Mel Robbins ON: Letting Go of Negative Thoughts & Redirecting Your Energy to Self Transformation

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Meaning comes from working on something with intention that has
importance to you. It's that simple. I think a lot
about you know, the act of going for a hike.
The purpose of going for a hike, ironically, is not
to get to the top. It's to be on the trail.
If you focus on the fricking trail, whatever step you're on,

(00:20):
and you keep reminding yourself, this is gonna lead me somewhere.
That is where the meaning comes in your life. Hey everyone,
welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast
in the world. Thanks to each and every one of
you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow.

(00:41):
And I am so excited to be talking to you today.
I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of
Love is out and I cannot wait to share it
with you. I am so so excited for you to
read this book, for you to listen to this book.
I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already,
make sure you go to eight Rules of Love dot com.

(01:02):
It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or
let go of love. So if you've got friends that
are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure
you grab this book, and I'd love to invite you
to come and see me for my global tour Love Rules.
Go to Ja shettytour dot com to learn more information
about tickets, VIP experiences and more. I can't wait to

(01:26):
see you this year. Now, today's guest is someone who's
been on once before, and when she came on last time,
you exploded. The community was showing the love, feeling the love,
and the feedback and response was incredible that I've been
wanting her to come back on and we were waiting
to announce. She's got a brand new podcast out herself,
So if you don't already listen to her show, I'll

(01:47):
announce it in a second. Please go and subscribe. It's
already crushing it. It's going to be absolutely huge, and
I know you're gonna love it. I'm speaking about the
one and only Mel Robbins, who became one of the
most trusted experts in the world on confidence and motivation
the hard way by first screwing up her own life.
As one of the most widely booked and followed podcast

(02:08):
host and authors in the world, Mel is sought after
by the world's leading brands and medical professionals for her research,
back tools and motivation. At the same time, Mellers amassed
millions of followers online with her advice going viral every
day pretty much. Meller is a New York Times best
selling author and self publishing phenom, and her work includes

(02:29):
The High five Habit, the five Second Rule, and the
Number one Ranking, the Mel Robbins podcast That's the one
that you have to supplyte the subscribe to. Mel's female
led media company produces provocative, life changing content with millions
of books sold, billions of video views, six number one audiobooks,
and one of the most viewed TEDx talks in the world.

(02:52):
Mel's work has been translated into forty one languages and
has changed the lives of millions of people worldwide. And
on top of all of this, mell is one of
my dearest friends. We bumped into each other last week
in Montreal where we were both giving keynotes. It was
around ten PM and I get this text saying I
heard you in Montreal. I said, I still am, and
we hung out for like a couple of hours. At

(03:13):
the end of the day, I love this human. I
believe in everything she says and does. She lives it all.
She is the same offscreen as she is on screen.
Please welcome to my Welcome to the show. My dear friend,
an incredible thinker. Mel Robbins. Mom, Oh my god, can
I just hug you? Yeah? Of course, Oh god, Oh

(03:36):
I just love you. True. I just you know, we've bested.
I think we've you know, whenever we've connected. The first
time we met. I was thinking about that last week
in Montroul. The first time we met, we were also
both speaking. We were at this event in Utah. We
were both speaking there and I didn't know you then,
and I think our mutual friends like Lewis House and

(03:57):
Brendan Bouchard were there too, and they were like, oh,
you guys should connect. And we spent an evening together
then and just hit it off. And I appreciate it
that I was like four years ago now. Yeah, you know,
I think we've all had this experience where you've been
at a bar, or you've been at a big party
and you look across a room and your eyes meet

(04:18):
somebody and it's like immmediate, like tractor beam, electric pull.
I felt that way about you for a long time,
just by watching what you were putting out on social
media and so I had had a brain and soul
crush on you for a long time, and so when

(04:40):
we met, it was like, oh my god. So And
you know what else I love is that I love
like I get both you and your amazing wife. I
love that you are decades younger than me and very creative.
And here's what else I love about you. I consider
you not only a very dear friend, but my own
per so on, monk, there you have it. I love it.

(05:03):
Just put me in your pocket right there, right there.
But mel I'm so excited to talk to you today. Literally,
the last time you came on it was unbelievable, and
I've genuinely been wanting to have you back on, like
as much as you want to come back. But I
know there's a few things we want to talk about today,
and I wanted to start off with this idea that
you've always talked about how you learned about things the
hard way. There were always challenges, and even now when

(05:26):
we talk offline, we shared that even last week we
were talking about challenges we were both going through in
building this opportunity to serve others, And I wanted to
ask you, like, what do you think is the hardest
thing you're working on right now, Like, what's the most
challenging thing you're working on internally or externally. Could be creatively,

(05:48):
it could be habit wise. What is what is something
that you're struggling with or grappling with that you're working through. Happiness? Wow, okay, yeah, happiness.
It's interesting. I was getting ready to come over here
this morning, and so I my daughter goes to school
here at the Thornton School for Music. She's a senior,
and she spent the night with me last night. I'm

(06:09):
going to tell you the story because it's relevant about
both learning things the hard way and about happiness. So
she slept in my bed with me last night and
it was so awesome, and I just love her. And
she's twenty two and she's about to burst into the
next chapter of her life. It is so exciting and

(06:32):
I miss her terribly, terribly, And oh, I'm gonna get
like totally choked up when I think about it because
I live on the other side of the country. And
I think one of the hardest things that you have
to do in life, if you really love somebody, is
to encourage them to leave, to encourage them to grow woof,

(06:53):
And I can't believe I choked up I'm getting about
this because I mean, this just happened this morning, and
I was laying in bed and she's sound asleep, you know,
like sprawled out like most twenty two year old sleep
and sweating and just like this, and I thought, oh,
I want to take a picture of this moment. And
then I thought, no, she's going to kill me because
she looks terrible, and you know how that rolls when

(07:13):
you're twenty years old, And so I close my eyes
to just capture the memory. And I thought, why is
it that I am always gripping onto the thing that
makes me unhappy? What is it about this campaign? I

(07:34):
call it the campaign of misery? Like instead of focusing
on the fact that here I am, first of all,
lucky enough to be in Los Angeles to be able
to have the means to go see her for parents weekend,
that I have a relationship with her where she would
want to come and just snuggle up and spend the night,
that she is pursuing her passion and dream of being

(07:55):
a singer songwriter, that she is just killing it, she's happy.
Why am I always defaulting to the loss and so
when I say that I'm working on happiness, what I've
realized about myself, Jay, is that I have done a

(08:15):
lot of things in life, but I've spent the vast
majority of my life being so busy and keeping myself
so busy as a means to outrun I think a
deep seated unhappiness. And that when the pandemic hit and
I had to slow down, and I had to truly
say to myself, Okay, you can't go anywhere. You cannot

(08:39):
regulate your anxiety by running to target. You can't catch
a plane, you can't like it's you, and you're like
you and yourself right now, mel And all the coping
mechanisms that you used to have that distracted you from
the fact that you're just not that happy, they're not
there anymore. And unless I want to drink myself into

(09:00):
the ground, which I don't and numb it, or hit
the vapen or take a gut like, unless I want
to numb it, I got to deal with it. And
so I've spent the last two years and I continue
to focus right now on the number one goal that
I have, which is to learn how to be happy
and content wherever I am, and so this morning is

(09:23):
the perfect example of catching this profound sadness, which is
part of the human experience. Deeply missing somebody is also
about loving them right and noticing that I was going
into the negative. And part of being content and being
happy wherever I am is not trying to fix things.
It's being okay with things. It's allowing the emotion to

(09:45):
rise up and then noticing that there's a different way
to feel. And so in that moment, I just am
doing what I'm doing a lot of, which is just
breathing through those deep moments where I'm like, why am
I complaining about this? This is so stupid? Why am
I obsessing about this thing tomorrow? And I'm not even
here right now, and reframing things in a more positive way.

