral activation therapy so behavioral activation therapy which as you know is just as effective and in in some cases more effective than than cognitive behavioral therapy behavioral activation therapy can be boiled down to simply this act like the person you want to become this is very different by the way than fake it till you make it act like what you act like the person you want to become is set an intention for the person you want to become like you want to become a marathon runner you need to start acting like one you better buy some trainers you better schedule some time with your wife to be able to go on a training run you better watch some videos about how you taper up to the race you better talk different you better start acting like one and so when you start to raise your hand and high five the human being in the mirror you are acting like a person who cares about themselves you're acting like a person who cheers for themselves you're acting like a person who cares empowers respects believes they're worthy and your brain is watching and so over time as you repeat this your the structure in your brain starts to change in relation to how you feel about yourself you stop thinking believe it or not about the failed restaurant and you start remembering that you join in companionship and support in cheering this person forward it's brilliant it's like unbelievable yeah it really is right because the research on self-compassion is just overwhelming i don't know if you know the uk study yeah but also do you know professor kristen neff um i don't she's you would love her work um and she has been studying this for about 20 years or so and she came on the show and she was talking about how the research shows that people who are compassionate to themselves they're healthier they're happier they're more productive you know it's it's not the narrative that we think we have to beat ourselves up and when we beat ourselves up that motivates us to take action um although i think this is a interesting point right because if i look at email yeah and i've been researching you for the past two days i've been this morning i watched your ted talk uh do you know that's like a 21 minute long panic attack i do because i heard you talk about that and i want to address that a little bit because i think it's interesting so you do a ted talk that certainly was uploaded in 2011 and is close to 30 million views now right so one of the most watched ted talks of all time i would imagine probably top ten yeah i think it's top 20 anyway wait maybe longer i don't know okay so you you know the outside world much of society would look at that go and melroms is crushing it she has just nailed a ted talk and it's gone viral now you're saying that you had a panic attack the whole time right so let's just think for a minute you're getting the external success but inside you are eating yourself up with worry right then we fast forward let's say nine ten years uh-huh april 2020 you are successful speaker motivational coach you know best-selling uh author and you're struggling with self-doubt in front of the mirror so is there this slight clash here somewhere where actually you can be successful and not love yourself and be racked with i think everybody is yeah i don't success is not the source of self-love in fact most people who are successful or competitive or entrepreneurs most people are chasing that success because they have married their self-worth with achievement and i was the same yeah and so right there me too and so this is by the way evidence that you have a problem with self-rejection and with self-worth and with self-criticism because you believe you are only worthy of love and you are only worthy of support if you have achieved the thing so someone's looking at you and thinking man i wish i was mel robbins right we'll talk about jealousy if we get to it later but they might be jealous of you in a nice way they might think man i wish i had a viral ted talk right now i wish i had multiple international best sellers great write them right great apply for one you can do it if i can freaking do it you can do it but they might also be thinking well that is that is success you've had that even though you were wracked with these problems on the inside yeah and they may think we know i'll take that i'll take that success um and i think this comes to this widely societal point which is we confuse sometimes success with happiness when you anchor your happiness to doing things it's always out of your control when you anchor success to the crap you achieve it is always a moving target yeah and so you know i it's it's a really hard concept to wrap your brain around because first of all there's the research that shows at least in western countries that you know there's the baseline with money 75 grand is the baseline that when somebody makes 75 grand or more there's this happiness thing that i can't remember how the exact study goes but it makes a lot of sense because as somebody who could not pay groceries with three kids as somebody who had liens on her house as somebody who is getting the bankruptcy letters in the mail has somebody who is unemployed during this whole thing and whose husband was bouncing the payroll checks and was running from one restaurant to the other to hide from the collectors that were showing up i know what it's like to live with the continent constant relentless pressure that comes from having no money yeah and until you can get yourself to a state where you can take a deep breath and you can pay the bill yeah and you can buy some groceries and you can put some gas in the car and the phone rings and it's not a collector you are going to live a stressed out life because your basic needs are under threat yeah and that is a horrendously triggering thing to live through and we lived through it for several years it was like that yeah and so um you know there is a certain level of economic stability that has a direct impact on your happiness on your safety as a person and your ability to experience less stress so i just wanted to be you know responsible about that because i've freaking lived it and um but i do think that you know look i used the five-second rule i certainly have found my calling i love building stuff i'm incredible as a businesswoman i um love the game of making money i love being smart in deal making i love content syndication i'm super excited for nfts and for how blockchain is going to change the role of being a creator and so there's a part of this that's a real expression for me in terms of building a business and the five second rule helped me take action and the five second rule made me very productive and the five