The High 5 Habit: Take Control of Your Life with One Simple Habit w/ Mel Robbins

you have a lifetime of your nervous system experiencing joy when you celebrate people i mean think about going to for me you know well you're a boston guy the red sox you go to the fenway park and they score you're like yeah yes naturally like yes first move and so literally when you raise your hand like that and it has been infused with so much celebration your nervous system and your brain recognizes it and you get what he calls a positive drip of dopamine which either calms your brain and the stress or it amplifies your mood to make you feel excited about what you're about to my gosh [Music] welcome back to max out everybody i'm so excited about today's show seriously i've wanted to do this show for months and months but i wanted to wait until her new book the high five habit came out and so the timing is perfect for this but this is literally one of my favorite people i have met in my life and particularly i can tell you for sure in the last two years the favorite person that i have met i think she's brilliant i think she can change lives i think the show today will change lives it's going to impact mine as well you know who she is you've seen her on television she's five years at cnn as a legal analyst had her own talk show 60 million people engaged with her social media her first book last book sold two million copies like that then this one's gonna probably triple that and uh and i take full credit for it after the show is over today she's got a ted talk with 26 million views you don't need any more data than that mel robbins thank you for being here who the [ __ ] is he talking about oh my god i hate her it's you i love her oh that was so nice and you even said that in front of your wife when she was here earlier so i know it's true absolutely totally true i talk about you all the time we haven't known each other that long everybody and i feel like you are a long lost relative of mine yep i do too i really do you know i come from a long line of farmers and like blue collar workers and my grandparents had a bakery my other grandparents were angus cattle farmers and you know i just we connect we connect because there's no there is no bs with you and i also think i think you connect with people that probably explains it why i think most people i think that you have a way of delivering super insightful content in what i would call like a non-threatening or non-egotistical way in other words you distill really complicated things in a very simple way and i'm super curious about this i the the book itself by the way if you're watching on youtube that it's here let's start like why'd you do this so you had the high five habit where did this actually come from initially so that we can get into what that means but how did it even start well it started like a lot of things start in my life which is i had a personal rock bottom and the things that i share tend to be the things that i figured out having to save my own ass yeah and that's why i that's why i'm so passionate about what i put out into the world because you know i'm going to be 53 this year i have made my life very hard for myself if i could save anybody the headaches and heartaches that i've put my own ass through that to me is a life well lived do you think people would be surprised to hear that though i mean as much success you've had in notoriety and impact you you say you put yourself through a difficult path you know i don't think people would be surprised and the reason why and i think you have this exact same thing we are not talking at or down yeah we are with you shoulder to shoulder and so when somebody says you're so authentic and i so relate to you it's the fact that they feel like you get them it has nothing to do with how much money you've made or how successful you've become it's your ability to be on somebody's level because you've been there i think you're right yeah well you were there when this starts so do you mind sharing like what was going on and then what did you do well i'll share what the lawyers will allow me to share about that and i'll share what our kids know because there's stuff that like you know if i were to say some of the they'd be like what really [ __ ] yeah exactly and so yeah um it's a moment that i think everybody can relate to i mean what was going on in my life is my my dream job which was to be a daytime talk show host ended which you were great at thank you the show failed i mean let's be honest it got canceled i got fired from my dream job that's what happened i could i could make some lovely story up but that's it i've been amazing we'd be in season two um and so i find myself fired from my dream job i then abruptly get a book contract cancelled not because the publisher is a jerk but because i have crazy dyslexia and adhd it is next to impossible for me to take what's in my noggin and get it on a piece of paper and i was a year late in delivering a manuscript so i then get a contract cancelled and i have to return money i've already spent and then the pandemic is just in full swing and the speech after speech after speech after speech starts canceling we get three kids coming home two from college one from middle school we all know what it was like to be with their kids in the early days they were like caged animals going through grief and fear and anger and aiming it right at us the parents and i found myself one morning standing in my bathroom in my underwear okay i was brushing my teeth i hadn't even had a cup of coffee yet i hadn't put on a bra i mean i'm just standing there giving me the visual appreciation yeah please like brush it up somehow okay because you trust me you know if you want to look at this there's something wrong with you so i am standing there and of course i look at the mirror and i immediately think uh i have jowls that look like saddle bags on a packed mule going into the grand canyon i've got stripes on my neck one tit is hanging lower than the other i got gray hair coming in i look down the dog still has to be walked i haven't responded to ed's text i've got a zoom meeting in nine minutes i literally my mind is taking me down the drain i feel the mood drop look like you i am one of the most successful motivational speakers in the world he's so awesome i didn't have a [ __ ] thing to say to myself right i've been there yeah like all i wanted to do is crawl on the couch with the dog and have a cup of coffee i wanted to not have to deal with anything or deal with anybody or face the problems that i felt i wanted the stress to disappear and i didn't know what to say here's the pathetic part okay as if this isn't lame enough right i literally without thinking raised my hand i love this and gave myself a high five in the mirror i love this and i could cry like i i just my shoulders dropped i i kind of felt this like okay yeah pick your head up yeah it's okay you got this and i went on with my day wow that was it in that moment you go this is something no god no no i'm like don't tell anybody what just happened like that oh my is yeah like normally what i would do is on a stressful day it's like cancel the zoom call and make a bloody mary i mean it's like so i 25 billion people are agreeing and connecting with you right now obviously but this is the truth yeah right this is the truth yeah yeah and so the next morning this is the weird part this is when things got weird i woke up i always wake up when the alarm rings and then i make my bed largely so i don't crawl back into it but also so that i have a beautiful place to come back to to sleep so that i practice simple discipline and as i walk toward the bathroom something weird happened okay i started to anticipate seeing sort of like you know when you pull out of your driveway and you got a neighbor that waves to you yeah i felt like i was about to see a friend interesting now here's the crazy part i have probably spent the last 40 years either criticizing the person i see in the mirror or ignoring her and so i step into the bathroom right so i step in and there's your reflection and i stood there for a minute and like you i'm really busy and my mind is also like wildly active constantly going and when i stood there and stared at my reflection knowing that i was about to high-five myself it was this moment of like intentional just purposeful presence with myself beautiful yeah and as i raise my hand and high-five myself again something else weird happened okay it's impossible to have a negative thought when you're high-fiving yourself i love this impossible you cannot go you suck yeah you're a failure you've like blown it you're not going to do well in this meeting today is going to be you can't do it and i'm going to tell you why the science on this is this is what i love yes it's crazy so here's what happens you have a lifetime of giving other people you got a trigger now or something don't you so what does a high five mean to you good job awesome let's go right yes yes yes you got a teammate that's going down you give him a high five to pick him up you've got the biggest player of your life you give them a high five to send them into the game you've got a really awesome thing you're celebrating a high five is what seals it yes so you have a lifetime of positive programming very good high fiving other people this is awesome it is already stored right here in your basal ganglia yeah and so when you do the physical motion that is tied to all the positive programming ed you start to fuse it with your own reflection oh my gosh you silence the inner critic you silence decades of criticism you shut the shame up you literally reset the regret that you may feel any stress or anxiety that you feel about what's about to happen shuts up and you cannot have negative thoughts this is really good as your arm moves now there's this whole field of of psychology and neuroscience called neurobics i didn't make the word up but it's like neuroscience and aerobics and the research shows that when you take an unexpected physical action so you know we're used to high-fiving everybody else but we're not used to high-fiving ourselves so it's unexpected for your brain so your prefrontal cortex engages and you have a