(10:08):
And this might surprise people because I am a very
positive person. I am a very optimistic person. But when
I really slow down, my mind runs a million miles
an hour, and normally it's fifteen steps ahead, which means
I'm never content where I am. And so I've been
doing a ton of work, like in my nervous system
in my body instead of going right up here and

(10:31):
trying to wrestle with my thoughts. I've been going down
into here to just anchor in my body and slow
things down and be physically where I am, where my
feet are. And so then there was a second thing
that happened. So again I'm working on happiness. That's the
thing I'm really like working on. It's like a muscle. Right.
I'm in the bathroom and I am terrible at doing

(10:55):
my hair. I know it looks really decent today, but
normally I look like a fricking labradoodle on a humid day.
Like that's just me. I just have never figured out
the hair situation. And so I finally said, that's it.
I have got to figure out how to make my
hair look halfway okay. Like I'm not even looking for amazing,

(11:16):
I'm just looking for okay. And so I was watching YouTube.
I'm learning the tutorials. I've got the right sprays, and
so Kendall comes rolling in after she wakes up, and
I am sitting there trying to curl my hair right
with this big fat curl. I'm terrible at it, Jay,
And all of a sudden, I hit my freaking ear
and I'm like and I'm like, oh my god, I've

(11:38):
just burned my ear, and Kendall casually goes, well, you
gotta learn somehow, and she walks out of the room.
I think there is so much wisdom in that, because
that is how you learn. That is how you learn
how close to hold a curling iron to your ear,
you burn yourself and then your whole body absorbs the

(12:00):
lesson and you don't go that close to the fire
next time. And I'm doing that dance with happiness and
contentment that when I feel the fire of discontent or
friction or complaining or looking for what's wrong, I pull
the curling iron a little away from the ear, and

(12:22):
I go back into a safer, calmer place. That was
a beautiful answer. I didn't know what to expect when
I asked that question. I really appreciate you, you know,
going that inward with it, because you could have gone
a number of ways. I fully understand and empathize what
you're saying because my mom and my family do something similar.

(12:46):
So and I love my mom. I have a great
relation with my mom. She's amazing and anything that's good
about me is because of her. But every time I
go back to London, the day I land, my family
will say well, you only here for one days, am
I twenty one days? Like, that's three weeks. Even if
you added up all the hours weekly that you spend

(13:09):
with time with someone, it probably won't account for twenty
one full days with full presents. And then a week
will go and be like, oh, you've only got fourteen
days left, or you've only got seven days left. Oh
you're leaving today, And that mindset just keeps forcing you
to think that day twenty one is day one, right,
as in that day twenty one days left is the

(13:30):
same as one day left, and you're living all twenty
one days as there's only one day left. And I've
taken time and I've sat with my mom so many
times to have that conversation with her, and I said, Mom,
if you celebrate that we have twenty one days and
we're going to make the most of it, and we're
going to create new memories and create new experiences, then
you're going to be happier for these twenty one days.

(13:50):
And yes, you're going to miss me the same, it's
not going to change that, and I'm going to miss you.
So I have personal experience of that. On the other
end of it, with having that conversation with my mom
where she's really grown in understanding how that thought hasn't
served her right, and she's so much happier for it
now when I go back, so that I definitely identify

(14:13):
with that. What you touched on at the end there, though,
was really interesting to me. When you talk about happiness,
it sounds like you believe you deserve it, and you
sound like you believe it's yours for the taking, Like
it's like it is a clear goal direction, it's there. Yeah,
And I think what's happened is subconsciously or consciously, so

(14:34):
many of us don't feel we deserve happiness, or we
don't feel we're worthy of happiness, or we actually think
mediocrity is a safer place to live because then we
don't have our expectations being unmet. We don't have the
fall of I wanted this, but I got this right.
And so I've been at a friend the other day

(14:56):
who sent me a message and he said, take a
look at this, and it was all, how, really, we
shouldn't strive for happiness, we should strive for mediocrity because
mediocrity is where most people will end up. So that
was that sucks. Literally, this is the message. So my
friend messaging me, he goes, what do you think of this?
I think it sucks. That's I think that's the worst

(15:16):
advice I've ever freaking heard. How about that, it's the
dumbest thing I've ever heard. Here's the thing, Jay. So
one of the things I also want to say is
that I'm fifty four and it's taken me a long
time to figure out that I was actually not a
happy person. And I don't think I really truly understood

(15:42):
what happiness is. And maybe I'm using the wrong word.
Maybe the word is the problem because I always associated
happiness with like parties and laughter and like I'm just
like full of joy and I'm and I just you know,
it's like this very positive thing. And again, I am
a positive person. I'm a very optimistic person. But if
you were to put a speaker on my head and

(16:02):
broadcast the things I said to myself, you would literally
check me into the seventh floor at mass General Hospital
in Boston, Massachusetts, because it was a constant drumbeat of negativity.
And as I one by one by one, Jay started
to fix the problems in my marriage and my finances

(16:22):
with my anxiety as I built a business. You know
a lot of people are surprised to learn that most
of what you see that I've built has been built
in the last six years. Literally. And so I, as
I started fixing things outside, that default drumbeat did not

(16:43):
go away. It just was a situation where I no
longer had anything outside of me that was rationally wrong.
So I turned it back on me and just started
hammering meays, I'll give you an example. So this is
where I started to have this breakthrough. So I was

(17:05):
sitting my husband and I have just bought a house
in Vermont, and I know you guys, you know, are
in your new home. It's an incredible thing to do.
It is our dream house. It's the house that his
parents built, It's the family house. We not only were
able to purchase this thing, we've been able to completely
renovate it make it our own. This place is the

(17:27):
closest place to God that I have ever been. We
sit nestled between mountains with one hundred and forty mile
view straight down a valley with cascading like it is
just spectacular. When I would sit in therapy sessions eight
years ago and my therapist would ask me to come

(17:49):
up with like a you know, like a totem or
a spiritual guide or vision whatever for truth or God
or whatever. It's always this view. And so lo and behold.
Eight years later, we freaking live there, and I'm sitting
on this covered deck looking down the valley. My daughter
is sitting next to me, our other daughter who lives

(18:09):
in Boston, who's twenty three. And it's Sunday, and normally
on Sundays, I'm not even present on Sundays because I'm
now got the Sunday scaries. I'm now thinking about the
week ahead. She is starting to now do that. Okay,
I gotta get going. I gotta pack the car. I
get going. I got a big week at work this week.
And it's seven thirty in the morning on a spectacular day,

(18:33):
and the energy is starting. And I recognize the energy
because that is the campaign of misery that I have
lived with for fifty years. And I'm sitting there and
I'm thinking, oh, this is interesting. That's me. And then
I stopped in that moment, Jay, and I thought, I

(18:53):
don't feel that right now. I just feel that exactly
where I am looking at this view is exactly where
I'm supposed to be and it was so profound. It's
almost like that moment where Eckhart Toole has on the
bench in the beginning of the Power of Now, where

(19:16):
I have this profound experience where I think, wait a minute,
is this what happiness is? That I'm not fifteen steps ahead.
I'm just able to be right here without the anxiety,
without the stress. I mean, that is like a revolutionary

(19:36):
experience for me. I don't think I had ever not
felt the default of a revved up nervous system, an
anxious mind, or a to do list that was a
mile long. And I don't want to go back to
that sort of frenetic busyness that creates chronic stress. And
you know, the challenge for me right now is how
do I stay in a space that's happy Because I

(20:00):
of the game of building a business. I love pushing myself.
I love and I realized, oh wait, you actually need both.
You need deep spiritual quiet time and you need the
business of Los Angeles or Boston or New York in
small sprints. But that can't be your default anymore. Woman.

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Go to Masterclass dot com forward slash on purpose. Now
that's Masterclass dot com forward slash on Purpose for fifteen
percent off Masterclass. And that's a that's such a great
realization and reflection. I think when you come to that,
and it takes a lot of self acceptance to come
to that, because I think we think of life as binary,

(22:35):
like you have to make a choice. You're either going
to be a hustler or you're going to be peaceful.
You're either going to be a winner or you're going
to be a loser. You're either going to be wisdom
and zen or you're going to be money and materialistic right,
And it's almost like you feel you have to make
those choices early in life. And I think when you

(22:56):
came in here, we were talking about something and really
really think it's something that a lot of our listeners
will resonate with. The idea that so many of us
experience pain of not going after what we want or
what we need or what we feel is our calling

(23:19):
because of the pain that comes with that, and so
we settle for the pain of where we are. And
I think those two ideas are related because again we
think there's this choice you have to make at any
point in time where it's like I'm either going to
live the life for my dreams or I'm going to
be stuck forever. And then we're like, Okay, well I'll

(23:39):
be stuck forever because my dreams seems so far away.
I remember being there, and it's always hard to help
everyone who's listening realize how much I felt that way.
This was six years ago for me. Yeah, six years ago.
So six years ago I was working safe corporate job.

(24:01):
Six months from now, I was about to be married
to Radi, and I was making thirty one five hundred
pounds a year, and that was my salary at this company,
and I was doing extremely well at the company, so
I had a good tract to progress there. And I'm
sitting there going I've been there for two years, and

(24:22):
I'm like, I don't think this is where I'm meant
to be. I was looking at people who've been at
the company for decades. I've always said to people, look
ten twenty years ahead of you, and look at that
person in the company, and go, is that where I
want to be? And I was like, well, even if
they paid me as much as that person's paid, even
if I got all the benefits that person got, I
don't think I want to do that in my fifties.

