”There’s nothing that’s particular or fortunate or completely different between me and any person who picks up this journal,” Mel Robbins insists repeatedly throughout our interview.
It’s a humble evaluation that her longtime listeners and social media followers will acknowledge. The self-deprecating podcast host, writer and motivational speaker wears her typicality on her sleeve and even flaunts her greatest failures as launchpads for her most listened-to and hard-earned phrases of recommendation.
Amongst them is a very painful interval that occurred 15 years in the past. That’s when she discovered herself, at age 41, unable to get off the bed within the morning. She’d been laid off from her job. She was consuming an excessive amount of. Her husband’s restaurant enterprise was failing, and their household of 5 was suffocating beneath a mountain of debt—to the tune of $800,000. There have been weeks when she couldn’t discover a strategy to pay for groceries or gasoline.
Robbins was determined to get again on track, however she saved discovering herself doing the alternative: nothing. The motivation simply wouldn’t floor. That’s, till she tried a bit trick. She imagined she was a rocket getting ready for launch, and he or she silently counted down: 5-4-3-2-1. With this straightforward follow, she observed she was in a position to get off the bed earlier than her mind may protest. “It felt like a small victory, however it was additionally a revelation,” she recollects in her newest ebook. “If I may push via these 5 seconds of worry, possibly I may push via something.”
The invention was easy however efficient: She had 5 seconds to behave on any given thought earlier than her thoughts may shut down the concept. She began utilizing the countdown for every thing she had been avoiding: getting up on time, confronting her overdrinking, discovering a brand new job, opening a stack of long-ignored payments and making a plan to get out of debt.
It grew to become the primary of Robbins’ many viral ideas when she shared it on stage at a 2011 San Francisco TEDx presentation. She remembers the speak as a 21-minute “panic assault” in entrance of 700 folks, however to anybody watching from the surface, it’s something however. Robbins’ singular capacity to captivate an viewers with a easy however highly effective idea is displayed in full glory—as is her humorousness, her down-to-earth demeanor and a touch of crassness (the speech was titled “How to Stop Screwing Yourself Over”). A video of the speak made its approach on-line shortly after the dwell occasion and has since been considered greater than 33 million occasions.
Robbins’ countdown to success
The success of Robbins’ TEDx Discuss propelled her right into a facet gig as a speaker at conferences and enterprise occasions. Inside three years, she was giving almost 100 speeches a 12 months and have become the most-booked feminine speaker on this planet. Sharing her recommendation was now not a facet gig, and the facility of Robbins’ countdown method—what she got here to name “The 5 Second Rule”—solely gained traction. A ebook of the identical title was printed in 2017 and has offered tens of millions of copies; its recording grew to become the No. 1 promoting self-published audiobook of all time.
Since then, Robbins has constructed a formidable media enterprise round her concepts, analysis and conversations with consultants. She based 143 Studios, which now employs 30 group members. Many are middle-aged ladies—a supply of pleasure for Robbins, who’s herself 56.
The bedrock of the enterprise is The Mel Robbins Podcast, which launched in 2022 and virtually immediately shot to the highest of the charts. Listeners have downloaded or streamed it over 200 million occasions, devouring Robbins’ private takes on motivation, productiveness, wellness and mindset change, alongside her interviews with consultants in well being, psychology, habits and relationships. It routinely ranks throughout the high 15 podcasts within the U.S. and is the No. 1 podcast in Apple Podcasts’ training class.
A number of of her books, together with The 5 Second Rule, The High 5 Habit and her newest, The Let Them Theory, are bestsellers, and her audiobooks and packages recurrently rocket to the highest of Audible’s charts.
”A fish in water”
It’s no shock that Robbins does notably effectively within the audio area. When she talks, folks pay attention. She has the voice of a clever, humorous, straight-shooting Midwestern aunt who drops a brand new reality bomb in seemingly each sentence and is endlessly quotable. She packages her recommendation in relatable, usually minorly embarrassing tales from her personal life. And in movies on Instagram and YouTube, Robbins seems to be straight into the digital camera from behind her trademark thick-rimmed glasses, the corners of her eyes crinkling with the occasional wry smile, as she gives highly effective, commanding insights meant to snap listeners out of no matter funk they might discover themselves in that day.