positive thought with it you accelerate new neural pathway development and so you're using the physical action that's unexpected along with a lifetime of positive programming to fundamentally rewire how you think about yourself this is good it's unbelievable this is good and so the that's just the beginning can i say something about that i want to just validate a few things one i want to tell you the appreciate your vulnerability and sharing that you spent those four years either criticizing or being miserable 40. okay excuse me 40. that's what i meant to say 40 years and i can tell you because we get this both a lot we're you know obviously people that poor energy in other people i just want to tell you that that's true for me too and i want my audience to know that i do a lot of criticism of myself i've done it all my life but i've really moved that more into invisibility i don't look at myself i don't think about myself i do that as well so just from a male perspective i don't have the right boob lower than the left and all that other stuff you're going through if you lift on one side you might i probably actually at this point though i've been eating i definitely do but typically i would like to think i don't but i want to say that i want to second that and then the other thing is the massive power of what you're describing because you're engaging both parts of the brain here you're engaging the front frontal cortex of the brain because it's a new move so your brain can't conserve energy it's got to actually engage but you're also engaging all the hard wiring you've had for years and years and years of having this trigger of this high five this is brilliant at both times so i don't want to interrupt you even done dude like i've only just like scratched the surface on the side okay so you're gonna you're gonna freak the [ __ ] out okay talk about max out yeah you're going to freaking freak f out okay so keep rolling on it because i'm you know me i'm super fascinated by this so simple move out of nothing high five all of a sudden you've stumbled into some of the best neuroscience in the world that proves that this is a game-changer yeah okay so now there's even more so think about a moment when you go to high-five somebody and you guys kind of like you know like you have a shitty iphone right yeah you miss it it's like limp yeah i hate that one me too okay right yeah do it again why because a high five requires both presence and intention [ __ ] yes that's true you're right yeah you're right and so standing there with yourself there's new research right out of harvard that proves that if you take just one minute of an intentional reflection about who you're going to be today it changes your level of productivity it changes how you show up as a leader it changes your ability to impact people and it changes your effectiveness simply a single minute of setting an intention about who you're going to be today and so when you stand in front of that mirror and you don't ignore yourself like ed and my husband do or criticize yourself like 91 of women do on default and you take a moment to intentionally be with yourself and you think about the day ahead even if you've got a lot of stressful stuff going on especially actually if you have a lot of stressful stuff going on and you then raise your hand and you begin your day with this high five to yourself you are sealing that intention that you believe in yourself and that you got it very good it's incredible there's also i just i was just with dr daniel amen who i know you know too who's one of the world's leading experts on the brain and we were talking about the high five habit and he was saying that the other thing that's happening and this is why when you first start doing it it's going to take two to three days to get through and we're going to talk about the resistance and we're going to talk about the fact that it feels weird and why yeah because there's a very deep and very sad reason why it feels weird and why you're going to have resistance to doing this but by about day three what's going to happen is pretty crazy you're either going to feel a major surge and boost in your mood or you are going to have a very just kind of unnerving sense of calm and the reason why is you have a lifetime of your nervous system experiencing joy when you celebrate people i mean think about going to for me you know well you're a boston guy the red sox you go to the fenway park and they score you're like yeah yes naturally like yes first move and so literally when you raise your hand like that and it has been infused with so much celebration your nervous system and your brain recognizes it and you get what he calls a positive drip of dopamine which either calms your brain and the stress or it amplifies your mood to make you feel excited about what you're about to my gosh isn't this incredible it is incredible yeah it is incredible so are you suggesting and we're going to the resistance in a minute i'm just thinking through all the applications the other thing is almost anything good happens in my life especially anyone ever played to support you bam i am high-fiving anywhere i can get it you spread it and it is a way of acknowledging yourself but also acknowledging the other person it's a massive state change it's so i love the fact that some re i introdu this way not knowing we were going to talk about this that you can take incredibly complicated things and distill them down to the most simple action you could take this is the best example ever of that because there's all this neuroscience behind all that you're like look look at the mirror and high five right yeah which sounds like oh please it actually doesn't now though like we're 10 minutes in here and it's brilliant right so it doesn't sound that way to me now so i want to go back physically you're saying that what you're suggesting we all do recommending which i will begin to do immediately is that upon waking is there a time that you believe that this is a good question i don't i i personally think how you set your day up is how it ends up and all the research also shows that when you're that your mood and your morning uh impacts productivity all day for sure so when you do small things to boost your mood it has a documented impact on your ability to focus to be productive believe in yourself and so i personally would recommend that you have it stack it that you pair it with something that you always do in the morning in the bathroom so whether that's brushing your teeth or whether it's flossing or shaving or whatever you might do before or after just before you leave that bathroom you have to high-five yourself in the mirror and so the simple rule is don't ever leave a bathroom without high-fiving yourself in the mirror send yourself back into the game of life okay having your own back okay can i ask you about that yeah my heart no one else is going to ask you this i'm just thinking through because i'm going to do this okay okay i'm in 1 000 do you think that if you do it too repetitiously that it loses its charge or do you believe that if you do it more repetitiously that it actually gains uh you know a pattern with you that has a deeper trigger excellent question i'm realizing that i do the high five right before i leave the bathroom so it's the last thing i do okay it's always after i brush my teeth but it's the last thing i do before i leave the bathroom now i might come back in and put makeup on or do something else but that first high five in the morning is important and here to answer your question in the beginning it becomes something you do it becomes a practice that you're adding to your morning routine over time it becomes part of who you are yeah because here's the killer thing oh my god i'm not even done explaining all the research because we've got to get into motivation we've got to get into what research says about celebration empowerment support we've got to get into what the studies about the nba teams say about high fives and championship teams like i got so much to unpack here it's incredible so um uh oh god what was i going to say i was high-fiving in that well i want you to stay on one thought you have because i don't want to move off of it because we're going to get into the research i actually want to ask you about the resistance piece of it because you said that it's powerful and a little bit sad and that's just stuck straight you said it because other we can move into the nba stuff but beforehand because one my question is don't out think the room right just take this principle and apply it right that's the first thing don't overthink it how do i do it where do i put my hand just give yourself a high five you know think about when you're giving another person a high five right open hand closed hand just give them a damn high five right so let's don't overthink the room i know that thirty percent of us like exactly which hand how quickly how long do i hold it up for let's not do that everybody right let's just let's apply the principle and the second thing is though what is the resistance why is there a resistance so sad okay so there's two uh kind of buckets that it falls into okay and the one bucket is that you believe you only deserve it if you've achieved something yeah i haven't done anything worthy of a high five i don't get a high five unless i hit the number on the scale or i have that number in the bank account or i land the job or i find the person or i do the thing and by withholding celebration support empowerment and encouragement from yourself you're making it not only harder i would say next to impossible to make those things that you want a reality very good the other reason why people feel a resistance in this is also incredibly sad is that your default in your mind is that you are not worthy of it yes yeah that you have failed or you're damaged or you've been abused or you have so much evidence stacked up about why you do not deserve to be celebrated yeah that you actively withhold it from yourself yep which is a metaphor for other parts of your life you actually don't think you're worthy of this joy i have to say to you i uh if you're hearing me under my breath during the interview i'm going this is very good this is