second rule had me go no i don't want to do a talk show no i don't want to do talk [ __ ] no i do not want to do a talk show why are we still talk like i just oh and you know this is interesting when you say no people want you more i wish i knew that a long time ago but so i for sure use the five second rule to push myself to take the actions that have made me wildly successful but that doesn't change the fact that i would look in the mirror and still see a person that i didn't like and that as soon as the five-second rule book came out like i'll give you an example so i write the high five habit book i'm practicing these tools and i am also human so when we get word two weeks before the book comes out that the big box stores like target and walmart in the united states are passing on my book because i'm not a known author i get triggered i punch the wall i porridge in martini light up a joint i call a bunch of friends and [ __ ] up a storm i am literally reliving being left out at a sleepover in middle school i've got this gigantic ridiculous story that you know it's you know i'm always left out i'm never part of the group like there's this group of like real authors that are all friends that all permit like you know i like have the whole thing i'm human put the record out just press play yes yes exactly i tend to be like angry depressed kind of person you know like yeah yeah like breaking stuff and then i wake up in the morning and i drag myself into the bathroom and i look at myself in the mirror and i have compassion i'm like you're right that sucks you are a known author you deserve to have your work be in places where people can find it it doesn't feel fair and you know what you're gonna be okay and so the high five becomes this it's like a it's like a life jacket in the waves of life that keeps you above these waves so that they yeah they knock you over they tumble you around but then you climb back up you reassure yourself and i have this thing that is embodied in the high five so the high five is also a wildly realistic optimistic mindset so part of what i am constantly doing and i do this as a mother too so we have a 23 year old a 21 year old and a 16 year old and every day in everybody's life there is stuff that happens that sucks there are friends that go out to lunch that don't invite you there are people that tell you no there are schools you don't get into their apartments that somebody else gets there's boyfriends and girlfriends that break up with you there are people that have cooler clothes and nicer cars and parents who throw the parties and you know like it just there's always going to be something that makes you feel like life is out to get you things aren't fair people don't like you it's just like a tweak right it's triggering your insecurity and i have this saying that i developed that again it embodies this high five which for me also having run a marathon the only reason why i made it across that finish line is because every stranger's high five said i believe you can keep going that's what the high five said to me i see you mel i see that you're limping keep going girl like and so my mindset whenever i'm working for something and i don't get it and i feel the sting of rejection or disappointment i always say to myself and i say i say this to my kids on repeat too i say look when you work hard you're going to be rewarded you have to believe that this moment is preparing you for something better that you didn't get this thing because something better is coming and you know so there have been a couple of those like for example the high five habit audiobook is unreal i mean i record it it is the number one selling audiobook on all of audible ever since it's been out in terms of the number of downloads in one month like it's just destroying it and i know you don't like that word but it is destroying audiobook it has been reported in the ap it has been reported in all these places it is in the charts number one and we are destroying it on the amazon charts because people are reading it and loving it and sharing and i freaking love it because it tells me like the you know that the tool is spreading yeah because my books like your books are just vehicles for ideas to get out so then people can talk about them and obviously i put all this stuff online for free anyway so if you can't afford the book you're listening to this podcast like you're gonna get but so the new york times puts out a um uh a monthly audiobook list i self-published the audiobook and in the back of my mind i was saying don't get your hopes up mel don't get your hopes up you're not a publisher you're a self-published author they're very fancy over there and so the audiobook list came out for the month of october i clearly destroyed it like i'm clearly the audiobook we don't even make it like a complete and utter intentional snub that was another night where i punched a wall and drank a couple martinis and lit up a joint and called a bunch of friends and felt really sorry for myself and the next morning i literally high-fived myself in the mirror it took about four mornings of high-fiving myself to get over that sting because it felt personal but i kept saying something better is coming something better is coming do you know i figured out the better thing that's coming well first of all sales actual sales are better than a list so let's just get that straight but i'm human you know we all want to be recognized i was in the new york times crossword puzzle today today yes isn't that not crazy i literally it is the coolest thing that's cooler than being a new york times best seller i reckon don't you think yeah i think it is so it's a smaller club i'm literally getting off the train and my text messages are blowing up from mates from the united states and they've screenshot this and it says literally a three word down on the new york times and it said um motivational speaker robbins and it was me and you know what it was that that that made me so just blown away is that i underestimate the fact that people know who i am i think that i am a person who [Music] has really screwed up a lot and for a very long time i have lived inside a body that was wracked with anxiety and fight or flight and doubt and judgment and it has been really hard to live in this body yes i've been high functioning yes i have still gotten okay grades i've gone to great schools i've had friends i've been married for 25 years but it has been a real [ __ ] to live with this much unedgedness this much stress this much self-imposed condemnation this constant relentless drumbeat of what's wrong and someone's mad at me and i've screwed up again and just constantly feeling like