(24:44):
And so I thought to myself, Okay, well then I
have to take a risk. So and obviously that was
like a two year journey of even convincing myself. Let's
talk about that. If someone's sitting there right now, passionate
about something, wanting to get inspired, wanting to do something,
but they're set for the pain of where they are.
And that's why I asked that mediocrity and happiness question. Yeah,

(25:05):
it is really that Daunce between I'm going to settle
for where I'm at, where I'm going to be where
I want to be. How do you think about that, Jenny?
How do you You don't just popped into my mind. Yeah,
we're great. Cancer. If you got diagnosed with a cancer
that was treatable, would you try to treat your cancer? Yes,
of course you would, because otherwise it would kill you.
When you feel this call or this this burning desire,

(25:30):
and I feel like we all have this flame inside
of us. We are not like a boiler where the
pilot light can blow out. That is not how a
human being is wired. You, whether you're stuck, whether you're
in pain, whether you're suffering, you still have this this
flame inside you that is burning. And when you actively

(25:51):
engage in your own campaign of misery, and you actively
tell yourself the reasons why it's not going to work,
or the reasons why you can't do it, or the
reasons why now is not the time, or you're never
going to make it happen, or it was great for
Jay or great or for mel but nothing ever works out.
For when you engage in your own campaign of misery,

(26:15):
you are creating literally a cancer inside of you that
eats it at you. And we don't realize that by
engaging in this campaign of misery because it's active. That
flame is burning inside you and you are actively convincing
yourself not to do anything. It is an active engage

(26:38):
and that's why I call it a campaign, because that
flame is going to keep on burning, which is why
the campaign has to get louder and the excuses have
to get louder. And you know it starts to happen
is you start to listen to that campaign and you
start to feel pain because there's something burning inside of you.
And the only cure for this is to stop listening

(27:00):
to that campaign and simply start taking small steps, just
one every day toward the thing that you want. I
talk to my daughter about this all the time. So
she dreams, absolutely dreams of being a singer, songwriter, solo
artist with a successful career literally stadium tours. And if
I'm being perfectly honest, this kid has all of the

(27:23):
talent and all of the like she's one of those
five tool players, and she is a great person, kind
and just awesome, and she's even in a program for it,
the best in the country. She has everything, she just
has to do the work. What is the work, Well,
the work is simply writing crappy songs every day. The

(27:47):
work is not listening to the campaign of misery, because
all around you you're going to see evidence of this
person's better or that person this or this one's at her.
When you listen to that pain in your head, it
is like a cancer inside. It causes pain because you
can feel when you are giving up on your own potential,

(28:10):
and that is the worst kind of life to live.
And we're all I've remember I was the president of
that campaign in my own life. Like you know, I
was like when you and I want people to understand,
this is that everyone you think is doing something good
with their life at one point they were the presidents
of this campaign of misery in their own life. I
remember saying, well, that never's going to happen for me.

(28:31):
Those things only happen to those people. I remember also
watching things and this was the key one that I
realized had to go me and my friends. And my
dream when I was young was to be a spoken
word rap artist, Like that was my goal. Like I've
always loved words, have always loved having a large vocabulary.
I've always loved bending words and making them rhyme, and

(28:53):
I think that's why I love words today and what
we do so much is there. And we would sit
there and we would rappers or artists that were up
and coming, and we would critique them, and we would
almost talk badly about them. We would criticize it, and
we talk about how rubbish they were and how untalented

(29:13):
they were, and or if we had those opportunities, how
how good we'd be. And I realized that today's culture
is propagating that even more because now we're just scrolling
through TikTok or Instagram and you'll see someone who's doing
what you want to do, and you may think you
can do it better. But instead of doing it, we're
spending our time watching someone else doing it and going, well,

(29:35):
that sucks, that's rubbish, right. I Actually have friends will
message me stuff like that sometimes and they'll be like, look,
you know, I've been wanting to make videos for a while,
and they'll send me someone who's made a bad video
in their opinion, And I said, you know what's really
interesting when you're on social media, you look at everyone
who's doing worse than you. I said, when I'm on
social media, I look at everyone's doing better than me
and learn, right, It's like there's there's those two mindsets.

(29:56):
You're either criticizing someone or your cre eighteen and ninny
and growing. And so I just feel what you're saying
is so true. And I think I spent so much
time thinking I had something but then not doing anything
you did. Yeah, so a couple of things. I want
to give everybody a visual, yes, because I find Jay's
into words. I gotta have a picture, like my mind

(30:18):
is not the words mind. You are either in the
stands commenting about the game, or you're on the court
planet and right now, I want you to think about
that flame inside you, that dream that you have. And
I'm going to go back to my daughter who is
on the court, who is writing shitty songs, but she
will be the first to say that for many years

(30:39):
she was engaged in her own campaign of miseries, sitting
in the stands telling herself why she can't get on
the court right now. And so I like that visual
because at any moment, it literally like cuts right to
the truth. Are you in the stands criticizing who the
people who are playing the game or being jealous of them,
or in the stands telling yourself it's not time to

(31:01):
jump in or are you on the freaking court. There's
only two places to be in life. That's it. There
is no middle ground here. And so what I want
to say also is that being in the stands, it
is loud. It is an active thing that you're doing.
This is not a passive thing that we do to ourselves.
We actively argue against our dream and our potential. And

(31:25):
that is a thousand percent tied to your happiness, to
your confidence, because if you are arguing against your own
God given potential, you are actively destroying your confidence. You're
actively destroying possibility in your life. And here's the thing,
you freaking know it. People know when they have imposter syndrome.

(31:47):
They know it. They talk about it openly. And I
also hate the term fake it till you make it.
And here's why. When you say I'm just going to
fake it till you make it, you are calling yourself
a fake. It amplifies your self doubt. Instead say this,
I'm going to get on the court and try until
I make it, because the pain of sitting in the

(32:08):
stands and never getting down there is way greater than
tripping on the court, way greater you're causing you and
This is the thing I want people to understand. You
are causing yourself so much pain by laughing off and
making jokes about how it's never going to happen. You're
causing yourself so much pain by thinking about it. Get

(32:31):
out of the freaking stands and get back on the
court in your life. I did this to myself for
years about the podcast. You know, I'll tell you some
insane story. So here, I am crazy successful in the
audiobook world. The most successful self published audiobook in the
history of audiobooks is the five second Rule that leads
to a seven book Audible original deals with Audible. Because

(32:53):
of the success of that, and I kept telling myself, Jay,
I'd look at you, you know, and I'd look at
a ton of our other friends who you know, have
these amazing podcasts you rich roll like, you know, just everybody,
and I'd be like, I missed the boat. I'm too late.
There's two million podcasts out there now. I can't do this.
I don't have anything different to say than Jay. Jay's
already got you know it covered, Like why would I

(33:15):
jump in there now? And then I would like in
the stands for six years, and you know what else?
I would tell myself, well, you're just successful because Audible's
your partner, and if you were to try this, you're
going to fall flat on your face and you don't
have time. And here's another thing that I tell myself, Well,
who on earth is going to come to Boston to

(33:37):
sit in a studio with you? Mal Everybody's remote. Now,
Boston is not a media place. Nobody travels there, like
just in the freaking stands, telling myself, no, no, no.
Now Here's the thing about campaigns of misery. It does
not actually mute the heartache and the pull that you have,
because your dreams actually can't leave you. They're meant for you.

(33:58):
And so all that can painting or the drinking, or
the numbing out or the avoiding the thing that is
inside you, it doesn't make the dream go away. It
just creates more pain. And so finally, you know, it
was two years ago that I'm like, I have to
take my own device, and I got to make some
major changes because I knew when I was going to

(34:19):
step into the podcast spase that I was going to
make it the only thing that I was doing that
I needed to complete all the speaking engagements that I had,
I needed to create different boundaries around like I had
to get serious about taking the steps and getting on
that court. And that's what I've been doing for the
last two years. And a lot of people don't know that.

