#103 Mel Robbins: The Trick To Unlocking A Happier Life

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If you've ever felt stuck knowing what to do but not doing it, this one's for you, Mel Robbins. You probably know her as a superstar podcaster, best selling author.

The let them theory.

Today we break down exactly how to rewire your brain to stop self sabotage. Silence the inner critic and finally follow through on the things that matter.

69% of people in the United States would quit their job if they could. If you're the kind of person that resents someone who's paying, you should figure out a business for yourself. You have no excuse right now because you can go to any AI platform and you can type in your problem or your goal. And if you were to follow it and give up your timeline, eventually things will get better. I talked myself out of starting a podcast for probably about six years, and I kept saying, it's too late. You missed the window. That monk, Stephen Bartlett, that guy. I'm not interested in being smart. I'm interested in being useful. Wow. If I can save anybody the heartache I've caused myself, that's an incredible way to live your life. On my deathbed, I will remember that experience of my daughter's.

Oh, fuck.

As one of the highlights of my life.

Hundreds of millions of people know about Mel Robbins. You know, your buddy Mel, your friend Mel. Yeah. And I feel this, like, friendship with you. I also have been so inspired by what you've built. You're a podcaster, you're a businesswoman. You know, you had a corporate career historically, and you've been somebody that almost lost it all and then got it back and did the really uncomfortable thing, which is share it. And so, on this podcast today, I really want to dive a lot into how to help someone change their life.

Yes.

I loved this quote, which is start late, start over, start scared, start again, just start.

Yes.

And I think you've lived it because at one point.

Yes, I have.

In your 40s. Yes. 800k in debt.

Yep.

Business struggling. And now bestselling author, top podcaster, big businesswoman.

Yeah.

What happened?

Oh, my God. Well, can I just blame it on my husband? That'd be okay.

I think that's what we do. I just met mine.

Yeah. My husband's name is Chris as well, by the way.

Oh, yes.

So, you know, the long story short is we failed. That's what happened. We failed. My husband went for his dream and wanted to open a restaurant. And the first one was successful. And then like complete morons, we ignored everybody's advice, everyone's advice. Because when things start to work, you gaslight yourself into thinking they're always going to work. And then you start to go, oh, you know, I don't want to dilute myself. And, you know, we're going to get friends. And so we cashed out our life savings, 401ks, kids, college savings. We have three kids under the age of eight at this point. And we get a home equity loan. That's free money. We find credit cards, cash out. That's free money. And what happened is a very, very, very predictable thing that happens in the restaurant business, which is when you start to expand, you better be rigorous about the formula that's working. They had park and walk downtown, 40 seats. The second location, which seemed like a dream, was a different type of location. It was a strip. It had a big anchor tenant that was very high end. It had a lot of other high end stuff. But a park and walk is a different psychology in a small, in a suburban town than a big strip that people are driving past commuting wise. And it was a little bigger than the first one. And so you know, you all, you know this in hindsight, but so the second location, it was double the cost. It took twice as long to build. So by the time the second location was actually open, there was no money left for the third location, which they had signed a lease that had the percentage of profits, a cost plus lease on it, which that'll kill your retail business. And within six weeks, they knew the second location was a dog. And then on top of it, you know, we live in the northeast. This was in the Boston area. There were five nor'. Easters. Five nor'. Easters. And if you're living in an area where you don't have snow, that means the abominable snowman turns into a blizzard, blows through your town and shuts things down for three days, which means nobody's getting paid, no cash registers are ringing. And by the way, this was 2008. So if you don't know what that Means recession in the US Housing market turns upside down. We have secured everything with our housing market, and by God, we found ourselves in this situation where we were $800,000 in debt, credit cards maxed, the home is upside down in equity, liens hit the house. And if you're somebody that goes into business as a dream, you are a dreamer. You have a big vision for yourself. You've probably made a vision board and written the business plans, and you have this idea of what you think it's gonna be. Nobody makes a vision board and plasters an image of divorce and alcoholism and bankruptcy and a closed restaurant on it. But when it happens, and if you're in business, I'm gonna tell you something. You will fail. You will lose money. It is going to test you. It is the price of entry. It is you against you. And in the hindsight, you will see that you made some dumb mistakes. You can learn from them. And in hindsight, it's very easy to tell this story when you're in the thick of it. Oh, my God, I lost my job. By this point, the kids are 10 and under. Galen's hit the house. Kody. The bills were piled up on the counter. I didn't even open them. And if you've ever struggled financially, you know the certain kind of shame and pain that comes from seeing bills arrive that you can't pay. And so this moment of my life, it was really. It was. The type of stress that you feel when you have no money is a crushing, grinding, unbelievable amount of stress. And here's the other thing. Cody. I knew Chris and his partner, they were doing everything they possibly could. Like, some of it was just kind of decisions that in hindsight, we would have done differently. Other stuff is just life's unfair. Things happen. There's so much out of your control. And I also, in this period of my life, one of the things that I turned on Chris, like, I literally turned him into the enemy. Because when you face a breakdown like this in your life, especially when you know you can't make payroll, you've got vendors showing up and you're hiding in the bathroom, you are coming home and your spouse is angry at you, like, this poor guy. When I think about, like, the fact that I was so scared, and it's easier to be angry than it is to be afraid. And so my story begins at the age of 41. I had been a lawyer. I had done the startup thing. I had mild success. My husband and I, the first business that we ever had, it was a paint Your own pottery franchise. Like, one of those places that you take your kids Totally, completely lost money on that. We even one day walked in and the high school kid that we had, the amount of stuff that goes sideways in a small business, I'm sure you hear it when you're coaching. Your small business owners are at these events. I remember showing up and there was a birthday party going on. And I'm like, where the heck is someone that was supposed to be running the place that afternoon? I walk in, she's having sex in the bathroom with her boyfriend. Like, welcome to small business. Like, this is like, what's happening?