nobody likes me and i can never do it right and it's all never going to work and just this just this grinding feeling that when i finally started to attack the anxiety and understand it when i finally started dealing with the childhood trauma that created a dysregulated nervous system in the first place when i finally understood what was going on and came face to face with the woman in the mirror and i started getting help and finding a new way because i didn't want to continue living a life where i felt that stressed out and that anxious and that worried and where the constant just noise in my head was negative now through the five second rule through emdr and psychedelic guided therapy through traditional talk therapy through the high five habit and practicing that since april of 2020 i have a totally different experience of being alive and if i can save anybody the headaches the heartaches the struggles that i have been through that i now realize that you have very simple tools at your disposal that you can use to move the needle on the things that are making you feel anxious and stressed and unhappy and just constantly on edge that you can come back home inside yourself and reconnect with your true nature if you think about our true nature we're wired for love we're wired for connection we're born accepting ourselves like when a four-year-old sees a mirror they don't back up and say god my thighs are fat and look at that nose and my hair and no they like they're twirling they love themselves that's your true nature yeah that's why a high five from a stranger feels amazing because it cuts down to the core of who you really are a person who deserves to be seen a person who deserves to be celebrated and it begins with you yeah it's so powerful mel um as you were describing your different experience of life now you're still successful as you were but you're you experience it differently there's a there's a calmness there's a um there's a groundedness i guess with it is what i hear and it reminds me of the phrase my friend pippa grange she's a psychologist she used to help the england football team a few years ago and she has this term winning shallow or winning deep sorry interrupts if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification bell and now back to the conversation and it really epitomizes that she's she's dealt with so many yeah it it she's brilliant and it it's such a great phrase because it it's she's dealt with you know elite premier league footballers and um you know they've been walking up the steps to win the trophy and on the inside they're feeling nothing they thought from a young age on the age of eight i keep training i'll keep trying i'll get for a big club we'll get into the cup we'll win it because they thought like many overachievers that actually winning that medal getting that number getting that job getting the house getting the car would make them happy but it doesn't because it's an inside job and that's where i think this high five habits it's not going to change everything but it makes everything much easier you know you've still had therapy like i feel someone who um let's say they've got childhood trauma yeah i do everybody does and who doesn't really everybody knows yeah on some level and they it's too hard for them to even address it and actually go and see someone well the high five i think is your way in oh of course yeah you start doing that yes i think a few weeks down the line you're going to be picking up the phone to someone and making an appointment because you realize you deserve it exactly or you when you're saying when things didn't go to plan on this book launch and i know all about that kind of stuff um that drink you poured yourself and that moan to your friends that was one night right it seems to me like that high five habit it just puts a flag in the sun and says okay you know what we did that but today's a new day and today i see myself i'm i'm gonna get on with it now yeah it's like the way that a team shakes off a bad play and resets the game for themselves and there's you know there's interesting research about that in chapter two as you know it's where all the research is people love hearing about the study with nba teams in the united states so researchers at berkeley wondered are there habits in the preseason of the professional basketball league uh in the united states habits in the preseason that can predict what teams are going to have a winning record and in fact there are yeah and um the habit in the preseason that determines what teams are going to have the winningest records are the number of pats on the back fist bumps and high fives the team members give one another and you know it seems so implausible that the wall street journal in 2011 did an independent study where they paid people to watch tapes and count it yeah and in fact it's true and it's also true that the teams that had the least number of high fives pats on the back and fist bumps during the preseason had the worst records why well you've already said it when you high-five somebody you're building trust in partnership you're in it together when you withhold those gestures you're selfish you're judgmental you're in it for yourself and one of the things that's helping me now feel like i'm winning deep is the fact that i know that i'm in partnership with myself and when you know you can count on yourself you know that anything that happens even a massive tragedy even the biggest heartbreak or betrayal of your life you know that you will like those waves of life come out the other side yeah that it will suck for a period but you know that you have within you the ability to get through it and i think that's where my kind of grounded deep winning sense comes from and you know that doesn't mean i'm not immune i'll give you i'll give you a real-time example so we've come here from the united states i'm traveling with our 23 year old daughter and um our ceo who's my sister-in-law we've had an amazing time and i was super proud and honored and excited you know that you had us on your podcast and so last night because it's covered we've got to do all these tests right you got to submit all this documentation to even come to the uk then when you arrive on day two as you probably know you've got to do this two-day test and then there's all this complicated stuff that you've got to then upload in order to get a pass so that you can then you know be able to stay here and then you gotta get another test and you gotta get that test within a certain number of days and you can't get that test unless you get the fur like it is so mind-blowingly stressful and so last night we take the test and it's the