very good you guys they don't normally hear me talk like this because i'm going to be honest with everybody when i have someone on the show that's in our space or our world there's usually there's things this is very good or you know this is great but when i'm listening to you right now there's a part of me that envies you a little bit because i think this is one of the most brilliant things i've heard since i've ever been involved in personal development or peak performance or life change and so i'm just going this is i wish why didn't i think of this this is so good right i also am like a high five person i've done it with people think i'm wearing my kids all the time i'm sort of oh i love that you said this dude okay you want to know why yeah because we're all good at giving everybody else a high five so everybody thinks they're extra good at it but everybody's actually good at doing it they just don't they won't give themselves one because they're not worthy or nobody's ever taught you how yeah like we all know we're supposed to validate ourselves and love ourselves and accept ourselves how the [ __ ] do you do it yeah what are you doing actually to physically do that yes yeah yes and so the thing is is that we're amazing at cheering for our favorite sports teams and and downloading albums and planning birthday parties and doing extra work for colleagues who are stressed out and visiting people that are sick we not only fall short what i have found now researching this for a year is that most of us do the opposite we withhold it from ourselves yep i do yeah i do too i do the two things you said i if i'm in a space by myself i am typically being somewhat critical of myself evaluating what i could have done there's one thing we all do too i could have done this better that's actually self-criticism i used to think no i'm growing i'm evaluating myself i'm you know i'm self-aware it's usually criticism usually criticism and then because i avoid that guy i do the invisible thing i've literally gotten ready in front of hundreds of mirrors in my life and really never looked at myself really never looked at the man looking back at me like i wonder sometimes i've looked at myself so little i don't know if everybody can relate to this i don't know if i would recognize me in a crowd if i were there and that's a pretty that's a pretty sad thing to admit is somebody who's you know probably impacted a few people in their life positively right like i'm not i i pay so little attention to me and give myself so little of just this gift for me i'm thinking about this in the morning for sure i'm going to do it i'm also thinking about before i go out and give my a talk somewhere look find myself in a bathroom just give myself the gift of it this is a gift you can give yourself exactly that is so simple do you know why your mind is popping off because you actually understand so much about the brain yeah like i can see like your neurons firing as you're connecting the dots and being like this actually reshapes your res correct like this is like something that that is a tool like one of the other things that that i i think that you're going to really really love about this is that i want to tell you about two other studies okay okay because your audience my audience really into peak performance into achieving goals into and i think when you're somebody that's driven like you and i are you already said it we have a a negativity bias because we're so driven that we've developed a voice that's really hard on us we don't see the hundred things that went right today we see the one freaking thing that didn't work and then we look at that and we call that of course it's one of the reasons why we're successful but i'm here to tell you it's also why you're not as joyous yes as you could be as you're having this success yes because you are focused on the [ __ ] that's wrong instead of having micro celebrations and moments of joy and drip dopamine as dr amon says throughout the day as you're seeing the things that are going right i think the robbing of that of yourself will eventually cause a frying and burnout you should continue to take actions and get no dopamine hits for doing any of them at one point you just reach the conclusion that it's not as worth doing as it used to be yeah and this is one way to give yourself that hit my brain is firing thinking about all the applications yeah yeah so give me another study you're gonna say so there's two really cool studies that i know you're going to love so and this goes into the power the motivational power of encouragement support and celebration because i think the myth of like tough love and being hard on yourself as a motivational force it's i know it is based on the research it doesn't work even if you look at goggins what does he do when he is really up against the wall right he's got that cookie jar thing that's right that's a positive memory positive memory that's right yep so even that is in the form of encouragement and so here's the study with the nba teams they took a look at mba teams in a couple see across various seasons you can predict who is going to be in the championships based on the teams that have the most number of high fives fist bumps and backpacks in the preseason in the preseason because they build trust and partnership and you can also predict who's going to rank the worst based on the fewest yes because those players are selfish and in for themselves and so there is a partnership and a trust that this builds and what i'm here to tell you is you do this every morning you will build partnership and trust with yourself i love it you are the most important person in your life your relationship with yourself is the foundation of every single relationship that you have you better start [ __ ] paying attention to it and look in yourself in the eyes and if you continue to do this you are a man with an enormous heart and soul thank you you will i don't even see myself physically i'm in touch with the being that's in this like skin sack seriously were you prior to this i don't think so i think i was so busy and sort of dysregulated in my nervous system and you know my success was born out of um at least in this chapter of my life another rock bottom moment where we were on the verge of losing absolutely everything and i know that you're you've been there too facing bankruptcy i was drinking myself into the ground chris and i were fighting like crazy while i have fixed things on the outside i never actually knew how to connect with myself on the inside i absolutely was chasing all those things outside the likes the validation the external achievement stuff in order to prove that i was worthy of love the high five habit and and that's just the beginning i mean this high five in the mirror is just a trojan horse i mean the whole book is about small habits based in science that teach you how to fulfill your own needs emotionally and how to support encourage and empower yourself through the ups and downs in life how to flip jealousy for example into inspiration how to go from a really low mindset into what i call a high five attitude when you feel insecure or people pleasing and so the high five in the mirror is the beginning of i want to go to this jealousy into inspiration thing but i want to i want to say something to you first i'm loving this by the way we we better be careful because we're going to go five hours and i know neither one of us can't i want to so badly i um i've realized a few things about myself and that is that i struggle with being present uh with other people sometimes sometimes like it was interesting when you and i met in the dinner that we had with some great friends what was so wonderful was how present all of us were that evening and none of us wanted that conversation to end but i'm not very rarely present with myself i think one of the gifts of this is it causes presence with oneself it's not just the high five for me but it's a moment of presence with me and so i just want to acknowledge some of you that all have that the second thing he said that i really connect with were so similar is that for me this idea of validating or earning love or bliss or these conditional things wired into me as a kid i got more attention and significance when i achieved something so that's true for the vast majority of people that are wired like you and i are and when you do get to a point where you understand you're worthy of those things without having to achieve them just by your being is a real breakthrough day i have to think that one of the hidden gifts of this is just that in and of itself thousand percent it's not conditional so um but go ahead i wanna i wanna i wanted to step back away from that just for a second because i wanna validate what you were saying but you said this idea these other small habits what i have found in my life the last five years even at the highest levels is there is more jealousy and gossip than i uh really ever realized in people's lives and i think it's one of the hidden killers of joy in people's lives is this inability not to gossip or to have jealousy towards other people you know the whole hater thing's been covered agnosium and personal development right but the actual gossip or jealousy piece this is where it really comes from so what can somebody do to flip that you're going to you're going to die when you're that's right okay well gossiping i like that what's that quote that small minds talk about people and big minds talk about ideas yes that's that's it so like one rule that will make you a better person and it's hard to do it is hard to do is to try at least with your family and your friends only talk about the people who are in the room i can so if somebody starts talking about somebody else and it it it it's one thing to talk about somebody out of concern or just sort of that reporting in that family members tend to do about one another when it when it strays into that judgment and we all know when it's there like just say hey you know why don't we just they're not here right why don't we just give them the benefit of the doubt and let's just talk about the people that are here i don't see you guys enough yeah let's not waste your time talking about that like