Hers is an endearingly approachable media presence that manages on the identical time to be extremely polished and authoritative, because of her earlier careers as a radio speak present host and an on-air CNN authorized analyst. However life formed her communication fashion in much less glamorous methods too. Robbins has been open about her grownup diagnoses of ADHD and dyslexia, circumstances that impacted her from an early age. Surviving the latter as a scholar, she believes, is what propelled her to turn into an distinctive verbal communicator.
“When you can freestyle and speak, you may sort of distract folks from the truth that you don’t fairly perceive the passage within the ebook,” she says. “Being the primary to speak, being charming, with the ability to learn social cues, being brave and simply sort of going first—it grew to become a life ability.”
Certainly, Robbins did effectively at school and went on to earn a historical past diploma from Dartmouth School and a legislation diploma from Boston School. The trail wasn’t with out its challenges, although. “I used to be horrible at legislation college,” she says. However in her program’s third 12 months, the scholars started mock trial workouts that relied closely on verbal arguments, and he or she remembers the distinct pleasure of lastly feeling like “a fish in water.”
After commencement, she labored as a public defender, the place she observed that deliberating juries tended to solely bear in mind a couple of standout phrases from the trial arguments. To win a case, she realized that “you’ve acquired to have the ability to distill it down into one thing tremendous easy that any person can bear in mind… and that’s the guts of what I do.”
Robbins and her group have taken her podcast effectively past productiveness pep speak territory, partly by bringing on consultants for conversations on well being and wellness, which has resulted in a reshaping of the cultural lexicon on some subjects. Her episode with visitor Dr. Mary Claire Haver, an OB-GYN and menopause knowledgeable, for instance, grew to become the podcast’s most-listened-to episode of all time and has spurred numerous new discussions between ladies and their medical doctors about medical therapy for perimenopause signs. Episodes tackling anxiousness are additionally ranked in her high 5, together with one with Dr. Russell Kennedy, generally known as the “Anxiousness M.D.”
The podcast’s success has led to a landmark three-year settlement with SiriusXM, which secures 143 Studios’ income stream effectively past the standard 60-day advert gross sales cycle. The deal, alongside her books, audiobooks, programs and talking engagements, places the corporate amongst huge gamers in international media. “And I’m simply loopy pleased with the truth that a bunch of, largely, ladies of their early 40s and 50s are those operating it,” she says.
Moving into the sneakers of chief and entrepreneur is one thing Robbins realized from her mom, Marcia Schneeberger. “She simply had this moxie,” Robbins says. “I simply noticed this girl [who] would determine what she wished to do, after which she would simply go do it.”
She recollects the time her mom and a pal sought a financial institution mortgage to open a connoisseur kitchen retailer within the Eighties in Muskegon, Michigan. The financial institution, impressed with the marketing strategy, agreed to offer the 2 ladies a mortgage—however provided that their husbands would cosign. Her mom, who was joint account holder with Robbins’ father on a number of private accounts on the financial institution, “stood up and marched proper over to the teller and promptly began to shut all their accounts.” After that, Robbins chuckles, “they have been more than pleased to offer her a mortgage in a short time.”
Dwelling life as an open ebook
On-line, viewers get a peek into Robbins’ personal marriage and household life, say, in a video of the couple tenting out of their yard or in a podcast interview together with her son Oakley about his anxiousness. She embraces the social media influencer mannequin of self-promotion, showing on social media day by day—usually a number of occasions a day—with a phrase of recommendation or just a momentary thought she desires to share. Generally, the recordings happen alongside mountain climbing trails close to her house in southern Vermont or in her workplace or studio, whereas others she movies whereas she’s getting within the automotive to move to yoga class.
When requested about her willingness to share a lot of her life on-line, she says that whereas she has no intention of turning her life right into a actuality present, “I actually simply love deeper conversations, and I feel we’re all largely going via the identical issues, and we will study from it.”
One such private revelation got here final 12 months on the day of her son’s highschool promenade. He hadn’t made dinner reservations, purchased a corsage or ready for the climate (a rainstorm was headed their approach). Robbins describes how she repeatedly tried to intervene to assist her son whereas he, as youngsters do, resisted any help. Certainly one of her daughters occurred to be house visiting and watched the scene go down with scorn, imploring, “’Mother, allow them to…. It’s their promenade. Not yours.’”