little like coveted 19 swab thing and we take the photos and we upload them and we go off to dinner and we come back and we're not approved yet and my daughter starts going oh my god what what if this happens and what if that does this mean we're going to get to go to paris on thursday what if we can't get back into the united states what if i actually do have covet if i test on peace like her she's and then i start going oh my you're right what if i what what if we do get stuck here what what we do have to do a pcr test like what do you mean if these don't come back but they were supposed to it says they're going to come back in an hour but they haven't come back in an hour is there something wrong did i not nope like the swamp they did not come back last night we woke up and now i am fully i haven't high five myself i'm fully in the wake up mode in the dark at six o'clock in the morning we're over by high street we're in the hotel my daughter's in the bed with me and she wakes up and she's like mom are you awake i'm like yeah and she's like check your email like um she's like we don't have our results active we do it and i'm like no we don't know we don't they're negative i know they're negative they're negative like i don't you you i had two coveted tests before i came here i know they're negative we've been wearing like and so we're working ourselves into a frenzy i walk into the bathroom i look in the mirror and i go mel what if it works out what what if what if you get to paris and the pcr test is negative or positive like let's just go like we weren't even worried about a positive test we were worried that the form we had to submit somehow wasn't going to get accepted so we wouldn't be able to leave and then like it just became this craziness just playing out all these fictional yes and we've all had this happen where your mind hijacks you by the way the second i got on the train we get the email results are in negative you're good to go you can leave the country you know what i mean they're like oh my god i wasted probably five hours sort of ginning this thing up with my daughter allowing my mind to take me down a road that was absolutely ridiculous which is part of the human experience and it was honest to god a high five in the mirror in that pause and this kind of like you could this is going to be okay and then my favorite kind of mantra when i remember to use it is what if it all works out what if and then i said well sawyer what if it all works out like let's just play this out let's just say we can't leave britain you've always said you want to live in london let's just say we can't we can't get home for thanksgiving maybe dad and those two come over yeah what if it all works out yeah what if i record the audiobook next week here in london or paris instead of going back home to the states what if it what if we can't leave yeah what if it all works out there's a beautiful section in the book on that which i loved and i think so many people will resonate with that maybe a different scenario but this just hypothetical then you just bleed time and hours and before you know it the amount of energy you've wasted on that is just incredible isn't it it's incredible and i'm telling that story because i want everybody to understand just because i'm sharing tools doesn't mean i always use them yeah it doesn't mean that i i you know have a disappointment or a stressful situation and my mind is suddenly zen like i am just as vulnerable to the waves of emotion carrying me downstream but what i have developed which is what i love this idea of winning shallow and winning deep yeah i have developed this tool kit especially with the high five and the mirror especially with this everything is preparing you for something extraordinary that's going to happen that if you didn't get what you wanted and you've worked really hard it's because something better is going to happen so just keep working you know like literally you know one of my favorite friends who grew up in london paul wilmington once gave me the best interview advice yeah and he said when you're interviewing for something you go in there and you give a thousand percent you just light it up and then when you walk out of that interview forget it ever happened and go and focus on being amazing at what made them want you in the first place yeah because if you don't get that job you weren't meant to and something better is coming yeah and what i love about that mel is we've got a choice in life right you can choose not to believe that you can choose to believe that i didn't get that job man that was my dream job everything would have been perfect it was in the right city the right salary i've been working for that you can do that but where's that gonna get you like the choice to believe that actually something better is coming along [Music] it is a choice right yep and by making that choice as hard as it may be in that moment your shoulders drop you feel calmer you feel stressed you're much more likely to see the opportunities that are on the other side of that than if you are caught up in that stress mode i mean you've you've written i i've read about how what stress does to the brain right when you're in that panic what does that do yeah well if the if if all of a sudden we smelled smoke and the fire alarm went off you and i would not be able to do a math problem yeah because your nervous system takes over and goes into fight or flight which then impairs your brain's ability to focus on something rationally yeah or strategically and so you just made me think of something that i think is really helpful to understand i know it was really helpful for me to understand this point and it relates to this um the story about me all of a sudden getting freaked out and stressed out about the fact that our documents were not uploading to the uk you know passport thing um you can choose what you tell yourself about a situation that's happening but it was helpful for me when i started to understand that your emotional waves and your nervous system response happens before your thoughts appear and so it's really important for everybody to realize you will not be able to control the fact that there will be moments when you're disappointed moments when you feel rage moments when you feel betrayed moments when you feel pissed off moments when you feel short-changed moments when you feel aggravated and these waves come over you you will never be able to control those from coming up but you can choose what you are going to tell yourself about what's happening and the other thing is is that when it comes to trauma i mean all of this is sort of dysregulation in your nervous system that's stored