it's just a great way without like kind of meaning with somebody to just like direct it back get advice move it away so that's one way that i have tried to curb gossiping in my own life but here's the coolest thing about jealousy okay embrace it let me tell you why okay you're only jealous of the things you authentically want so for example for a long time in my life i was super when we were struggling financially i was super jealous of anybody that had a big house or was putting on an audition and i didn't know what to do with my jealousy so it would consume me i tell the story in this book of going uh into a friend's brand new you know house at a time in our life where chris's restaurants were failing and i was unemployed and we were like profoundly in debt i was it nearly made me self-combust in this woman's kitchen okay and how did i deal with my jealousy because i didn't know what it was we get in the car and what do you think i did for my poor husband why aren't you more successful i should have married somebody in finance like she did why are we in this situ like you just like aim it at people right because you don't know what to do with that my jealousy was not about a house when i finally started to unpack it it was about my ambition very yeah very true and so you cannot be jealous of something you don't want if i believe that jealousy is blocked inspiration i've never heard that before it is blocked by your fear it is blocked by insecurity it is blocked by you of this deep ins like you have this and and like you said it earlier i'm really jealous of this idea mel i wish i'd come up with it you have a new book coming out i'm not going to say what the title is but here's what i want you to take away from it there's something about the simplicity of the idea that makes you jealous that is what your inspiration is trying to get you to pay attention to very good so i'm jealous of you you got this show you have the discipline to do it all the time you're translating it into a podcast i've been sitting on my ass talking about doing a podcast for four years what the old mel would do before i understood jealousy is because it's blocked by insecurity i would then tell myself a story you're too late it's already done there's not enough room for you if you do it you're a copycat all of that just blocks what you really want really true pay attention to your jealousy and stop and unpack it what really is it about that person is it their marriage is it the way that they're being treated is it how they take care of themselves what is it about financial freedom and anybody that has it that makes you feel jealous really get to the core of what feels right for you and then get to work on it i have to say this i i that's one of the most incredible things i've ever heard i'm going to give you a reason why i'm saying stuff today on today's show i never admit to because you do it but i'm jealous of people that really like themselves a lot i'm jealous of not confidence because i have you have confidence too we both have this really pretty good combo while brag about us we're both pretty confident people but at the same time there's a degree of humility there that makes us want to learn and grow and change and be better and i love people that toe that line people with a lot of confidence no humility they're no fun people with a bunch of humility with no confidence they're pain in the butt right like but people that really i have found in my life i was just thinking what am i jealous of i sometimes feel jealousy when i'm around somebody's like they just really like themselves don't they maybe a little too much you know you do that story with yourself and you make that story up and that's a signal to me and it just just literally as you were talking it was it was an indicator to me like you need to look at that yeah that's a signal like you this is something you want that you don't have enough of man yeah and that's amazing to admit in front of millions of people who look to both of us for help on this well it's because you have been hard on yourself along the way and so it's now been woven into what you think your formula for success that's exactly right it's the [ __ ] formula you think well if i let go of that i'm going to lose all my power yeah if i let go of this beating myself up think that's why i'm so successful no i'm successful in spite of doing that not because of it yes yeah right yes and in the in spite of in that gap is where all the joy comes see high-fiving yourself isn't about becoming an arrogant [ __ ] we're not trying to turn you into a narcissist right i'm trying to relocate you inside of your own power i am trying to get you to understand that if you want to feel validated if you want to feel supported in life stop looking outside of yourself and give it to yourself this is being you know the greatest form of confidence is just being comfortable in your own skin yep that's it and that means being able to sit with yourself on the mornings that you wake up and you are facing a terrifying health diagnosis or somebody that you love is in trouble or you've got the hardest conversation of your life in front of you you're about to say i don't love you anymore you're about to say i quit or you're about to say whatever in those moments being able to be with yourself and to look yourself in the eye and to really get this is hard and you know what you're still going to do it and i got you i love this we're at the end of the show by the way we're going to talk about a challenge that you can participate in to kind of take you through this and make it something that becomes a part of your formula part of your pattern that you do that we're going to talk about towards the end that i'm really really excited about that we get a chance to participate in that i'm going to participate in myself but you said that a lot of the things it's fascinating to me a couple million people read the five second rule right and i think probably three or four times that will end up reading the high five habit by the way i don't think i need to say this everybody you need to get the book but i think probably everyone's already concluded that you know 10 minutes into this you can just feel that this is something groundbreaking this is not just another book on hey think better you know this is most personal development books are and there's nothing wrong with it or just some other little version of think and grow rich there's some delineation of it all the way back this is next level stuff and it's next level because in our world today simple things when complexity is the enemy of execution so those very complex things changing in you as you do this very simple thing you can execute it very easily and very regularly starting right now that's what makes this so brilliant but you also when you wrote the five second rule that was born out of what we're describing too another one of these times and my audience probably knows but i think it would be an unbelievable gift for us to have the high five habit with a little bit of the five second rule today just to give them a little bit of magic so you got it i'm gonna tell you the five second rule and when we're done remind me to tell you the story about the reticular activity system the res in the brain and my metaphor of doing laundry okay you're you are in my go zone for sure you have all people on the planet you are the one that is going to go wow this is so good all right we're going to laundry after this so um the five second rule so the five second rule is desperate are you kidding it is brilliant but the story is desperate i'm it's 2008 we're in the middle of the housing crisis my husband has followed his dream and gone into the restaurant business opening up a string of little pizza restaurants with his best friend um we were new entrepreneurs so of course when location number one was great what do you do complete idiots we cash out our 401ks our kids college savings we get a home equity line because that's free money we cash out the credit cards we ask friends and family to invest we go all in and then chris and his business partner as is the case in the restaurant business the second location was a huge dog too big too expensive wrong location tons of traffic driving by every day as you're sitting there with an empty restaurant knowing these guys are so committed to returning an investment i have to hand it to chris and jonathan they work day and night to pull this plane crash out of like the room factoring and this and like just anything you could possibly do so we find ourselves in a situation in 2008 41 years old and we're eight hundred thousand dollars in debt dude i could not pay for it there was there was the moment the rock bottom moment was this morning where i went and we live in a nice neighborhood friends have invested we can't let them know this is happening kids three of them under the age of 10. oh my gosh whoa i um remember going to the grocery store and i went to when i leave an ivy league school i have a law degree but here i am unemployed we've lost everybody's money we're about to lose the house and i'm doing that i don't know if you've ever played this sort of like mental bingo game with your check card where you're like okay pleased or god let the let the electronic system not talk to the bank absolutely yes please yes so i'm standing there as she's scanning this stuff knowing that the balance is read and i'm thinking please please please please please just let this go through please and um the woman looks at me and says oh you know this was declined i was ready with my excuse i i would always [ __ ] my head and go well that's weird because it just worked at the gas station which was a complete lie i've done it and then i'd be like okay kids let's go to the car and get my other card and we would walk out of there and leave the stuff and i'd get in the car and drive away oh my gosh and then i of course would come home and drink to numb all of the everything so i was sitting in a chair and um i was doing that thing have you i'm sure you have have you ever like been in such a low moment where you give yourself a pep talk yes that is a pathetic moment i have been there yeah yeah you know that's it mel tomorrow morning