Robbins took the plea to coronary heart and started repeating the chorus “allow them to” to herself. Inside every week, it grew to become a mantra that she says allowed her to rise above the annoyances, inconveniences and outright offenses of day by day life and relationships. She felt the white-knuckled grip she had held on a lot of her life begin to loosen.
Robbins shared the revelation on her social media channels, and the posts blew up instantly. When she began receiving footage of followers’ tattoos that includes the phrase “allow them to,” she knew she was on to one thing huge.
The Let Them Concept
In December 2024, she printed The Let Them Concept, a extremely anticipated launch that particulars how the follow works in day by day life and in a wide range of relationship situations.

Vital to the idea is an equal measure of non-public accountability captured within the accompanying phrase, “let me.” She explains within the ebook, “If you say Let Them, you make a acutely aware resolution to not permit different folks’s habits to hassle you. If you say Let Me, you’re taking accountability for what you do subsequent. What I really like about “Let Me“ is that it instantly reveals you what you may management. And there’s a lot you may management. Your perspective. Your habits. Your values, your wants, your needs and what you wish to do in response to what simply occurred.”
The speculation is one in all enormous private progress for Robbins, whose work has largely targeted on particular person motivation and self-empowerment, and takes her recommendation right into a broader realm of relationships and neighborhood.
“This will probably be my legacy,” Robbins says. “[We’ve] all missed this hidden first step to private progress and alter…. Earlier than you may take management of your individual life, it’s essential to first cease making an attempt to manage everyone else’s.”
It additionally acts as an antidote of kinds to the tendency many people have to match our lives to others in a contemporary world narrated by social media feeds and slick advertising imagery.
“The ability is in studying how you can let folks have detrimental opinions, as a result of that’s what you’re afraid of,“ she says. “That’s why you’re managing every thing. Since you’re making an attempt to ensure no person has a detrimental opinion about you. Properly, what if you happen to simply did the alternative? What if you happen to simply allow them to have a detrimental opinion, and also you then targeted on saying, ‘Let me make selections that make me pleased with myself’?”
A renewed ardour rises in Robbins’ voice when she talks concerning the Let Them Concept and its prospects. “Allow them to, allow them to,” she insists, “as a result of you’ve such an enormous, superb life to dwell, and it’s essential to take all the facility again that you just’ve been giving to different folks…. Use that point and vitality in your desires, your happiness and the imaginative and prescient that you’ve in your life.”
Is letting go of worrying what others assume is a pure subsequent step for a 56-year-old girl who has dug herself out of debt, efficiently raised three youngsters, nurtured a wedding of 28 years, launched a thriving media empire and made her approach into the earbuds of tens of millions of People? Maybe. Nevertheless it’s a knowledge we may all stand to listen to too.
4 issues Mel Robbins desires you to know
Robbins has a message for you: “When you’re studying SUCCESS®, you even have huge objectives and also you wish to do huge issues.” Listed below are her 4 tricks to set you in movement:
- Allow them to: “The extra that you just let different folks dwell their lives, the higher your life will get, and the extra that you just let different folks be who they’re, the higher your relationships are going to be.”
- Flip the script: “One of many greatest alternatives in your life, truthfully, is to discover ways to flip persistent comparability right into a type of inspiration…. Let [other people] encourage you, allow them to educate you, allow them to present you the best way and allow them to present you the method.”
- Observe the method: “Each enterprise has a method. Observe it…. You’ll make it distinctive as a result of you’ll be placing your self into the method. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Observe the method, and use it to your benefit.”
- Get “unstuck“ in 5 seconds: “Give attention to getting off the bed within the morning and simply beginning the day. Merely saying that I’m going to get up each day and get off the bed, and I’m going to do one factor that I’ve been avoiding—and that could possibly be [taking] a 10-minute stroll, it could possibly be journaling, it could possibly be meditating—is an act of defiance. Use the 5 Second Rule (5, 4, 3, 2, 1—go) and it’ll take you a couple of week, and also you’ll really feel fully completely different since you’ll be shifting in a brand new route.”
This text initially appeared within the March/April 2025 issue of SUCCESS journal.
Images by Brian Nevins
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