there that keeps getting re-triggered and so if you're dealing with a trauma response you will not be able to also think your way through it first and part of what has really helped me is when i started to understand oh the wave of emotion and feeling comes before my brain can actually help me get back in control and so when i started to understand that oh there's going to be these waves of emotion don't resist them let them come feel it like i'm somebody that likes to hyper process yeah that's my weird word for it which is basically um i will say i feel really pissed off like i just express it because it feels like it expels it i'm working on not emotionally venting at people i'm working on saying putting myself in pause and going chris honey um do you have the capacity to hear me like go rip [ __ ] about something that has nothing to do with you and he's like as a matter of fact i do why don't you make yourself a drink and i'll sit down here with my glass of water and listen to you rip mel you know so like that kind of being responsible that is progress yeah oh that's huge seriously it sounds funny but actually it's huge progress it is huge it's kind of it's a real awareness of the situation isn't it it's a real awareness of your emotion skill i now i'm about to unrip yes let me just check that the person i love is okay for this it's respectful oh i'm so happy you said this because i just learned about this in our couple's counseling we're like go see this marriage therapist that like sort of just deal with our own stuff and depression and my stuff and and and holy cow i didn't realize that my turning to chris my best friend my partner in life my lover my husband of 25 years i never knew that in the past seven years when i would turn to him and just be like yeah the british [ __ ] websites not doing this because part of his story is that i'm not a good husband and i've failed in this business and my wife is out there doing this and i'm the one that should probably be making the money and that makes me less of a man and all of the garbage yeah even if i was venting and upset about something that had nothing to do with him he would tell himself if you were doing your job you'd be able to fix this if you were a good husband she would not be stressed out in england right now and so my venting unbeknownst to me which i thought okay he's like we're in this like he could was feeling like more reasons why he was incapable now i didn't know any of this yeah and so i really appreciate you saying that because i think a lot of us in our in our most important relationships we just assume that our spouse or our lover can absorb everything and there's a lot of times where they can't yeah and being more responsible about what you're feeling what you're about to express whether or not somebody has the capacity to listen to it or to help you with something right now yeah it's you're right it i did make a joke about it and and it is an enormously important thing and this is a very new thing for me i appreciate you sharing that because this is again i think the sort of power of your work now it's it looks as though it's you know the subtitle take control of your life with one simple habit but our life is not just us right we are relational beings we only exist in relation to other people so you show yourself a bit of self-compassion you create that little bit of space to sort of process your emotions and see yourself and validate yourself you're then going to show up differently with all the interactions in your life including those with your loved ones your children your partner and you know why i sort of picked up on that is because i feel in my own marriage that uh and even with my kids if i'm honest just i guess close relationships this real understanding of what is it you want from me now what do you need from me let's say for example my wife says something to me to complain or she's anxious about something i will now ask in a way that i didn't a few years ago hey babe do you want me to try and provide a solution or do you want me to just listen 99 times out of 100 it is i just want you to listen and that's changed everything because the old me would have just jumped into the solution yeah she didn't want that she just wants me to listen and likewise if i've got something to say about because she produces the podcast right oh amazing yes great job so you know thanks for booking me so it's it's kind of um it can be hard sometimes because our whole personal lives can be consumed with trying to put out this show this is a big issue in my marriage by the way i can believe which i didn't realize and so i think it's amazing when couples can work together i thought it was bringing us closer and it was actually making it really hard on chris because our marriage became work yeah and so it's one of the reasons why he's leaving the business oh my god well literally this morning before you showed up vid and i were talking and we have decided that we're going to look for a new producer because she's brilliant at it but it's just too much the show's too big now there's too much intensity to get this show out every week and i think as much as she loves it this is my thing yes right this is my thing i've chosen to do this she's helped me with this thing but it's not her thing and it's taken a while to get to that point but we're kind of feeling quite free and thinking okay now we have to find someone oh i'm sure it'll get flooded now that that's out on the air yeah but but it's kind of that sort of i'm really proud of you guys because it we got so busy and sort of stuck in our roles both in the company and in our marriage that i think for chris in particular he couldn't see a way to break it apart without feeling more disappointment that he had failed there too and i couldn't see a way to having somebody else take over his role as the ceo yeah because i trust him with my life and so we were both in these habits that felt broken but it was just patterns of thinking that were broken and you know i got to give chris the credit because he is the one that said uh we gotta like go talk to somebody about this yeah i mean that that's it it's it's really wonderful to hear that and you've come out the other side of that still going still going yeah but in relation to the point about being respectful to others because work takes up so much of our personal life as well as professional life like i will always ask or try my best to and likewise with it it's like look i just want to ask you a question about the podcast or about production schedule you know is now a good time yep and even that small thing it's kind of really cool because it's like you know what i just