At least it wasn't in front. You know, at this point, you go, thanks for doing it where nobody could see it. Okay.

That's true.

It's a Tuesday.

Yes. They should have locked the door. Like, you know.

Oops, sorry. Let me.

Oh, sorry to interrupt you while I'm paying.

I'm gonna run my store. Exactly. You have to laugh, though, otherwise you die on the inside.

Oh, yes. And so, you know. And I also come from entrepreneurs, so my grandparents are cattle farmers and hog farmers and own machine shops. And my other grandparents owned a small bakery. My dad was not only an orthopedic surgeon, but he invested in PT clinics. My mom had a little retail store and sold, like, had a kitchen gourmet kind of store. And so I just grew in a family where it was in the blood system that you can do your own thing. And then I became a lawyer. And I gotta tell you something.

You know, I had a lawyer, too.

After all that.

Oh, my God.

Okay, well, that's a long story. But basically, I had no idea what to do with my life. So I attached myself like one of those fish that attaches itself to a shark and just followed whoever I was dating to whatever they were doing. And so I ended up going to law school because out of college I got a temp job. And the first place I put me was a law firm. And I didn't know what to do with my life. I hated that job. But my boyfriend was applying to get a PhD in economics, and everybody around me was applying to law school. And so I just kind of jumped into that current thinking I could do something else. But then the current of where you are takes you on to the next thing, and you can slide into the next thing. And I wanna tell you something. I am the world's lousiest employee. I am built to be a business owner. If you're the kind of person that resents someone who's Paying you to do a job, then you should make your own way and figure out a business for yourself. I was the kind of person that was looking for every way to leave before 5. I would put my coat on my chair at the law firm and go out for lunch, and I'd spin my computer around so nobody could see that I wasn't still in the office. Oh, I am the worst. Yes. Cause I didn't like it.

What you're talking about right there is so relatable, I think, especially to people listening today who want to be an entrepreneur. And if somebody is listening and you're like, I want to do all that, but I also hate my job, but my job's terrible, and your boss is the worst, how do you flip your mentality from saying, I hate my job. I want to do the least too. I actually want to build an empire, and maybe I just could.