(34:39):
I actually got my start in two thousand and seven
hosting a local radio show, and I have wanted to
get back to radio for almost twelve years because I
love the intimacy of it, and so and I can't like,
you know this, You can't share your life in real
time in an audiobook, No, I definitely am. You can't

(35:00):
do it in a sixty second reel. But I too
sat there in the stands actively engaged in my campaign
of misery. Here's another area of my life where I
engaged in campaign of misery, loneliness. I have been profoundly
lonely for a while now, and by lonely, I don't

(35:22):
mean alone because there's people around me, but I have
and I think a lot of people feel this way,
and I know a lot of women do, particularly when
your kids get older and the social things change, and
I think a lot of us are struggling with adult friendship,
and especially coming out of quarantine, people are now kind

(35:43):
of I don't want to leave my house, not because
of anything going on, but because I like being home.
And so I started to get serious about the fact
that I was really in the stands in my life,
complaining to myself that I didn't see my friends, that
I don't have friends, that I'm really lonely, but I
wasn't on the court. What are you going to do

(36:03):
about it? Because it's easy to actually start making friends
if you send texts Jeff people and you make plans. Yeah, Oh,
Jason Montreal, Why don't I text him? Oh he's in
the same hotel. Why don't I go up to seven
floors and go see him? Because my monk is in
the penthouse. You know what I'm saying. I love what
you're saying. I can resonate with it so much. And

(36:25):
there's a journey from where is your campaign of misery
right now? Oh that's a great question. Where is my
current campaign? And where are you in the stands in
your life? Jay? Mine is actually I grew up loving
I went to public speaking drama school, and public speaking
became a huge part of my life, and drama stopped,
and drama is something I'd love to get back into. Really,

(36:47):
I loved acting growing up. I love the idea of
getting into someone else's emotions, and I love the idea
of learning about new characters and understanding, and I keep
wanting to do it. And two years ago, three years ago,
when the Bad Boys movie came out, I was asked
by Sony to be in their theatrical trailer for TV
and so I played the role of a therapist with

(37:08):
Will Smith and Matin Lawrence and I had so much.
It was so uncomfortable because I hadn't done it for
so long. I went to drama school for seven years.
It was so uncomfortable doing it. And I got an
acting coach that week and I practiced and I learned
all my lines. And then I got there on the
day and they gave me a new script. They said, oh,
the scripts changed, and I'm going guys. I had five days.
I knew about this. Five days ago. I had an

(37:29):
acting coach every day for two hours a day, and
they give me a new script. Then they come in
ten minutes before I've been waiting around for two hours
learning this new script. We get there and they say, oh,
by the way, Will and Martin have scrapped this script.
There's no more script. They're just gonna freestyle and you're
gonna have to freestyle. I'm like, you want me to
freestyle with two of the greatest to ever do it?
And I'm not a comedian. Now were you friends with

(37:51):
Will at this point? Not in the way we are today? Okay,
So like, because I think people might be like, yeah,
but you guys are not a friend of Yeah, we
were acquaintances, but not. I think that's important. Yeah, and
I didn't know Martin at all. I'd never met him
in my life, and so I am fully feeling imposter
snder I'm fully in my discomfort zone. And I had

(38:14):
the most fun. Yeah, I was on the court and
I had fun. But then since that day, I retreated
and so and so that's been If I'm completely honest,
that's where my heart is. I love the idea of
getting to be I've I've always loved biographies, and I've
always loved autobiographies. I've always loved true stories, and so

(38:35):
if I had the opportunity to learn or play or
be in a true story, that would fill my heart
with a lot of joys. Is there's somebody that you
would I dream? No, No, I don't have that that answer.
I don't have clear but yeah, that would be my
honest answer to that question of that's something I'm in
the stands on. There's so many excuses. I'm like, well, Jay,
if you did that, then it discredits all the work

(38:56):
you've done up till now. Well, Jay, if you did
that and it doesn't work out, then then what about
the people that you coach in that industry? Like if
if you if you did it, and you did it
really well, then people will call you a sellout because
you just did you chose to do something completely different.
And it's not saying I want to do that and
stop doing what I do today. It's just that there's

(39:18):
a part of that expression that I'm so creatively inspired
by that I'd like to try. Yeah, and again it's
try right, it's not and I wanted to get So
that's what I want to talk to you about. It's
what was the heart of my question before. I'm so
glad you asked me that. Thank you. I've never publicly
talked about that. I've never shared that really with anyone
beyond my wife. Is what is the difference, because I

(39:40):
think this is where it goes wrong. I meet a
lot of people who talk to me about their dreams
and even mind. And I want to clarify mind in
a second, the one I just shared with you. What
is the difference between a dream and delusion? Big? And
I'm going to share what I my initial thoughts before
I hear yours. When I say I would like to
do more drama or acting or experiment with that phase

(40:04):
of my life. My dream is not at this point
in time, to win an oscar. My dream is to
try to creatively express myself and see whether this vehicle
is a form that brings me joy, happiness and meaning
in my life. Yeah, that to me is not delusional
because it is giving myself the opportunity to put my

(40:28):
using visuals like put my you know what are they
called stabilizers onto my bike and see if this is real? Right.
I often find people whose first dream is I want
to build a billion dollar company, or and they've never
built a business at all or have business experience, or
I hear I want this to be the number one

(40:49):
thing in the world. And while those are nice aspirations,
I'm not sure that I actually think. And this is
just my personal take. I never had those when I started,
and I feel that sometimes without the skills without doing
the learning, without doing the experimenting, Those things can actually
stop you from doing it because it's so hard, it's

(41:10):
so far away, and there's such a big way to fold.
So I want to understand how do you decipher between
dream and delusion. When you talk about delusion, what I
hear is like arrogance and conceitedness. Now, and let me
explain the difference here, because I think confidence is this
willingness to try and this belief in yourself and what

(41:32):
you're trying to do, right, I think arrogance and conceitedness
is thinking you're better than everybody else. Yeah, And so
when you frame the delusion as this grandiose thing, it
feels like it's coming from insecurity, right. It feels like
it's coming from wanting to be better than versus coming

(41:55):
from a place where you're willing to take the risks
and try and get on the court of life in
a way that's aligned with this thing inside you. And
so that's what I process in my own brain when
you ask me the question, what's the difference between dreams
and delusions? Now, if you have a true dream, is

(42:17):
it ever delusional? And my answer to that is never.
And here's why I believe that dreams are not meant
to be achieved. I believe that your dreams are a
directional signal that the dream is out there in a

(42:40):
different chapter of your life, calling you from this moment
toward that direction. And that the reason why you still
have this burning flame inside you that relates all the
way back to something that you did when you were
younger that you freaking loved, is because when you walk
toward acting, and what that requires of you to get

(43:04):
on the court and walk toward that dream and look,
the dream could be an oscar, the dream could be
something like that's an award, it doesn't matter. It's in
the lane of acting. What I believe about dreams is
that the dreams are deeply personal. They are connected to
that flame inside you. You are hardwired with them when
you were born. It is absolutely part of why you're

(43:25):
curious about things, why you're interested in things naturally, this
is part of your natural intelligence, and that when you
get on the court and you start walking toward them,
that is what's supposed to happen, because if you allow
yourself to take on some roles in acting, it's going
to make something come alive inside of you. That's the
purpose of your dreams. It's to make that flame burn

(43:48):
brighter inside of you. It's about you awakening something, and
your dreams are the directional signal that are trying to
point you in what way to move forward. Going back
to my daughter, she ever have a stadium tour. I
don't freaking know. She might, That's not the point. The
point is to have something come alive inside herself by

(44:10):
getting on the court of her life and writing music
and putting it out there. Yeah, whatever happens happens. The
reason why I wanted to launch the Mel Robins podcast
is not so that it could become the number one
podcast in the world. Of course I have those goals.
Of Course I want to be the number one female
podcast host in the world. Of course that's what I want.

(44:31):
But the reason why I am pursuing this is because
I wanted to connect with people at a deeper level.
I knew that I would come creatively alive. I knew
that I wanted to build an ongoing conversation that was deeper,
and I also knew I wanted to learn more. Because
when you're constantly putting out content or you're standing on

(44:52):
stages or you're writing books. It's kind of a one
way conversation. And so part of my solve for loneliness
was to stop griping about it to myself and to go, well,
what would actually make me feel more connected, what would
be of more service to people, what would create a
deeper impact. That's why I'm doing this thing. Yeah, that's
what I'm getting at. That. The clarity and the reason

(45:13):
why I really want to get this really clear for
people is that I had a friend last night I
was talking to and they want to start a podcast.
And it was the most beautiful intention. Right, everyone wants
to start a podcast, that everyone wants to start anything today.
It's very and they should. But what I've learned is
that anything I've started intentionally has not only more likely

(45:36):
brought out the consistency and creativity for me, it's not
only been successful, it's also made me happy. And so
what I'm trying to get to is, how do you
plant a seed that goes all the way from not
only growing consistently to giving you joy as it grows,
to then giving you that flower, to then giving you

(45:57):
that fruit, to then giving you the seed to do
more rather than like I got the flower, we then
cut it, it then broken. You know, so when I
look at it, I go I think a lot of
people are so obsessed with the result that all they
get might be the result, and then you have nothing else,
and then that result feels dissatisfying. It's like when we

(46:20):
had Gwyneth Powder on the podcast. She talked about how
like winning an oscar in her teens like removed all
aspiration because she goes, well, what do you do next? Right, Like,
when you've done that, you've done the epitome, the peak
of that career in your teens, and now it's like, well,
what do you do next? And it said, well, when
it was always when it was if it was only
about the result, not speaking about her, But if it

(46:42):
was only about the result, then you stop. And so
I just want to clarify that what you just said
is you started it not to be number one. You
started it because of the impact. You wanted to make,
the stories, you wanted to totally the connection with your audience,
and I think if people leaned more into that, to me,
that's the real dream. Yeah, And you know it's interesting.
I keep bringing it up my daughter because she's an artist,

(47:05):
and when she leans into the fact that she's not
trying to impress her friends in her pop music program,
she's not trying to impress anybody. Yeah, she wants to
tell stories with her music that inspire people. Yea. And
when you really get into the reason why you're doing something.