not or i could say hey babe i really don't want to talk about work at the moment can we leave it till tomorrow right it just opens up instead of someone trying to say it and the other person getting really frustrated i'm trying to unwind now you know why are you bringing work in which could also happen well that's all that our life became and it's all we talked about it's all we because it was so consuming and you know neither one of us had ever built a freaking media company or a production company or had been in this business and so we didn't know what the [ __ ] we were doing which added more stress yeah and so i'm really proud of you two for recognizing that you're certainly doing it faster than we did [Laughter] women v men what do you mean have you noticed a difference in who really resonates with your work of course we're all individuals right there's no kind of women do this men do that right there are certain patterns that you often see i guess what got me thinking about that is you mentioned your husband before and how the high five habit has helped him and how he finds that really really helpful in his life since you put your work out there are you seeing a trend actually you know this is resonating more with women than men and i guess i'd expand that to different cultures you know you've come over to the uk you know giving ourselves a high five in the mirror like a lot of brits will be quite resistant to that sure you know i'm not saying americans wouldn't be but i think everybody is yeah but i think a lot of brits would think yeah i can see americans getting on board with that but yeah we're not going to do that right so i guess are you seeing a difference in the sexes in different countries different cultures just in your experience i'm really interested because i think this is a universal habit that can help all of us but who is this landing with the most well i mean so i could unpack your question a million different ways so first of all personal development content it's consumed 85 90 women yeah i think most people would probably be surprised to hear that in any kind of health or wellness or mindset or personal development category even though most of the hosts are male most of the listeners are women that's number one and it's always been that way yeah women buy books women go to seminars women are consumers of this content and so of course i resonate with women because that's who tends to be consuming the content that said i s i've spent you know six years as one of the most booked speakers on the corporate circuit the biggest brands in the world i mean jp morgan's hired me 51 times starbucks hired me when the two gentlemen in philadelphia were arrested and they closed down starbucks global operations for a day i was one of three speakers they brought in to train 174 000 people and so you know i because of the respect that i have speaking about how human beings change speaking about habits speaking about how to motivate and inspire other people to show up as their best i have a large male following on certain platforms uh platforms like linkedin uh youtube skus more mail it's still predominantly female but you know the numbers are pretty high you'd be surprised but i also have such a matter of fact very i'm not pulling any punches kind of approach that i think there's a real appeal yeah i also have a very unique female voice in that i've been told that my timber is um something that a lot of women's voices sound higher and there's something about the lower yeah and the the the kind of richer tone of the way that i speak that makes me more appealing to a male and female audience and i'm saying this because this [ __ ] actually matters if somebody's irritating to listen to or if somebody is speaking too quickly or somebody has a pitch that feels off or grinding if somebody's accent is hard to understand it it will skew your audience a certain way yeah and so i think that um due to the nature of my voice and what's interesting is i get recognized all the time if i'm standing talking to somebody from people behind me who aren't even looking at me because my voice is so distinctive and because i put out so much work on audible and because our youtube following is so big um but the other thing is that i have never marketed myself as a women's empowerment person because the stuff that i'm talking about is universal yeah i'm talking about mental health i'm talking about your relationship with yourself i'm talking about changing habits i'm talking about little hacks based on research that you can use to improve your life i see anxiety hit our sun as profoundly as it has hit our daughters i see depression hit my husband as profoundly as it hits one of my best friends i have seen my father struggle after retiring from being an orthopedic surgeon with a sense of meaning and what do i want to spend my life doing as much as i've seen women struggle with it and so i think when you look at somebody as a human being yeah are there you know problems that women face that are different than men of course are is there socialization that's different of course you know it's it's interesting you know with my husband part of the reason why he thinks he's a failure is because men have been told their entire lives that to to be successful you have to make a lot of money yeah that a good guy is tough and you know not a [ __ ] and makes a lot of money and doesn't cry and i really admire a lot of the you know folks like jason wilson and other people that are coming out in the men's mental health and men's emotional strength space and so um that's the same pressure and judgment that a lot of women feel because it's been socialized into you based on what culture you are that you got to look a certain way in order to be worthy and desired and so i believe that there are a lot of differences in terms of the pressures the socialization the expectations that get pounded into men and women from a you know very heterosexual standpoint into their minds but the way in which it's absorbed into the brain and the nervous system the way in which habit loops get encoded in the basal ganglia the way in which a human being can start to feel paralyzed or overwhelmed or trapped in their life is [ __ ] universal and so um that's how i would answer that yeah you mentioned children in that and there was a very powerful section in the book i can't remember the subtitle you gave to it but it was essentially saying the added benefit of adopting not just the high five habit the book is full of other practicals i was like should we call the high five habits should we call it the high five habit should we call the and we may i made a strategic decision to only call