Oh, well, you def. Well, first of all, not everybody should. Not everybody is built to run a business because you gotta be willing to do it for 10 years. You gotta be willing to accept the risk that comes with stepping out on your own. Like, you gotta be willing to do all the things you don't want to do at work, but do it in your business because it's for you. And so that's like, maybe you're not cut out for this. And that's okay, too. Right now, 69% of people in the United States would quit their job if they could. And what I want to tell you is if you. There's a simple way to know if you should be doing something else. If you're driving to work or logging onto Zoom and you have tension in your body, you have a sense of dread. You don't want to go in. There's your signal. Now the question becomes, what are you willing to work at for 10 years in order to build something for yourself? And if you don't trust yourself to do it on your own, and you're not yet at one of Cody's events or in the coaching program. Cause that's the other thing. Like, the beautiful thing about what you do is Chris and I didn't know what the hell we were doing. And everything was on the line. We didn't have somebody that was advising us. So you're just kind of like, trying to figure it out and scrambling and doing it on your own. And so there's so much more support even today. Cause this happened almost 20 years ago. So that's number one. Number two, you're not stuck where you are you're not stuck in a job. You're not stuck with a boss. Like, that's a lie you're telling yourself you can't quit your job if you have bills to pay. But number one, the first thing you need to do is flip that mindset from complaining about it to saying, I get to work today and I get to pay my bills. And that's a good thing. But I am going to stop wasting my weekends watching television or partying with my friends, and I'm going to use the time on the weekends if I don't like the job that I have to figure out what is the next thing I want to do. That's all you have to do. And obviously, it doesn't happen overnight. It happens over time. And one way that I started to figure out, well, what might I like to do is I started doing experiments. So one experiment, that. And for me, you gotta understand, Cody, I'm a very negatively motivated person. So if I have a problem, I'm very motivated. And one of the first problems that helped me start to figure out what I wanted to do was, you know, I was working a large law firm in Boston. I got pregnant with our first daughter, Sawyer, on maternity leave. I started to have that feeling that you may have as you're going to work, which is, I don't want to go back there. I don't want to ever answer the question, what do you do for a living? With the answer, I'm a lawyer. And so I went to Chris. I'm like, I don't think I can go back to work. He's like, what do you mean you have to go back to work? First of all, we both pay for the mortgage. Secondly, you will drive me, our daughter, and yourself crazy if you're not doing something. And here's the deal. You gotta make $60,000. And now I have a problem. And he's like, and I don't care if you're a barista. That's what you have to make. I've crunched the numbers in order for us to pay our bills. And so now I have a problem. I do not wanna go back to work. I got four weeks before maternity leave is up, and now I gotta find a job that will pay me $60,000. And I'm tell you something. When you have a problem, think about this. If you have a problem that one of your kids is facing, you basically have a PhD all of a sudden in figuring that thing out. But when it's you, you sit around, you're like, and so I networked like crazy because I did not want to go back to that job. And the night before I was supposed to go back for maternity leave, I got offered a job for $55,000 with a new tech startup. This was 1999 in Boston. First big.com bubble. And I had to go into work the next day and they threw me when I walked in the door. A surprise baby shower.

Oh, balls. Oh, no.

And I had to resign. That was harder than breaking up with like a couple people that were like nice guys but not your person.

Yeah. But also, I mean, I think a lot of people like you now run a business.

Yes.

Do you ever want somebody to stay and work for you?

Absolutely not.

That hates their life.

Get out.

What would you do if somebody came to you and said, hey, I love you, I love what we're doing here, it's just not for me.

Great.

You would say, let's, let's tell me what is for you. Should I make an introduction? If you're a good performer, go, absolutely. Let's fill your role. Let's find you something else. Great.

Absolutely.

But it does seem like you have these ideas in your brain about how things are going to work. And we catastrophize and say, it will go terrible. If my boss knows, they'll fire me immediately, then I'll never be able to become a polite again. As opposed to, well, but how would you know if you've never run a business? You don't know that feeling yet.

Yes. And if you don't know, here's another thing that happened. So I kept feeling this nagging pull that, okay, now I'm in the startup space. I think, like, what do I want to do? And I'd always thought I wanted to run a bakery. And if you think you want to run a bakery or open a restaurant before you do that, experiment by getting a part time job in one. Because it took me exactly one Saturday shift of showing up at 5 o' clock in the morning and filling the napkin container and filling and refilling the half and half and the milk and wiping the counters and baking the carrot cake muffins and running the thing and da da da da da, and cleaning up the tables. Realize, wait a minute, I don't want to spend my life smelling like a carrot muffin and doing all this stuff. Why I was interested in a bakery is, first of all, my grandparents had one, so it's in the DNA. But I'm interested in the experience and having a life where I could walk into A bakery where people know my name and I know them. And I can have my carrot muffin and I have time and I can have a meeting there. I want the freedom of the experience. And so all these little experiments that you can do while you're employed. Cause you need to be responsible. You need to pay your bills. The worst thing you can do is quit too soon and put stress on the thing that you are starting is do an experiment and really put yourself in a microwave in the thing that you think you want. And you will feel immediately, whether it's for you or not for you. And so back to kind of the core story. I just continued to kind of bounce from one tech company to another. I then hired a coach. Cause I felt like I was all over the place. To help me figure out what to do, this would have been 2000, 2001. And this coach said, you know, because you're a lawyer and because you've now got this.com experience and because you are crazy intuitive, I think you'd be a great coach. Why don't you let me train you? And so in 2003, I started coaching people. I basically said, I work with successful people who feel stuck. And I started doing it on the side. This is how bad of an employee I was. You ready? So I was working for another tech firm. I would literally tell my boss, oh my God, I'm so. I would tell my boss that I was going to take a call in the conference room and I would be in there coaching somebody on the phone who was paying me $75 an hour.