(47:27):
So I'm going to give everybody another visual because there
are two visuals that I think about a lot in life.
For me, one of the most powerful things that I
use to coach myself is that when I'm in the
middle of something, I always remind myself I'm on the bridge.
So in launching this podcast, something I've been thinking about

(47:48):
for more than eight years, something I've talked myself out
of for a long time, something that I finally stepped
on the court and started working for about two years ago.
And now we're here. I know that this is literally
step one on a long suspension bridge that is leading

(48:09):
me somewhere. And when you remind yourself that you're just
on the bridge, you stop focusing on how long is
it going to take and what's it going to feel like?
And I'm not there yet. You are on the bridge,
and you are going to be on the bridge until
you get to this other side, and then guess what
happens when you get to the other side. There's another
freaking bridge. Every single episode is like its own bridge.

(48:32):
The other visual that I use a lot is a
trail leading up a mountain because the research is so
conclusive and Jay and I can try to beat it
into your head that meaning comes from working on something.
I'm gonna say it again. Meaning comes from working on

(48:52):
something with intention that has importance to you. It's that simple.
You can create meaning in your life by planting a
garden if it's important to you, and for me, I
think a lot about you know, the act of going
for a hike. The purpose of going for a hike, ironically,

(49:14):
is not to get to the top. It's to be
on the trail. And if you constantly stare at the top,
you're going to be out of breath. You're going to
tell yourself you have so much longer will we ever
going to get there? And you're going to miss the
entire point of your fricking life, which is the ride,
the trail, the bridge, the mile markers, all of it.

(49:37):
And so part of my desire to be happier is
to continually remind myself. It is not about getting on
that mountain, because when you get to the top of
that mountain, the top of one mountains just the bottom
of another one. And if you're going up, eventually you
got to come back down. Like that is just life.
If you focus on the freaking trail, whatever step you're on,

(49:59):
and you keep your mind finding yourself, this is going
to lead me somewhere. That is where the meaning comes
in your life. Because Jay and I will both tell
you guys that you put all this effort into writing
a book, it publishes, You're like, okay, now what Yeah,
it's true. Yeah, and we want it to be something else.
We want to think that there is this silver bullet

(50:20):
that if you get to the mountain, if you launch
the podcast, if you meet the person of your dreams,
then you'll be happy. And the truth is, for me personally,
happiness was really about ending campaigns of misery in my mind.
It was about identifying where I was arguing against myself
and my potential, and it was allowing myself to get

(50:42):
back on the trail or start walking across that bridge. Yeah,
that's it. I love those visuals. They're so powerful and
so beautiful and there's I mean, when you said the
bridge one, it reminded me of I believe this is
from the Christian tradition. I believe it's from the Bible.
But this statement says, the world is like a bridge.

(51:04):
Don't build your house on it, cross over it. And
I've always spiritually gravitated towards that statement very deeply. So
when you said bridge, that was the first thing that
came to my mind. The world is like a bridge.
You know, I also liked the term a couple of reasons.
So you know, I was telling everybody earlier about how
I woke up this morning and I'm here visiting my
daughter who's twenty two and a senior in college, and

(51:25):
I felt this profound sadness and I noticed it and
I allowed myself to feel it because I wouldn't feel
that if I didn't love her so deeply. Right, And
then I visualize this bridge, that this is just one
step on a very long bridge that I'm crossing, and

(51:47):
a bridge that as a parent, like, the most important
thing that I need to do as a parent is
to encourage my children to fly into this world and
to leave and to become who they're meant to become,
which means going to leave, and there are a lot
of goodbyes and it sucks, but it's also beautiful. And
I also love this idea of a bridge because when

(52:08):
it comes to anxiety, when it comes to separation, there
is this concept when you say goodbye to somebody, or
when you're about to leave somebody who's going to do
something anxious, is you bridge that moment to the next
moment you're going to see them? So I'm sure you
do this. When you say goodbye to your parents in
the UK, you hog and say I can't you know?

(52:31):
For me, I just said, I can't wait to see
you on Thanksgiving break. I can't wait to hear how
this thing goes tomorrow, so that you are staying connected
and bridging and closing that kind of loop of something's ending,
because things are not truly really ending. Yeah, they're always
beginnings to something else. Yeah. One of the questions we

(52:52):
get in my DMS a lot and comments and everything
is and I think people subconsciously or consciously have this
as well. The idea that you brought it about is
your parents' expectations. So either some people had parents who
had very high expectations or different expectations to what the
kids wanted, Like you're very aware that what your daughter

(53:14):
wants to be and you're happy to support it as
long as she wants to be it. Some people have
the experience of, well, my parents had very high expectations,
but they're not the expectations I want, Or my parents
actually didn't have any expectations of me, and they were
actually more negative and they actually didn't believe in me
at all and didn't really think I'd get anywhere anyway.

(53:35):
Or when I want to try something, I get the
toxic feedback of well, you're not going to make it anyway.
So I think we deal with parenting and a feeling
of not believing us in ourselves in two ways. One is,
your parents saw the path they gave you it, but
you're like, that's not my path. This is and then
your parents don't believe in it, or your parents never

(53:55):
believed in any path you were to take. And I
think a lot of people I'm hearing right now are
feeling like Jay, I'm just surrounded by family and friends
who don't believe in me, don't believe in my ideas,
don't believe in the partner I want to be with like,
I just don't feel like people support my decisions. Yeah,
Chris and I have been married twenty six years. We
have three kids. They're twenty three, twenty two, and seventeen.

(54:18):
There is no doubt in my mind I've screwed them up.
How could you not? I mean, we're talking about millions
of moments where somebody needs emotional support and you are
a mismatch in that moment, right. And I love this
term of parental mismatch because it allows those of us

(54:42):
that still have a good relationship with our parents to
acknowledge a fact. And the fact is there are things
that went down in your childhood that you may not
even remember, that left you with negative or toxic thinking
patterns that you struggle to get rid of as an adult.
It is a fact, period. And so I want to

(55:03):
start off by saying that because we all deal with
this and it is a result of childhood. In fact,
doctor Russell Kennedy, who is amazing. You should have him
on your podcast, says that all anxiety results from a
feeling of separation from your parents. When you're a kid,
probably before you were five, a moment where you felt separate.

(55:24):
There is a mismatch. Maybe you were sitting on the floor.
You don't even remember this, you're quietly playing, You're in
a happy space and mom or dad comes home and
they're frustrated, and all of a sudden, they lie, you know,
like everybody does at some point, because everybody has a
volcano moment. It's a fact, and it startles you as
a kid, your body remembers it. And there's this concept

(55:47):
in research called ghosts in the nursery that a lot
of us struggle as adults with behavior that we're like,
where did that come from? And where it comes from
is the fact that if you're now an adult and
you had an experience growing up in a household where
your parents raged, or your parents were abusive, or your

(56:08):
parents just ignored you and you just felt separate or
on edge, when you get into those same situations as
an adult, your body has a feeling first, we think,
we think first, we don't. Your body has the feeling first,
and then your body repeats the behavior that you actually
observed as a kid. I speak English because I observed

(56:29):
and absorbed the language my parents spoke. And so there
are patterns that you're struggling with that do not serve
you as an adult that are not your own. And
so I want to say that first and foremost, Okay,
that one of the greatest gifts of being an adult
is separating from your parents and deciding how you want

(56:49):
to talk to yourself, how you want to change the
way that you think, how you speak, how you support.
So that's number one. Number two, it is so common
and natural to feel this kind of complex mix of
guilt and of pressure to want to please your parents.