it's the new you no more drinking gotta be nice to your husband you gotta look for a job girl you gotta get these kids on the bus on time and by god woman when that alarm rings you have got to get out of bed you cannot lay there like a human pot roast marinating in fear you cannot hit the snooze button four times you have got to get up and get the day started and then honest to god what happened is a rocket ship launched across the television screen it was probably the four manhattans that gave me something that's it tomorrow morning when the alarm rings you got to launch yourself out of bed if you move fast enough metal you will beat the anxiety you won't be in the bed when the anxiety hits so i the next morning and this is the power of the five second rule now i now keep in mind i didn't know any of this at the time a lot like the high five habit it was the super simplistic moment that changed everything and what changed everything for me was the very next morning it was a tuesday in february outside of boston massachusetts i'm familiar with that location and the alarm rings and what i'm about to share with you if you've never heard this you'll never see life again dif the same you never will once you see what i'm about to show you you can't unsee this there is a five second moment of hesitation that defines your entire life it's the moment of hesitation that is the gap between what psychologists call a bias towards thinking and a bias towards action right the moment you have an impulse to move to say something to do something you'll start hesitating as you think about it if you don't physically move within those five seconds your basal ganglia takes over and you drift into a biased word thinking if you can manage what you think and do in that five second window you know the secret to changing any habit any behavior any thought pattern now i didn't know that then all i knew is i had thought of this dumb thing while i was drunk and now it's february in massachusetts and it's dark and it's freezing the alarm goes off i start thinking i'm not going to [ __ ] launch myself out of it this is a dumbest how is this going to help i don't want to get out of it it's cold it's dark i start reaching for the snooze button and then i go five four three two one and i stand up and i'm like that's weird oh my gosh i go on with my day the next morning same thing i immediately remember the immediate dom i'm not doing it five or three two one i stand up again it was the third morning and look i'm like you somebody that i'm like super optimistic but really resident resigned you know what i mean like kind of skeptical even though i'm really positive like yeah prove it you know like that kind of thing so i'm like okay i start arguing okay so you invented some stupid ass thing that helps you get out of bed how the [ __ ] is this going to pay off a million dollars right and then i'm like whoa whoa whoa you're about to lose everything woman what do you have to like why not try it right and so this was the simple thing i said to myself any moment today i know what i should do but i don't feel like it just count backwards see what happens i'll explain the science around this thing in a minute um so i walk into the kitchen and there's my poor husband chris i love of my life we're celebrating 25 years married next week congratulations poor guy standing there minding his own business looking for breakfast and you know how that thing happens where you see somebody you love and you just want to kill them so there's chris and i'm like and you know here's the thing i knew he wasn't trying to bankrupt us i knew the man was working as i knew he was full of shame and like scared and like felt so bad and here's the other thing i knew i knew i didn't want to get a divorce okay i knew i didn't want to treat him like this i was so triggered and here's why it is so much easier ed to be angry than it is to be afraid they're closely related aren't they but you've checked the anger button yeah so i go five four three two one and that counting backwards here's what it's doing in your mind it is interrupting habit loops and emotional responses that get stored in your basal ganglia and run on autopilot and control your [ __ ] life and when you start counting backwards five four three two one the moment you start counting you've made a decision to interrupt the pattern oh boy yeah and by the counting backwards when you first start doing it it engages your prefrontal cortex because it requires focus by the time you get to one you have created a moment where you have taken control and you now can consciously choose what you think or do next and so i used it every single day in secret to walk away from the bourbon to pick up the phone and call insert network five four three two one go out the door and exercise five four three two one don't snap at the kids five four three two one get out of bed even though you don't feel like it five four three two one tell the truth reach out to friends all the things because here's the thing we all know what we need to do we don't know how to make ourselves do it so the five second rule i never intended to tell anybody you'll love this story uh in three years flat i go from unemployed to cold calling my way into a radio audition and getting a job at a digital marketing agency because we had bills to pay and i end up with this little saturday morning show that ends up doing really really well in boston wtk and then it gets picked up by cox media and i end up uh winning an award called the gracie award and cnn calls and they're like we love radio hosts we love how you talk about complicated topics like you're sitting at a kitchen table we don't want fox news to have you you're in woman and so i became a legal and social commentator paid by cnn incredible so my life is turning around chris and jonathan are working day and night to get the business they end up opening more units and like so that gets turned around our marriage gets better i'm not in personal development we still have liens on our house like we're still like trying to figure it out this is 2011. and somebody calls and is like hey your college roommate said you've changed your jobs a lot would you ever come give a talk about it at this thing called tedx i'm like i've never given a speech before but okay i was used to be a criminal defense attorney i thought i can do this wow this was the first tedx conference so there was no real like major protocol right okay so i show up with my 20-minute speech and no prep no prep if you watch my tedx talk i've watched it you will see me having a 21-minute long panic attack on stage if you look closely i have a chest rash that comes on from anxiety i'm darting all over the place i forgot how to end that speech yeah that's what that's what happens when you're really nervous you forget the end yep and so i paused at the very end because that was not about the five-second rule and i look out into the audience and i go oh there's this thing i do i call it the five-second rule the moment you have an instinct to move come on you gotta move in five seconds so your brain will kill the instinct to move i was so disassociated i gave out my email address instead and then i left and i went back to my life at cnn and back to working hard with chris to clar way out of debt and prove our marriage and pay our bills and like i'm not kidding we got the liens off our house just like three years ago no and so um a year goes by so it's now 2012 somebody starts people start messaging me on facebook about the speech and i'm like oh were you in san francisco they're like no i saw it online i'm like it's online i didn't even know my gosh it gets a million views within a year people start to now 2013 ask me to come talk i have no formal speech i'm not even really talking about the five second rule all that much i'm sort of mentioning it in this speech it's starting to spread i'm now up at night with a bottle of wine answering emails from people in india and you know like bali and the uk about i've lost 100 pounds with this count backwards thing why is this working and because i work at cnn i can email somebody like dr ayman and say why is it working yeah can i interview you about this little brain hack wow is this not incredible it is incredible there isn't i didn't know this other explanation other than the universe or god said this is something that needs to get out of the world and this chick is the one who's going to do it unbelievable because i'll tell you what it takes some very big balls to stand on a stage with 20 000 people and convince an arena full of people that you can change your life by counting backwards from five i know it's so simple and believe it with every fiber of my being and so i now understand the science but more than that i have the real-life stories of literally hundreds of thousands of people and we know of a hundred and eleven people who have not committed suicide because they have counted backwards we know of veterans that are retraining the their their reaction to triggers associated with ptsd obviously it does not regulate a dysregulated nervous system it gives you a moment of control it works with ocd we have pediatricians using it with kids to interrupt the thoughts that cause anxiety over and over and over the things that you know what you need to do 54321 is a tool you can use in five seconds flat to interrupt the that's holding you back and push yourself to take the actions that change your life i'm listening to you i i i think you're brilliant i know you don't like to hear that i'm sitting here though i've done a lot of interviews now i i think you're brilliant the combination of the content and how real it is the validation of it you're unbelievable ability to tell stories though and communicate it you were you and i you were picked to do you were destined to do this there's no question you're relatability you're brilliant you're i enjoy you so much it's such an interesting thing male to female thing because we've become friends how much i just really admire and respect you and you are right for me in this space do you know what i'm saying like just i feel that way about you too thank you you know what it is i i i i have suffered so much in my life and