it the high five habit because if there was one tool that got out i wanted this one and i knew if we called it the high five habits everything would be well what are the high five habits and it would become a listicle in terms of the pr so that was strategic even though there were like 11 tools in there yeah we've got a world of empowerment yeah i mean we could do a whole podcast on my struggles with book titles um but i think it's a great title and and there's lots of um practical tools in the book beyond the high five habits but i love that bit where you were talking about that doing this stuff it kind of helps you to be a better role model to your kids you know you show them how you manage difficult situations you show them that you're worthy of compassion to yourself yes and i i kind of reread that several times because if i'm brutally honest i think one of my own drives to become a better person a calmer person a less judgmental person a less reactive person it means to be a better dad because when you see things about yourself that you're being reflected back through your kids you're like you know what i could either tell them not to do that or i could take a look in the mirror and try and figure this stuff out myself so i thought that was really powerful i think not easy there's a story in there that i didn't include that i can tell you that really kind of drives us home um so um i remember uh we were maybe i did put in the book i don't remember at this point um we were i was taking a selfie with our two daughters who were 23 and 21. and i oh i know what it was we were talking about um just body image yeah and one of our daughters is very tall and lean and the other one is shapely and gorgeous and amazing and the best human ever they both are um but i and the reason why i sort of paused there is because i was making a mistake that all mothers tend to make which is we compliment our daughters for their beauty and not for the fact that they're loyal and they're smart and they're amazing human beings and they're hard-working so we because it was done to us and the brain learns patterns we're just repeating the patterns with our daughters and so it's super important i learned this late to complement uh attributes that you like rather than constantly complementing outfits and nails and hairstyles and the way that they look so that's one thing that you can do and we were talking about this and i was like why do you guys like i see you and you're so freaking beautiful like i looked like a troll when i was in when i was in college like i had a dorothy hamill haircut and then i had a flash dance perm i mean you guys look like unbelievable and i'm like why don't why are you so critical like you constantly look in the mirror where does that come from and without skipping a beat my 21 year old daughter turned to me and said it comes from you i said what do you mean she said are you kidding me have you ever heard yourself talk about yourself i'm like what no what are you talking about she's like every time we take a photo with you do you know what you say about the photo i'm like no she goes you go do i really look like that and mom we think you're beautiful so if we think you're beautiful and you're constantly criticizing and questioning what you look like why would we ever trust you when you tell us that you think we're beautiful and i was like mike dropped okay that's 10 years of therapy you can just put that on my credit card girls because clearly i [ __ ] you up but so when i laugh because otherwise what are you going to do but you know but seriously i think that you know your kids are watching and they learn patterns and one of the things that i'm excited about in terms of the tools in this book as i do believe in terms of winning deep that there is an opportunity not for you to just break your own habits that are self-destructive but you have the chance to break generational habits yeah because the self-criticism didn't start with you the self-rejection didn't start with you this is your father's voice or your mother's voice and before that it was your grandmother's voice or your grandfather's voice nobody taught them how to feel worthy and to love themselves and to accept themselves and to forgive themselves and so when you start to take on this project of really practicing and demonstrating to yourself every single morning in the mirror that you like you that you think you're worth it that you respect you that you're going to validate you that you will support you that builds and it breaks cycles and cycles of generations of self-criticism and that means that it can stop with you and you can show your kids a different way because you know i've also know that you know look your kids are going to uh you can't avoid comparison you can't avoid those feelings of insecurity you can't avoid um looking around at the world and seeing places that you fit in in places that you don't and it's heartbreaking when you're a parent and you get a text from one of your kids going why does nobody like me or why won't anybody ask me to the dance or why am i the biggest one of all my friends or the brownest or the darkest or why do i have kinky hair why am i so tall or why do i have to these like this sort of like ah if i could only be different yeah you won't be able to change that but through the high five habit and the tools in this book you can demonstrate what self-acceptance looks like so eventually they will learn how to do it for themselves i think that would be my hope too because i you know my kids are a bit younger than yours 11 and 8 at the moment and i do think these two habits that we've spoken about and there's many more in the book but five four three two one go yeah and the high five habits i can see no reason why they can't be adopted into every school of course so many teachers listen to this podcast and i would love some of them to get in touch and let us know we have teachers all over the world right now that put a mirror up in the classroom and the kids walk in and high five the mirror and you know as part of bullying programs the high five or the five four three two one is a tool that is like you know look when they're like i'm gonna you know don't you dare tell your pe like and you start to go down the road but everybody will hate me and this 54321 tell the freaking adults like one of the most painful design flaws in a human being is that when you're a kid and something bad happens to you you do not have the life experience or the wiring unfortunately to go oh my god if this loser is doing this to me i can't imagine what's happening at home or these adults are screwed up somebody call the frickin police because you