(57:10):
Why because you needed them to survive as a kid.
It's not like you could leave. And what we learn
as kids is that there is a given, a take,
and that oftentimes that love that you need and that
support that you need is very transactional. That mom and
dad are in a great mood, and you get a
lot of attention when you're doing well in sports or

(57:31):
doing well in school, or you're doing what they want
them to do. And what we women learn in particular
is that if you're not doing what I want you
to do, that's bad because guilt, by definition, is feeling
bad about what you just did. We learned that feeling
during childhood, and it happens to everybody. And so I

(57:51):
want to just say this because I want to normalize
that these are things that don't mean that you're damaged.
It's stuff that we have to heal for ourselves as adults.
And so here's rule number one. If your parents or
your family are not paying your bills, they have no vote.
If your parents are paying for your bills, there is

(58:15):
going to be power in what they're saying. There is
a transaction there because they are paying your tuition or
they are paying whatever, and not all parents are transformed.
And so I'm saying that because one of the fastest
ways to free yourself is to pay your own way.
And when you pay your own way, you start to

(58:35):
feel very empowered to pave your own way. And that's
a really important thing, because I actually don't think it's
fair for somebody whose parents are paying for their rent
and somebody whose parents are paying for their credit card,
and somebody whose parents are paying for their car lane
for you to then bitch about your parents' opinion about
how you're spending your life because they're paying for your life.

(58:57):
And so I feel like that's a little bit of
a double standard. And I just happen to not believe
that I pay for my kid's life, and therefore I
control their life. I happen to believe as a parent
that my job is to help my kids figure out
who they are. And you do that by listening. You
do that by validating their experiences. You do that by

(59:20):
not seeing them as an extension of you that what
school they get into somehow means that you're a good
parent or a bad parent. The best thing that you
could do for your kids is figure out what's going
to make them happy and support them in doing that.
And the other thing that you can do is help
them make decisions by helping them figure out what decisions
are right for them. So I'm saying all of this

(59:43):
because zero to eighteen. So let's use another metaphor, because
I again love metaphors. Life's one big road trip. Okay,
every year of your life is a mile marker from
zero to eighteen. You're not even driving the damn car
somebody else's. You're in somebody else's car. They're telling you
what to do. They're controlling what's happening. The second you

(01:00:04):
get to university or you leave home, you get to
navigate your own life, but not if somebody else is
paying for it. Yeah, I think that perspective is empowering
if you're willing to take that risk. But what we've found,
you know, the research shows this as well. There was
a study a few years ago that I looked at
which talked about how you know, with men and women,

(01:00:25):
when when men see a job description and they can
do like fifty to sixty percent, say I can do it, right,
And then when a woman sees a job description and
even if she can do eighty percent of it, she'd
be like, I can't apply because I can't do twenty percent.
And so I find that there's a we do it
in dating too, by the way, right, So yeah, so

(01:00:46):
that that disproportionate self doubt that comes in there, or
that lack of self confidence, as as someone who's a
mom of girls, like does that do you see that
playing out differently for you and for them? And so
there's a tremendous amount of research on this with girls
and confidence. And I have a theory as to what happens,

(01:01:08):
and I know what age it happens at, typically for girls,
because girls struggle with crippling perfectionism in numbers that far
outweigh what happens to boys. And I believe there is
a specific reason why. So at the age of twelve,
boys and girls have the exact same levels of confidence. Jay,

(01:01:29):
at the age of thirteen, girls confidence fall off a
cliff according to the research, and I think I know why.
The reason why, in my personal opinion, is because that
is the average age that a girl goes through puberty
and she starts menstruating. Now, here's the interesting thing about
girls when they go through puberty. It's like a public conversation.

(01:01:52):
And what's the first thing that somebody says to a
little girl when they get their period? You're a woman now,
And it's also something that happens to your body. So
there's this like implied maturing, this implied notion of sex.
There's also the fact that your boobs are growing and
your budding, and people are self conscious, and so now

(01:02:12):
you're wearing a sweatshirt. You also know who's got their period. Somehow,
everybody knows when this is happening. Everybody's talking about it,
and so you in that moment lose the control of
the conversation about your body. And for most girls, it's
incredibly uncomfortable. Like I remember one of my daughters wore
like a gigantic sweatshirt for two years just to hide

(01:02:34):
her developing body. Other girls might show it off because
you get more attention, but it becomes this public conversation
about where you are in relation to everybody else, and
most girls, in addition to the socialization that you get
from the media and from culture, you start then wishing
you look different. You start to obsess about yourself. If

(01:02:55):
I could just get a perfect if I wear the
perfect sweatshirt, then nobody's going to notice, and you start
micromanaging as a defense mechanism to public judgment. That's what
I think happens because the perfectionism is off the church too.
When you dudes get hit puberty, it's typically when you're fifteen,
and it benefits you. I mean, because we're not talking

(01:03:15):
about what's happening with your balls, right, It's not like
some conversation about that. We're talking about the fact that
your voice is deeper, you've gotten taller. It benefits you
in high school sports, and so it doesn't impact your
guys's confidence. It actually helps you. And that's where it
begins in my personal opinion, along with the fact that

(01:03:36):
there's so much that happens generation generationally, where boys are
encouraged to take risks. Boys are in sports where they're
knocked around, boys are picked up and shoved back in
the game. Girls are coddled a little bit more and
told to be a good girl, be a nice sister,
go hug your uncle. All those things that send a

(01:03:57):
message that leads to the struggling with confidence. What do
you think, then, are some of the things that you
did later on and you want for your daughters to
do to develop better confidence? Like, what are some of
those steps towards better confidence? Because I think it's it's
so difficult right to confidence requires you to do so

(01:04:19):
many things you don't want to do to develop it. Yeah,
Like I think the problem with the word confidence when
I look it up in the dictionary, it's one of
my favorite definitions of a word. One of the definitions
is acknowledgement and self assurance in one's own abilities. Right, Like,
you're acknowledging and you are aware of and you're reassured

(01:04:39):
of your own abilities and your qualities. And so when
I look at that definition, I go, Okay, that requires
you to do things that, like you don't build your
self respect when you sat out on the beach but
you do build your self respect when you went and
hiked up a hill and then walked back down. Right, Like,
your self confidence doesn't grow because you sat out in

(01:05:02):
your garden and didn't do anything. Your self confidence grew
because you learned how to God and do something right.
Your self respect, self esteem and self confidence grow when
you do things, yeah, that are not obvious or easy
or simple. Right, But like you're saying, we don't trained
in that way. So what are some of the steps
that people could take towards self Confidat first, here's what

(01:05:22):
I want to tell you, and then I'll give you
some steps. So confidence is one of those topics, Jay,
that we have backwards. Everybody hears the word confidence and
they think it's belief. Like up here, yeah, I agree. Confidence.
My definition of confidence that I want everyone to walk
away with is confidence is the willingness to try. In research,
there is something called the confidence competency loop, and what

(01:05:46):
that means is that as you try something for the
first time, like I was curling my hair this morning
and I freaking burned my ear, and my daughter casually says,
got to learn somehow by trying and by the way,
screwing it up and burning my ear, I still am
gaining a little bit of competence. I know to hold

(01:06:08):
this thing a little bit further away from my ear.
Now by gaining competence by burning my ear, I now
am going to try again, and I'm gonna be a
little bit better, and I'm going to gain a little
bit more competence, and then I'm going to try again
and I'm going to learn even more. And so confidence,
at the heart of confidence is action. It's the willingness

(01:06:30):
to try. And all you need is to know that
if you try, you're not going to die. You're just
going to learn something. And when you learn something, it
removes a little bit of the insecurity so that it
makes it slightly easier to try again. And so I
would follow the sixty percent rule, okay, And I use

(01:06:53):
sixty percent because that is the figure that was in
the HP study about men applying for jobs when they
feel sixty percent qualified. If you look at something that
you want to do or try or apply for and
you feel whether it's sixty percent qualified, okay, I got
sixty percent of the stuff. Because the truth is a

(01:07:15):
job description everybody a dating profile that is not requirements,
that's a wish list. Okay, if you got sixty percent
of this stuff, freaking go for it. That's rule number one,
the sixty percent rule. The other thing is is that
if you're looking at doing something that you're scared to do,
maybe it's signing up for an improv class, maybe it
is ordering the podcast equipment, maybe it's signing up for

(01:07:37):
genius like even thinking about even thinking about it, you're
thinking about it. If you on a scale, you're on
this teeter totter, if you tip more toward I'd really
like to so about sixty percent, right, wait versus forty percent.
I'm kind of nervous, freaking do it. That's how you
build confidence because back to the original thing that we're