i didn't need to i didn't need to you know and um we are so lucky to have the internet and podcasts and books you know back in the day it was embarrassing to walk into a self-help like section in a bookstore there were no podcasts or online courses there was something really wrong with you if you went to therapy like you know i had a great grandmother who went to electric shock therapy like i like so the fact that there are simple things that you can share yeah that help somebody take control in meaningful ways that is what brings the greatest joy to me it's helping real people face the real issues in their life i think that's why i love you because me too and i've suffered that way i'm so thrilled i'm just happy to hear that you're not suffering like that meanwhile you've helped millions of people and they're suffering and i'm just emotional like you are just listening to you i imagine everybody if you took this podcast or youtube whatever you're doing with it today and you went back through and you combined both of these strategies you get you end up getting the high five habit and learning all the micro habits that are in there as well but you combine this five seconds five second rule for me i learned about way before i knew mel for me it wasn't always just even things that i should do that i wasn't doing it was things i shouldn't do that i stopped doing so for me in my life the five-second rule you when you have the ability to be pretty verbally influential you that works both ways right and so for me it was counting backwards and not saying that sentence the way i was going to say it because i did a lot of damage to myself my businesses my friendships my relationships by not implementing the five second rule in my life so it changed my life far before i knew you so a couple things i uh and by the way there's so many people also to just relate the the in in layered in the story is this woman who's created this incredible life this incredible influence born out of suffering born out of you know a little bit too much to drink one night and bam here we are the next one's one of the worst days and you walk into the bathroom and a high five in the mirror it's just incredible that should inspire so many of you listening to this that you think well i'll really get to my real life once i'm out of this low part of my life no maybe this is the beginning of the great part of your life oh it actually is you don't build your inner strength when you're winning it's like steel it's forged in fire forged in fire like in your lowest moments that's where you're gaining the wisdom that you need and the resilience that you need and the other thing that i am so [ __ ] passionate about because i see my daughter beating herself up about where she is to this day my husband still struggles with shaking off that sense of failure because the restaurant didn't deliver the returns that he wanted to and you know we're talking six years later yeah and you know i have a totally different story which is are you me without that we wouldn't have to fight like dude don't you see how all these dots connect yeah but it's personal like i can't teach my husband or my daughter how to see themselves differently yeah they have to do it for themselves your face changed when you just said that by the way that's how important that is to you oh they are the most there you go that makes me sad yeah like there we all have somebody that we love very deeply and it doesn't matter what you say to them yeah and one of the hopes that i have for the high five habit and for the tools in this book is that it gives you the things that you need in order to hit the reset in terms of how you see yourself because if you continue to beat yourself up over what happened you will never feel the encouragement and the support you need and the worthiness that you need to create what's next what's next and we all have had the experience of standing in the present moment and looking back right and going oh i see how the dots of my life brought me here what i love about this new tool of high-fiving your own reflection is what it's been doing for me at a very spiritual level is it's helped me stand in the present moment and have faith that this dot is connecting to something amazing that hasn't happened yet and as long as i have my own back i'm going to be okay i love it what if you could live what she just said you guys what if you could live knowing that the dots are connecting right now if you actually knew that there's dot there are dots connecting for you right now if you have your own back and i believe that and i know that if in fact you do too if you look back at every single chapter of your life no matter what chapter it was the dot's connected they're connecting right now and that gives us a comfort that we can move forward that there is going to be change that this story you're telling yourself doesn't need to be the story that happens in the future okay laundry oh you're gonna love this okay i gotta cause this is up my alley so we both love the res this live network that's constantly changing in your brain and showing you either what you want or what you don't want and you and i are both huge advocates of this fact that it's true your mind is designed to help you absolutely if you know how to train it and so i came up with this analogy doing laundry okay you know how when you like open up the dryer and you got to pull out the filter yeah and then you take your finger and your thumb and you pull off that crap that lint yes it is impossible to do a load of laundry and not create lynn right yes it's impossible to go through a day in your life and not create mental win mental lent is any thought that makes you lose inspiration due to the negative thought and what's happened for most people is that all of the negative thoughts that have been spinning every day of your life have gotten trapped in your res and just like you can take your finger and pull it away so that the filter isn't blocked by the wrong stuff because what accumulates when lint starts to build more lint what accumulates when more negative thoughts start to build more negative thoughts i believe that the high five in the mirror and even the five-second rule when you use it to push through the fear and insecurity that's holding you back from acting like the person you want to be these two tools act like you're clearing the filter away every single day that's why when you 54321 get out of bed in the morning like you said you would you wipe away that thought that i'm a failure that i'm a loser that i can't count on myself when you stand in front of the mirror and you high-five your reflection no matter what you wipe away that lint that's built in your ras that says i'm unworthy the actions themselves are proving to your mind and changing the filter in your brain in real time because you are seeing yourself acting like a person who is different from the one you used to be i love this enough cool it's super cool and the other thing that's happening come on this is good the other thing that's happening is that you are feeding yourself visually and kinesthetically and if you actually say anything auditorily when you're doing this over and over this is so damn good this is so damn good all right we're gonna run it we're at it well i'm going a little further i don't give a crap i have two pages of questions here okay i've asked none of them because we've literally got to this is what you want to tell you the other study okay give me the other study okay so it's called the motivational power of a high five or the high five motivation i'll send you the link to the psychological study so researchers wanted to know okay what is the single most effective way to motivate and inspire kids when they're doing a challenging task they divided kids into three groups and then gave them super something super challenging to do okay the first group the researchers would simply walk up and do the fixed mindset praise hey you're super smart ed you got this the next group got the growth mindset oh add your perseverance you're such a hard worker you're going to get this and obviously the you know the hard work praise that worked better then you're smart the third group the researchers just walked up to the kids didn't say a word just gave a high five outlasted more resilience more grit than the other two combined full stop that's big time here's why and this is the like a high five is not a celebration of your work it's a celebration of you very good so the high five fulfills your most fundamental emotional needs of being seen of being gotten and of being celebrated for the unique individual that you are this is going to be a movement i hope so this is going to be a movement well we're starting because i want people to stop beating themselves up i want them to start cheering themselves forward so do i and you're giving them the tool to do it okay one last thing we're gonna go a little long i also am this believer this is one of my favorite stories from you and i'm i'm gonna couch it so we can finish with it because it's really out of sorts or everything else we're talking about but it's actually if it's the story i think you're gonna say it's the in the last chapter of the book well no i don't think it's the one you're thinking we'll see i think you're one person one decision one anything away one new relationship away from totally changing your life i believe this okay and so the you were one moment away when you got out of bed five four three two one that changed your life right the high five in the mirror changed your life so you're doing your show okay you're you're you're doing your show and you've got some life decisions that you need to make i think people need to be open to that one moment that one person that one second of inspiration in their life as well right so you're doing your show and it's one of my favorite stories i've ever heard in my life so i'm gonna we're gonna talk about this psychic that was on your show okay it is the last chapter of the book okay so that's what you thought you know why you knew that's where i was going there i didn't know where it was going okay so the story that he's referring to awesome because here's the layers right so i believe