don't get to talk to me or treat me like that no every kid it's the design of a human being to go what's wrong with me yeah you aim it back at yourself and you use this abusive or toxic or negative behavior or treatment and you because you don't know any better it's the way our brains are designed it's what we all do we think there's something wrong with us and it's because you don't have the support system you don't have the life experience and so that's what the brain does yeah and i think that i have been doing that to myself for 40 years and it's only in discovering this high five habit that i've been able to break it and be like there's there's nothing wrong with me i'm just a human being that feels a bunch of stuff it's doing a bunch of stuff that's trying her best and life is a lot richer and more rewarding and full of joy and meaning when you can start every day knowing that you like the person you're spending your whole life with and that you're going to support them no matter what no matter how much they weigh no matter how little money they have no matter how many freckles or how kinky your hair is that you got you mal i could talk four hours with you i i think there's just so much that we haven't talked about yet and i encourage people to pick up the book to kind of learn all those tools there's so much cool science like the ras which you didn't mention which i wanted to get into but you know i really would encourage people to to get the high five habit i think it is so well written your voice your energy kind of permeates through it and it's not easy to write books like that i you know when they're that easy to read and there's a lot of science behind it i know full well what it's like to try and simplify that messaging it was painful let me tell you it was really painful it is harder to write books that are that easy to read than going you know deep and going on for pages and pages i i want to really acknowledge you for that i think it said thank you really good reads thank you i mean it's been almost five years since i've written a book yeah because it's very hard for me and because the right idea was not ready to be born yeah and you know for better or for worse it seems like my fate in life is that i have to fall into a hole or i have to dig one for myself and then i have to be pissed off and sad and overwhelmed and then i have to have the epiphany that nobody's coming to save my ass and i need a ladder and so i build one and that's what the five second rule was that's what the high five habit is and so this book i only started writing in probably my god i mean we started kind of researching it end of may i started writing maybe in august wow i wrote that thing in about four months and then when i looked at the first draft i realized i was writing it for fancy pants people like you who have a degree so that you would see the research and it was so boring and in 14 days flat we tore that book apart and rewrote it because i realized i was coming back to that credentialed thing of wanting to seem smart when really i just wanted to make a difference for the woman in iceland or steph who's thinking about hitting send on an email or that person who just lost their job or is going through a divorce or feels overwhelmed by life because i know what that's like because i've lived it and if a book isn't easy and fun to read you're not going to read it well i as i said at the start there are so many similarities in our lives we've lived different lives on you know different sides of the ponds but that's exactly the same story with my very first book which is called the four pillar plan in the uk it's called how to make disease disappear in america first book i was right i remember writing it in the first first couple of weeks i really want doctors to like this loads of loads of research in there i was doing it maybe not even two weeks about a week in i remember just looking at it and going wrong what are you doing why are you writing this book are you writing it so that doctors like it and then they like you or you're writing it to help people mm-hmm and i went for a long walk in nature and i was like no i i know i have got a way of putting these messages out that's going to help people because i know i can do it one-on-one with patients that's why i'm writing it i threw out the manuscript i started again i thought right you're going to have that reader in your mind throughout this entire process and it's just so wonderful to meet someone else who's gone through that same process even just a year ago you were going through it um this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our lives right at the end of what for me has been an incredibly enjoyable and deep conversation what are your sort of final words of advice and wisdom for people listening and watching as to how they can start to get more out of their lives um you know you only get one life and i want you to enjoy it and i hope that the conversation that you've just listened to not only gives you hope and the possibility that there is a way and a path for you to truly make some changes and enjoy your life enjoy the experience of being you enjoy what it's like to wake up and to move through your day i hope you also got some tools that are going to help you do it because you know i think at some point you'll have an awakening and i hope it's right now that you got to give yourself permission to feel happy you gotta be willing to say i don't want to feel like this anymore because i know deep in my heart i'm meant to feel better and if that's all that the awakening is that's all you need is just knowing that you deserve to feel better because you do and whether it's the high five habit or it's counting 54321 and shutting the critic down in your head there are simple tools that you can use to help you to start to feel better every single day mel robbins you're an incredible human being you've written a fantastic book the high five habits you're helping millions of people thank you so much for coming to the studio and i cannot wait for the next time we get together me either put it there if you enjoyed that conversation on how we can improve the relationship we have with ourselves i think you are really going to enjoy this one on how we can get more purpose in our lives and if you'd like to download my free practical guide all about breathing simply click here there's a very easy way to figure out what you value there's two things you have to look at

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 4,005,520

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: gqJlItPct4g

Length: 140min 12sec (8412 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021