(01:07:58):
talking about, self doutgrows when you engage in negative talk
to talk yourself out of the things you want to
be trying. There is so much pain, jay in talking
yourself out of trying things, and it just makes me
so sad and frustrated to see so many of you

(01:08:20):
that are listening wasting years of your life really feeling
this desire to try something and putting all your energy,
all your energy into talking yourself out of it. Here's
something that I just recorded an episode about this, and
it's the fall, so I'm thinking a lot about the
fact that in the fall season, at least in New England,

(01:08:43):
and I realize in other areas of the world, is
not the fall right now, the leaves fall off the tree.
Right here's an interesting fact. This is not a beautiful,
graceful thing that happens. The tree pushes those frickers off
its branches as an act of survival because leaves have
a huge surface area and they require a lot of

(01:09:04):
water to be able to capture the sun and convert
it into energy for the tree. And overwinter there ain't
no water, and if those trees are there, the leaves
are there, the tree is going to die. And it's
an energy conserver. It is an energy issue. You are
putting so much negative energy into things that you won't

(01:09:27):
let go of complaining into relationships that don't work, into
your excuses. Do you know how much energy it takes
to walk into a job you can't stand and yet
you do it every day. Imagine if instead of sitting
at your desk resisting, complaining, gossiping, and coming up with excuses,

(01:09:49):
imagine if you just redirected some of that energy towards
looking for something else that, like the leaves get pushed
off a tree, you make a decision that today I
am actual going to let go of the gossiping and
complaining about this because that is zapping my energy and
I'm going to direct my energy it's something positive because

(01:10:09):
once I get rid of that, I got room for
something positive to grow. And complaining to yourself and robbing
yourself of just trying something. Yeah, and we don't think
about it that way. It takes the same amount of energy.
I think more yeah more potentially it definitely. Yeah, it's
more draining, but it is, if anyone wants to think

(01:10:31):
about it, Yeah, it's it's that same energy just put
in a different direction could change the cause it does
change the course. And it just needs to try it.
I love that willingness to try. So the sixty percent rule,
there's one takeaway and confidence. Okay. The second thing that
you can do with confidence, because it's action basis, is
where the five second rule is a game changer. Just
use my five second rule. Literally in those moments where

(01:10:53):
you feel self dowtkick in, you got to be careful
because you have a habit of hesitating you have a
habit of doing what psychologists say you have a bias
towards thinking. And so a second takeaway is use my
five second rule. And when you catch yourself hesitating, when
you catch the self doubtcoming in, when you catch the
feelings and the excuses rise up, count backwards five four, three,

(01:11:15):
two one, and by the time you get to one,
the prefrontal cortex will have focused on the counting and
you've got literally a split second to move. And the
trick about this is when you start counting, you've made
a decision to try, and the counting itself is like
a trojan horse because it's the first action. Yeah. I

(01:11:36):
love that rule, and the book's there too, in case
anyone needs all the added information I think I lost.
Interview is all about that. So I want to ask
you about one final area of thought because we were
talking about it before and I think a lot of
our community. Does I have to ask you because I
just wrote a book quote eight Rules of Love, which
is out next year, and I talk about this in

(01:11:58):
one of the chapters to hear your perspective on it.
But the idea where you've been married for twenty six years, right,
Congratulations as incredible and that's beautiful. In that time, you
and your partner are going to go through different stages
of personal growth, personal evolution, collect collective growth, collective evolution.

(01:12:20):
Sometimes you're going to feel ahead, they're going to feel behind.
Someone's they're going to feel ahead, you're going to feel behind.
Sometimes it's not even about ahead or behind. The question
I have is if someone's listening and their partner, or
even if they're not in a relationship, their friend. I
was just mean to someone the other day and they
were saying, yeah, my friend is a bit envious that
I just landed my dream job, just meeting the guy

(01:12:41):
that I You know, we always feel ahead or behind
of the people that were closest too, even if we
love them and we want them to win. There's that feeling.
If someone's in a relationship, someone's got a friend that's
feeling behind, or maybe they're the person who's feeling behind
someone else. What do we do in that scenario? How
do we support ourselves support others? How can we think

(01:13:03):
through that? Because I think feeling ahead or behind is
never fun. Even feeling a head is not fun. Yeah,
when you feel behind, that's your insecurity, putting a lid
on what you believe is possible for you. So that's
number one. Recognize that it is that's insecurity blocking you,

(01:13:24):
and you can use that as a sign that, oh,
all I have to do is start walking toward things.
The second thing I want to share with everybody is
that it is normal to feel envious or even be
somewhat of a jerk when somebody that you care about changes.

(01:13:45):
And I want to tell a story to explain why.
And the story I'm the villain, Okay, basically the role
I've played in my marriage port Chris. Chris is wonderful. Yes,
Chris is amazing. So Chris a couple of years ago
decided he was going to completely stop drinking. And he

(01:14:08):
went on this deep spiritual journey and he was going
to stop drinking for a couple of years, and he
became a Buddhist meditation instructor and a yoga instructor and
started his men's retreat business. And I'll never forget the
first night that he was not drinking, I opened up
a bottle of rose. I'm pouring a glass of rose.

(01:14:29):
Everything's great because I'm cooking great. The second night, as
I'm opening up a bottle of rose, and Chris is
like cracking open, like I don't know, like a Saint Croix.
I'm starting to feel agitation. I'm starting to feel the campaign,
the complaining this and the that, and I notice it
and I'm like, don't say anything. The third day is

(01:14:51):
when mel the villain showed up. And I'm not proud
to admit this, but I want everybody to hear this
so you understand what's actually happening inside of your relationship.
I crack open the rose. I'm pouring my glass of
wine and I turned to Chris and I'm like, come on,

(01:15:11):
you want to have glass rose with me? And he says, no,
I'm good, and I said, it's like juice. It's like
cher I do not want a glass of wine. Stop
asking me. And I said, okay, I'm sorry, it's just
that it makes me feel bad. And this is when

(01:15:33):
he said something that just he said, nobody cares what's
in your glass but you. And if what I'm putting
in my glass makes you question what you're putting in yours,
then maybe you have some work to do. And it
is easier everybody to question somebody else's change. And even

(01:15:57):
sabotage it because they're change and growth creates a change
in energy and ripples and changes in patterns that make
you wake up and start realizing that maybe some of
the things you do don't work for you. So when
that friend of yours stays in to write a business plan,

(01:16:18):
how many of us on a Saturday night and you're like, oh,
come on, you work on it tomorrow. Do you have
to go to the gym today? Stay in bed with me.
That's that same behavior of dragging somebody to join in
with you and pour what's in your cup. And so
I want you to understand this is normal, and it's

(01:16:39):
a really good sign because it means that your behavior
is not only changing you, but is sending waves at
somebody else that has just given them a wake up call.
And most of us push against those wake up calls,
and that's what they're doing because you're very safe to
do it with. And so that's something that's really important understand.

(01:17:01):
And I find that the best way to support somebody,
because we all know we can't change somebody else, is
you keep a laser focus on what you're doing, because
the bigger the change becomes, and the happier you become,
the more difficult it's going to be for your friend

(01:17:23):
or your family to ignore it, and the more it's
going to stir up more things and eventually inspiration. And
the best thing that you can do is ask leading questions.
Do not tell somebody what to do. That is the
worst thing you can do in a relationship or friendship
or as a parent. Instead, like literally, hey, you don't

(01:17:45):
seem happy. Is there anything that I can do to help? You?
Don't seem like yourself? Is something going on? Do you
need support in something? And you know, my favorite sentence
on the planet as a parent and as a wife
is do you need me to listen? Or would you
like to know what I'm thinking? And nine times out
of ten, my kids, my husband, the folks that work

(01:18:07):
for me, they just want me to listen. And so
I think when you create an opening for somebody to
stop engaging in their own self doubt and their own
very active and painful kind of reasons why they can't
join you at the gym, or reasons why they're not
going to meditate, or reasons why they're not going to

(01:18:27):
join you in dry January or whatever it may be,
or the reasons why they can't. Can't we all have
a friend, can't look for a job, never going to
find anybody. That's not true, and you know it. So
create the space. You be the light on the path ahead.
And when you hold your light higher, eventually that jealousy
and those excuses, it actually allows it to disappear and

(01:18:51):
you become part of the force that pulls them forward.
And the other thing you have to understand is that
there are going to be legs of your journey in life,
and this is one of the hardest things. Where people
are going to pull off and take a different route.
That's okay. They may come back at another time, that's okay.
And you know. The final thing that I wanted to

(01:19:15):
say about this is it's a very simple exercise that
you can do with somebody. And this helps somebody who
is either struggling with happiness and doesn't know how to
get started, or is struggling with confidence and is not
able to take action, or who is resisting the changes

(01:19:38):
that you are doing, and you would love to see
them do. We did this with our daughter who is
now twenty three, and last summer when she graduated from
college really unhappy. I mean two years of college had
been imploded, and she was extremely depressed and basically just
drank her way through it and graduated and was not happy,

(01:20:01):
big life change. Nothing was going according to plan. She
had planned this huge trip to go to Cambodia and
do a big service trip for four months that wasn't
going to happen. Just lost. And so Chris and I
sat with her for a couple hours and then I said,
and She's like, I don't know what to do. I'm
twenty two, I'm stuck, am miserable. I don't even know
how to start. And I said, I actually think you do.