that the other cool thing about the high five habit is that when you first start using it it like creates a connection to yourself right there's that presence there's the support there's the encouragement there's this that as you use it over time and this the habits of self-empowerment self-celebration self-validation become a part of who you are and you start to truly build that trust in that partnership something interesting happens you hear your own intuition and your ability to trust in the divine nature of things more loudly so i am um doing the talk show now i have not in full disclosure invented the high five habit yet but i love this story because i believe that what's meant for you is trying to find you and your job is to remove the fear and the insecurity so that you are open to it just like jealousy is a signal and your insecurity and fears are blocking that signal there are signals and signs every day of your life so i the back story of this is that so we have a 23 year old and a 21 year old and a 16 year old and at this point our son is in the eighth grade and our son isn't like everybody's kid awesome kid but he's really struggled in school he had profound dyslexia and dysgraphia adhd he had bounced from the public school to a school for language-based learning to now a tiny little independent school hoping that we could find the right fit so that this kid would actually enjoy learning high school is coming up and i made the mistake or i guess i should not even say it that way i said because everything happens for a reason you've had such a terrible time with school oak you can choose your high school yep big mistake at the time it turns out to be the greatest thing that ever happened but i thought he would look in boston plenty of amazing high schools in boston our daughters had already said bro you cannot go to the public high school your ass will get eaten alive at that place you know it's like doc not the theater kid with dyslexia you're not going there okay i love my theater kid with dyslexia but just in a big kind of high school yep and so they're like you're not going to like it we went there we know so um i thought he'd look in boston and all of a sudden he says i want to go to high school in vermont in vermont mike okay what boarding school i don't want you to go to boarding school but if this is i don't want to go to boarding school i want to go to the public high school where my grandparents live like what you know we live in boston so my husband has gone to southern vermont for 45 years he grew up ski racing for stratton they have we we love vermont but i believe my words to my husband were vermont is where people go to die i am not at the age of 52 moving to vermont i have a talk show in new york i have a house in boston our home is in boston our friends are in boston our 15 year old son is not going to get us to move to vermont no we went around and around and around and around about this and finally finally oak and chris said you're right that would be kind of like us moving further away from where you are means we don't sit like okay we'll find a high school so he's looking at high schools right in boston meanwhile i'm i'm uh you know taping this daytime talk show which i ended up failing at and getting fired from at cbs broadcast center the producers have booked a psychic and i love this kind of stuff but i'm super skeptical yep like me she comes on and you know the truth of the matter is there's no way she had an audience list because the dirty little secret about daytime talk is unless you're ellen or something that's wildly successful you are trying to get church groups and homeless people to show up like you like whoever has a pulse can sit in the audience so we don't even know who's sitting there right so it's not like this was staged right right so i learned that this woman can can speak to people who have died because she was electrocuted when she was little and when she came to in the hospital bed and she's like our age her dead relatives were there amazing amazing so i'm like oh this is cool and i'm like what are you gonna do she said i said are there dead people here said oh yeah everybody's got somebody standing starting to crowded and the second i start talking it's gonna get really crowded i'm like really she said yes i said well who are you gonna talk to first the first reading ed honest to god she gets up she goes straight over to like this section over here asks four women in the second row to stand up looks dead in the eyes of the first woman and says does your mother know you're pregnant yet yeah that was that woman's and then the mom looks at her like this and then she goes now you've lost two kids right and the woman's face gosh and then she said the daughter that you lost is here the woman's now crying and she wants you to know she loves you and everything's going to be okay but she's going to pass over but the sun that you're carrying is going to stay but the sun that you've lost now she's weeping is going to stay because he's connected to the sun you're carrying the whole audience is now sobbing this is the first reading like buckle up people here we go so it just got crazier and crazier from there and then all of a sudden she turns and says there's somebody standing behind you that would like to talk to you are you open to being random like of course yeah so um she said he's in a military uniform and i say it must be my grandfather frank schneiberger and she said he was in the navy and she said no this is a this is a pilot in the air force and i'm like a pilot in the air force i there's nobody i'm related to that is pilot in the air force could it be a friend no um k does the letter k mean anything to you nope how about the name ken i'm like well that's what we call my daughter her name is kendall she's named after chris's dad whose name was kenneth and she said i think it's ken chris is dead and i said you're wrong ken was an advertising executive he was not in the military in fact i think i said if ken had been in the military i would know he said that and she said he's getting agitated i think he wants you to verify this so meanwhile chris's dad had died of esophageal cancer like 11 years ago so they get chris on the phone in the control room and i can hear in that little earpiece mel we got chris on the phone your father-in-law ken was in the air force reserves in college his dream was to be a pilot and he found out on the pilot's exam that he was colorblind gosh something you can't google and something that i didn't know impossible come on so now i'm like levitating on my own show and and so she said he's come here because he has a lot of grandkids but your son is very special to him and he's come here with a message about your son and i'm like oh my god what's wrong right what is he going to say and she said i don't quite understand what it is i don't know if it's about a nickname or a group of friends but there's something going on with a school come on and you don't like it he's here to tell you you have to trust your son on this one i am like are you [ __ ] me my dead father-in-law has come back from the grave with an ungoogled fact to prove that he's here to tell me that i gotta move to vermont to vermont so i wrap the taping egg i get on the phone with chris and i said i'm not going to argue with your dead father we got to give it a go let's at least go we'll rent a house well you guys can be up there i'll be down here i'll go back home to boston like we'll figure it out like oh we got to do it he goes mal you're not going to believe this i said what he said a year ago my mom who's been living alone in this house that she built with her husband ken alone up on a mountain for like 11 years she wrote to somebody a year ago about this townhouse that's in a little kind of 60 plus community that all her girlfriends live in in the little town in vermont that we're in and apparently the dude wrote back a couple days ago and my mom has put an offer on the place she called me yesterday asked me if you and i wanted to buy the house that she and dad built i told her no and i told her we were staying in boston and i paused and said tell her yes we'll buy the house will move to vermont a week later covet hit the show was cancelled the world turns upside down we had signed a contract to buy the house in vermont wow and my whole life changed unbelievable so you never know where these dots are coming from that are lining up everything's a lesson life is the greatest school you'll ever attend yeah but the openness to following the dots when they're laid out there what you said being open to that and not blocked well hold on a second okay the dots were there for six months the universe had to bring a sledgehammer i had to give you a psychic reading from the dead sometimes the lesson though you're teaching us is you don't need the sledgehammer or the psychic in your life like you needed like i've actually have a better story that you're gonna like even better okay give me it okay this is also in the book okay so this is a story about remaining open okay this is a story about giving yourself permission to want something okay not somebody else's spouse let's just start there okay it's like saying you don't want the money that's in a bank that you're gonna rob we're talking about things aligned with your values that are legal okay but most like with the high five habit the other thing about this resistance is so many people are unhappy because you won't even give yourself permission to have the things you desire you actively argue against it true so one thing about a high-five attitude is flipping resignation into possibility right so in 1989 i was a senior at dartmouth college in new hampshire another state i know you love i love it and i my parents were in town i grew up in western michigan they'd come out to visit and we went over to the mill at simon pierce right which i know you also know so we go over to the mill in simon pierce in quiche vermont and we walk into the restaurant and i have this experience i've never had before in my life there's this painting on the wall that is about the size of a door and for whatever reason i see this painting and i am immediately pulled towards it and i have an