That's incredible.

And then what I did is I so badly wanted to get out of that job, but I couldn't afford to. And so here's how I did the math. If you're currently straddling something and you're just like, okay, when do I make the leap? When do I make the leap? You wanna create a math equation for yourself that is tied to your psychology. And what I said is, if I can land 10 clients at $75 an hour, and if I can have those 10 clients pay me consistently. So every single week, I'm making $750 on the side at night, in the mornings, hiding in a conference room while I'm lying to my boss like, you gotta do what you gotta do. If I can do that consistently for four months, then I can quit my job. Because I have now demonstrated that I am able to maintain that. And it's not now luck. I've demonstrated something to myself that I'm willing to count on. And that's what happened.

And you kind of pair the luck with the, like. So, you know, you could have probably stayed at the bakery for the same amount of hours.

Yeah. No. One Saturday shift. I'm like, not for me, but it's.

Actually one of the reasons why I think that unpaid work is so, so useful. Because all it is is.

Wait, hold on. It's not unpaid because you're getting paid. Knowledge and experience.

No, totally. I'm just saying, half the time, people are like, I really want to be a podcaster. And then you're like, well, sit and talk to somebody for an hour and see if you actually like it. Even if it's free.

Just try it. Oh, I got a better idea. Take out the voice memo on your phone and start recording and see if you like it, because that's the job.

And put it on the Internet and see how you feel about other people listening to it.

Yes. Because that's the job.

Because that's the job.

Yes.

You know, you talked about this, but you're. I think you're probably considered one of the best life coaches, the biggest life coaches in the world, across all different types of humans. And when I think about.

Is that what people think about me?

I think so.

Really?

I think you're. I think you're a. I think you're. Yeah, I. I saw multiple YouTube channels, titles. Number one life coach.

Is that what it says to me?

Yeah, yeah.

Like on my channel.

No, no, no.

Change that.

Other people.

No. Okay, go ahead.

I love being called number one. I'm fine with it.

Oh, I'll. I'm like, get rid of the life coach. Well, I'll tell you why. Because I feel like all I'm doing is sharing my experience, and I am providing access to some of the best thinkers and researchers and interesting people in a way that's relevant to a normal person's life. And I am sharing the advice that's worked for me. But I feel like if you're somebody's coach, you have an accountability to them and to me. I know that the responsibility for what you do with what I have shared, or the conversation we have put out, by the way, for free. I mean, everything about the things that I do. I mean, what am I selling? You're gonna tell me it's a dumb business model. I have a book, and you don't even need to buy it because I'm gonna tell you exactly how to use what I'm doing.

We have multiple books. How many copies have you sold?

Overall, 8 million 11 months. It's on track to be the most successful nonfiction book in history.

But not surprising, because it's really hard to take the complex things and simplify them. I always feel like if you want to figure out if somebody's really smart and somebody you should learn from, it's not, do they make you feel stupid? It's do they make you feel really smart, even when you talk about really complex things?