(01:20:23):
I think you're just scared. Take out a blank piece
of paper, draw a line down the center on the
left hand side. I want you to write happy me. Now,
close your eyes and think about a time that you
remember being happy, or more confident or alive. It could

(01:20:46):
be any word you want, right, and you might have
to go back to childhood. Our daughter closed her eyes
and she said it was senior year in high school.
And I said, okay, so right down, all of the
things that you were doing in a week of your
life senior year in high school, just describe your life

(01:21:07):
for me. Oh, I got up and do it in detail. Everybody.
I got up at seven am or six thirty. I
was leaving the house by seven. I was with my
friends all day. I was looking forward to go in college.
I was playing varsity lacrosse. I was exercising six days
a week. I was only parting with friends twice a week. I,
you know, was in a healthy dating relationship. I ate

(01:21:30):
four dinners a night at home. Like, just do great,
write down what your life looks like now. I sleep
till one. I drank every day. I feel like I
don't see my friends because everybody's scattered. Now that we graduate,
I don't have anything to look forward to. My trip
to Cambodia is canceled. I'm not exercising. Okay, compare the two.

(01:21:52):
Your own life experience offers the map, and we want
to over complicate these big words like happiness I know
I did for decades, or confidence. It's actually found in
the little things. If you do this simple exercise of
drawing a line down a piece of paper, and you

(01:22:13):
write down what life looked like in great detail. When
did you wake up, when did you go to bed,
how are from your friend's family, what were you doing
for work? Exercise, what were you eating If you then
compare that to what life looks like, now you now
know what to do. And the fact is, your whole
life is the little things. It's when you wake up,

(01:22:36):
it's the first thing you look at. It's what you
do with your body. It's how you greet your spouse.
It's how you talk to yourself. It's what you say
to yourself when you look in the mirror. It's the
mood that you walk into work with intentionally. It's how
you greet your animals or your roommate when you end

(01:22:57):
the day. It's the tone of voice that you use.
That's your whole life. And if you were to just
take the time and intentionally write down a few simple
things that you do when you're happy in life, and
you were to focus for the next seven days on
just adding one of those in a day, you would

(01:23:19):
be very surprised how getting some of the little things
right actually starts to turn your life in a completely
different direction. So powerful. Now, it's been an absolute pleasure
having you back on the show. The Miles of Robbins
podcast is out right now. You can go and listen, subscribe, share,
please please please go and do that well. I love

(01:23:39):
sitting down with you. I love today was that perfect
balance as I was talking about before, of playing tennis,
going back and forth, and at the same time just
getting some really practical, insightful advice from you on step
by step strategic, systematic breakdown of how to do things.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my
heart for being a dear friend to me and RADI.

(01:24:01):
I hope me, you, Chris, all of us get to
spend lots more time together genuinely, or even if it's
not lots more time, but it's deep time together that
would make me very happy. And I wish you all
the best on defeating the campaigns of misery for yourself
and everyone else in the world through your show, through

(01:24:23):
your books on Audible, through through your book in the
five Second Rule, and also for helping me start working
on my campaigns and misery as well. So thank you
so much, Malay, deeply appreciate you, very grateful to you.
I love you, Jay, and I can't wait to see
you acting. Yeah now I have to. Now I have accountability.
So I want to offer another mistake I've made, and

(01:24:45):
I've made this with both Chris and with her daughter
Kendall so Chris as he is running Sole Degree, which
is men's retreat, and her daughter Kendall as she's writing music.
One of the best things that you can do to
help create momentum is to call out the teeny steps

(01:25:07):
are taking. I made a mistake with our daughter for
a long time where I kept talking about the big stuff,
or I kept saying, but you're not writing songs, or
this would make a great song, or you play me
something new, and she would go, stop talking about this,
stop telling me what to do. Because when somebody loves you,

(01:25:29):
they respect your opinion and trust me, they know when
they're not doing what they need to do every day.
So you will support somebody more when you say, you know,
I'm really proud of you for the fact that you're
very relaxed about this. I'm really proud of you for
the fact that you're not beating yourself up that it's
not happened sooner. I'm really proud of you from march

(01:25:52):
into your own drums. I'm really proud of you for
writing a song today and playing it. That's freaking awesome.
Acknowledging the little stuff is incredibly powerful because the person
has to push through so much of their own stuff
that if you go, oh, and you should do it

(01:26:12):
this way, or oh have you tried that, or oh
it'd be great if you do this, you're not actually
building momentum. You're pointing out what wasn't done. And that
was something I was guilty of for a long time,
catching myself and trying to look for, oh, what are
they doing and giving them that pad on that back,
that hug, that high five, that verbal acknowledgement of the

(01:26:34):
effort done, or even the fact that the fact that
they haven't done anything but they're thinking about it that
is worth it too. And the reason we do that,
you know this is because we don't give ourselves a
pout in the back for doing something small, so we
don't even acknowledge when we do something small. We are
waiting and we are saying to ourselves, oh, well, all
you did today was go to the gym. All you

(01:26:56):
did this week was go to the gym twice. That's
not enough, yep. And because we talk to ourselves like that,
when someone in our life doesn't, it triggers us about
going Yeah, they only went to the gym twice a
week too, Like that's terrible. Yeah, and so I couldn't
agree with you more. And I've Yeah, I think I've
had to be my own cheerleader for so much of
my life and notice the little things that I've done
in the little progress that with rad I've definitely seen

(01:27:18):
that and she appreciates it. Where I'll just notice those
smaller things. But I realized that any time I get
triggered by someone's lack of growth, it's because I'm triggered
by my own lack of growth, and I'm just reflecting
that back onto them. I'm upset with myself for not
going to the gym more times this week, and because
they haven't, I'm now releasing that on them. And that's

(01:27:39):
been such a great way of going, Okay, well, I
need to be kinder to myself too for the little wins. Yes,
it took you two years to launch this podcast, but
there were things in those two years that you learned
about getting to where you are now that you made
so many steps of progress, and that's why. Yeah. And
also there are so many little steps about completing things
so that you can create room. Yes. So one of

(01:28:00):
the other things I want to offer too is, yes,
that tendency for us to jump in and be like,
oh did you try this or do this orda and
like kind of create this snowball. It does come from
the fact that a lot of us are not encouraging ourselves,
but it also comes from a really altruistic loving space,
because you love this person so much, you want it

(01:28:20):
so much for them that as soon as you see
a tiny stuff for you're like, ah, let's do this,
and you want to join in with them. And so
it can come from both a place of your own
lack of support for yourself as a default unintentionally, but
it also comes from a really good place because you're
just so excited and you then amplify things and then

(01:28:43):
they feel crushed, Yeah, because what they did do doesn't
now feel like enough. Absolutely, I love that clarification. I
agree this both. Everyone's been listening and watching today. Make
sure you tag melan I on Instagram, on TikTok, on Twitter,
whatever social media platform you use with all the greatest
insights nuggets of wisdom from this episode. There were so

(01:29:03):
many scattered across the entire time we've been talking. Make
sure you grab the screenshot of the episode, share it
with a friend. Maybe there's someone in your life that
would benefit from listening to this with you and then
having a conversation about it afterwards. I think that's something
I'm really encouraging. I find that when we're collectively having
an experience, it's even better than saying, hey, I just

(01:29:23):
heard this amazing thing. Listen to with friends, listen to
with family, and then discuss it amongst yourselves. I hope
we've given you enough tools and insight and thoughts to
start a conversation to ask a powerful question. And I
hope that you're leaving here today feeling happier, healthier, and
more healed. Thank you so much on Purpose community. I
love you deeply, and thank you to Mel for joining

(01:29:45):
us again today. I'll see you on the next time.

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Jay Shetty

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Mel Robbins ON: Letting Go of Negative Thoughts & Redirecting Your Energy to Self Transformation