experience ed where the noise of the restaurant disappears and i am literally standing in the painting wow the grass is blowing i can like it's a big vermont landscape with trees running down the center and mountains behind it and a blue sky and um i'm like in it okay and then all of a sudden i come to and i'm back in the restaurant and i'm like someday i am going to own this painting and i lean forward and i see the price and it's like three thousand dollars and i'm like not today and i go back to the table now here's the interesting thing about how things are meant to you remember how i said you're only jealous of things that you actually want yeah you're also only drawn toward things that are meant for you my parents didn't notice the painting right i did now there's something called and i know you know this too the zygarnic effect when something is important to you the zygarnic effect takes place your ras shifts in real time and your mind makes a mental note that this is important it stores this thing in the back of your subconscious this happens in positive ways like with the painting and negative ways like with trauma right things you can't forget they and this is why i say your dreams will either haunt you or they will pull you toward them you don't have a choice about that if you don't work on the things that you're drawn toward it will haunt your ass for the rest of your life so i never forgot about that painting ever if somebody ever said vermont i thought about the painting if somebody said something about a painting i thought about the painting if somebody handed me a cocktail glass and was hand blown i thought about the painting so i meet chris uh we're planning a trip to go up to his family's place in vermont for the first time like oh my gosh we gotta go to simon pierce so this is probably like seven years later so we drive up to simon pierce i can feel with every fiber of my beating what this painting felt like we walk right into the mill and there is a painting by the same artist gail shepard and i'm like it's here it's here i know it's here we go all around the mill looking at all the paintings because they rep her and it's not there and here's the interesting thing chris was more disappointed than i was and i've thought a lot about this moment and the reason why i wasn't disappointed is because i was open to the possibility that could be mine yeah so the fact that it wasn't there didn't end the possibility yeah and so a few more years passed by i turned to chris i'm like that's okay it'd be weird if it were here like i'm gonna track that down this is a quest right like if i have to be 70 years old and track down the guy who bought it and hung it in the corporate lobby and i have to pay 60 000 for this thing i'm doing it you're getting it yeah like i and and by cheering myself forward i am socializing my brain i'm changing the filter i'm making myself believe because i'm literally telling myself a story that it's possible right i love this so a couple more years go by and i'm turning 30 or 31 or something chris gets all of our friends to chip in some money into an envelope he hands me 500 i'm pregnant with our first daughter i'm like out to here buy anything you want i should have bought a crib or like stools for a new house or something but for whatever reason all i can think of is this painting money whatever i want equals painting okay so i pick up the phone i call simon pierce i want to buy a gail shepard piece what's your budget he's like pause right and he's like hmm tell you what i'll send you some polaroids of the smaller ones and i go okay burn right you know right and i'm like by the way by the way there's this one painting i couldn't remember the name of it but i could describe it stand a trees blowing field mountains blue sky and he pauses he goes oh well that was before my time but you know who would remember it is gail like gail personally yeah right and he's like here's her number i'm like you know gail he's like of course she lives down the street come on so he hands me her phone number i give her a call we have this great conversation and i say by the way there was this one painting i go on to describe it in great detail i can hear her thinking and she said you know mel she said there have been so many times in my career that i've done like large landscapes vermont based format i would hate to guess and be wrong tell you what why don't you and your husband come up to the mill we will walk around the mill i'll tell you the stories behind all the paintings if you don't see anything you like there we'll go back to my studio you can see what i'm working on if you don't see anything that really connects with you there you're welcome to go through the thousands and thousands of slides that i have and try to find it and maybe i can recreate something in a small format for you i'm like fantastic so we go up to the mill we go all around as we're going around looking at these paintings she was lovely like amazing woman her husband was awesome i'm starting to realize i can't afford any of this like i'm like out of here i'm about to give birth like what am i doing here the imposter syndrome pics all i want to do is impress her we don't have the money for this why are we buying a painting like the only thing on our walls is like a poster that was hanging in my dorm room in college that matisse jazz thing that we all have everyone had so we sit down and she goes now that you're sitting down i have something to tell you there has only been two times in my entire career as an artist that i have done two studies of the same scene at the same time and your painting is one of them [Music] she said your painting is one of a pair oh my gosh and the sister piece to that painting is in my studio where it's been sitting for the last 11 years waiting for you to come looking for oh my gosh and her husband was like you should have seen her when she hung up the phone with you it was like she saw a ghost so we're all crying and we drive down to her studio and we walk into the studio and there on this easel is this massive painting and i'll tell you ed it was the most exquisite moment of my life gosh it was as if i was standing in that mill on october 6 1989 my 21st birthday declaring that that thing would be mine and 10 years later standing before it knowing i couldn't [ __ ] afford it so i turned to my husband and i say dude i don't mean [ __ ] you don't have to buy me any rings or buying me that painting and he turns and says hey gail how much for the big one and she says mel can have it for five hundred dollars because clearly when i was making it i was making it for her so it now hangs in my kitchen and it is a visual reminder every single day that your mind is designed to help you your job is to tell it what you want and to remain open to the possibility of having it that's incredible usually you don't make me cry on my show usually they don't get me crying on my show that's incredible you're incredible this has been incredible i love you i love you i think i really do i just think you're amazing i think you're amazing too we were definitely meant to meet i know i know you got me today girl you got me all right we're going to help everybody here at the end first off thank you for today and um for me thank you thank you i'm glad millions of people probably will get a chance to listen in on our conversation but this was for me today so thank you will you do me a favor yeah will you work on being kinder to yourself i certainly will i know we'll hold each other accountable for that you're you're ahead of me on that journey now i absolutely will be yeah i'll give you my word on that thank you do they help me with it do they help me with it for sure let's help a bunch of people too so there's a high five challenge yes how do we're gonna put it in the show notes we'll put links all that stuff right but just tell us a little bit absolutely so i wanted to make it easy to start this thing because it does feel a little dumb when you do it alone okay so uh you can we're gonna get five million people to wake up five mornings in a mo row and start their day with a high five in the mirror and see what happens awesome and you just click the link all you need is a name and an email address nothing absolutely nothing no it's totally free and uh you will be it's powered by growth day our friend brandon bouchard's app which means you get a very inspiring video from me to launch it you get to high five yourself you can upload a photo get cheered on by millions of other people you get a journal pro it's awesome it's awesome it'll just kick you off and get you going okay everybody needs to get in high five challenge high five challenge and everybody needs to go get the book i don't think i need to tell you guys all that i think you've all made that decision so listen thank you mel i love you i love you too today was awesome and everybody share the show this is one of those shows you probably watch more than one time i have a hallucination that's going to happen for a lot of you anybody you love or care about needs to see this show today or listen to it at least on the audio platforms so please make sure you're sharing it fast growing show on the planet i love you all god bless you max out hey guys thanks for sticking around if you'd like more click the videos right here they're exactly what you need to see next and if you're new here hit subscribe and become a part of the max out community and tell me what you think about the videos in the comments below i read all of them every week and i select winners that get all kinds of prizes gear coaching calls with me make a comment

Channel: Ed Mylett

Views: 299,615

Keywords: mel robbins motivation, mel robbins speech, mel robbins advice, mel robbins, mel robbins high 5 habit, high 5 habit, 7 habits of highly effective people, good habits, bad habits, the high five habit, habit 5, daily habits, healthy habits, high 5 challenge, morning habits, the high 5 challenge, best habits, habits of high performance people, habits of successful people, ted talk mel robbins, mel robbins mindset reset, mel robbins motivational speech

Id: kOar1SIe4u4

Length: 85min 10sec (5110 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021