And I'm not afraid to be the villain. And the reason why is I'm not interested in being smart. I'm interested in being useful. And if I can save anybody the heartache I've caused myself or the pain I've caused myself or other people, that's an incredible way to live your life. And for me, I spent so long hiding who I was and being embarrassed by my mistakes. People always say, oh, my God, you're so vulnerable. I'm like, I don't think it's vulnerable to talk about what's actually happening. It's way harder to lie and to carry things on your own, because when you carry it silently, it has so much weight. And, you know, I wanna go back to one of the things that you said earlier. You know, I want you to start late. Start what other. There was, like, all these starts. Yes. When we were $800,000 in debt and I had had more job changes than an ABBA cover band does costume changes. I told myself that it was too late. I told myself we had screwed everything up. We would never get out of debt. I would never figure out my career. We would never be able to pay for college. We would never get these liens off the house. I was too old. I had screwed up too much. There was too much of a track record for us. It's over. And there was this moment where you kind of get trapped in this loop with yourself where now you're arguing against everything that you want and you're arguing at the person that you married, and you forget who you married, and you forget that they're trying as hard as they can. They're not meaning to screw anything up. And you being a world class jerk to this person is only making it worse. And I remember this moment, and I didn't wanna be that way. I didn't want to be yelling at Chris. I didn't want to be drinking so much. I didn't want to be hitting the snooze button five times a morning and the kids were missing the bus. I didn't want to feel like I had screwed up my life. But I could not, Cody, make myself do anything. I was frozen in this experience and I knew what to do. And here's the kind of twist on modern life. You have no excuse right now because you can go to any AI platform and you can type in your problem or your goal and it will pretty consistently spit out a step by step plan. And if you were to follow it and give up your timeline, eventually things will get better. Eventually you'll get nearer the thing that you want. Eventually like the things that you need to do work. But if you feel right now like I felt, which is I was so discouraged. If you're discouraged, you won't do anything.

So true.

And so, and it's so easy when you're in business because it's so isolating when you're a entrepreneur. And a major mistake that we make when we launch a business, and this is why I love what you guys are doing here, is we do it alone. And so we don't have anybody to talk to and we carry the burden alone. And I just think, I think about Chris at this moment in time and I think about that famous statue. Is it Atlas of the guy that's got the world on his. Like that is what that poor man felt. And so it's funny you say that because that.

Where is it Kyle? Oh, right there.

Oh yeah, there it is up there.

That's our company logo. Shut up thinking. Except it's a brain. But the, the idea is really that you're holding up, holding up the world. When you decide to build something, it's way easier. Well, I think being broke is hard and getting rich is hard and being an employee is hard and being an owner is hard. It's all hard. But you get to choose which one.

Yes. Or for how long you're in which one.

Yeah, yeah.

Or if you're going to try to do something about which one.

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Idea to Life, head to GoDaddy.com Cody Sanchez and try GoDaddy Arrow today. But I think one of the really cool things about your story is you kind of said it earlier. You're not afraid to be the villain. You're not afraid to tell all the dark spots that we often don't want to tell.

It's how you free yourself of them.

And even with AI today, I think part of the reason it's so interesting having these conversations, what I hope you know, if you're listening right now, that you're taking away from this, is sometimes I think in modern society today, you're told a lot the things that won't help you but might make you feel better in that moment. So if you go to chatgpt and go, I fought with Chris and told him he was a terrible entrepreneur because he did this. And now we're in debt and this happened, you, AI will probably say back to you, you know, you're right. That was inappropriate how he did that. And you are in debt, and it'll validate you. And so instead, we gotta have Mel or somebody yelling at you a little.

Bit to say, well, yes, maybe not. Yeah. And here there was this moment in our marriage where Chris and I were fighting, and he's like, I feel like you don't believe me. And I said, I don't. I do not believe in your ability to get us out of this. And it was the truth. And there was something in that brutal moment of honesty that he needed to hear that I needed to say, because I will say for myself that I was part of the brainwashing that happens to women of assuming that it was my partner's responsibility to pay for my life, that it was his job to be successful so that I could have the things that I wanted. And that if I made money, it was my money for the extra stuff, but his money was our money. And there was something that happened in just saying it out loud that something shifted in me where I started to have this brutal moment with myself that was like, bitch, wake up. Like, if you want things to change, it's your job to change it. Like, you're capable of making money. You're capable of figuring this out. You're capable of getting a job. Stop bitching at him. Stop pointing the fingers and look in the mirror and see that if you can define what you want and you're willing to give up the timeline on it, you can actually make something amazing. Happen. And, you know, I said I was very negatively motivated. Once you admit to yourself this motherfucker's not gonna get these liens off this house. Like, if I wanna keep this house, it's on me. All right, we're selling that car. All right, we're pulling the kids out of town. Soccer. All right, cut the cable. Everybody can't pay for it anyway. All right, I guess I better find not one job, but three jobs. And that's what I did. And so you don't have to be motivated by this big, beautiful, brilliant thing. I wasn't. I wasn't trying to take my kids to Disney or go to buy a beach house or I was trying to pay my bills. And so there are going to be moments in your journey, whether, you know you're gonna be more entrepreneurial at work or you're going to be an entrepreneur in terms of your profession. There are going to be moments where you are in crisis and survival mode. And that was my motivation. The pain of sitting around hoping that somebody was gonna come in and fix this. The pain of drinking myself into the ground as a way to numb all the awful thoughts that finally got harder than just getting my butt out of bed and looking for a job and going for a walk and calling my parents and saying, we're in deep trouble, I need help. And explaining to friends and being kinder to Chris, like, the thing that I had been avoiding that anybody. It's so easy to give other people advice. Oh, my God, you could have heard this. Like, mel, you're an idiot. Get a job. Call the banks. Like, ask for money. Like, do something. Don't do what you're doing because it's not working. But you will have a moment in time where the pain of your situation, finally just avoiding what you need to do is harder than doing it. And so I, for the first, I don't know, however many years, it was just desperation, desperation. Get a job, then get another job, then get another job. The first job I got was $25 an hour as a Saturday morning radio host call in show talk radio station in Boston.

You do have a great voice.

Thank you.

Do you get that a lot?

I do.

Do you think that you would, like, can you be really successful without having a massive failure at some point?

I don't think you can live a life without having a massive failure. You're going to have a massive failure if you're not successful. That's just life. And it's not about what's going to happen to you because horrible Things will happen to you. Unfair things are going to happen to you. They maybe already have. They're going to be amazing things that happen to you. It took me so long to recognize that while I was so busy trying to manage everything and everybody else, and I had lots of opinions and upsetness about the unfairness of this or that or the other, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was missing the fact that it's not about what's happening out there. The power is in here. Your power is in now. What are you going to do about it? Like, through your actions and your attitude, you can make anything better. And that's not toxic positivity. That is the truth. It doesn't remove the very real issues that a lot of people face and in the world today. It doesn't remove historical things that have kept people from gaining wealth. Like, if you look at the way that black families were discriminated against and unable and discriminated against and not able to buy a house, which is the single biggest form of the way we transfer generational wealth to people, and it has not just impacted their grandparents and their parents, but now the generation that is real, that is not fair. It is a reality. And what are you going to do, given where you are at this moment? Because you have to acknowledge that it's not fair, but then acknowledge that you, through your actions and through your attitude and through the fact that you live in this extraordinary moment. And I realize the world's fallen off its axis. There's a lot that feels wrong, but there's so much more information and support and ways to solve problems that weren't even here 10 years ago. And so what I don't ever want anybody to do in business or in life or relationships or mental or health, which. Mental health. I even hate that word. Because you know what mental health is? Happiness.

Yeah.

It's managing your stress. It's not being a dick to people because, you know, you're burnt out. That's what mental health means. Like, we need a better word for it. We got to market it better. Cody.

Yeah. Well, also, why do you think that? I mean, nobody wants to stay in all the negative states, but could you imagine a person who had never experienced the deepest, darkest parts, that hadn't had the biggest highs, that hadn't been so angry and so sad and so upset? Why do we have to feel like we can't feel them? Why do we have to be happy all the time? Where's the context in that?

I think everybody just has this wild array of emotions. And that I think it has a lot to do, if I were to get like intellectual about, has to do with the fact that we are wired to connect with other people. And when you experience any form of social rejection, whether it's walking down the hallway at middle school and, oh, there's the cool kids and I'm the weird one, nobody wants to be the weird one. And the part of the brain that experiences social rejection is the same part of the brain where you experience physical pain. And so you will viscerally move away from any experience where you're the weird one. This is why we're having such a huge problem right now with self silencing. Because especially the younger generation is so worried about feeling cringe. Because cringe, oh my God, I don't even feel cringe. And here's the truth. Cringe is actually doing it right. Because if you're gonna do something where you step out of your comfort zone for the first time, you will feel cringey. That is what it feels like to do something for the first time. And it also feels like social rejection and pain. And so if you feel cringy when you put up your first YouTube video, you did it correctly. If you feel cringy when you go to your first pitch meeting and ask your friends and family for money and you're like, oh God, why did you did it right? Because your body's saying, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And so I feel that people are uncomfortable, especially sharing the lows, because they are afraid of being judged. We had a grief expert on Dan Kessler. He's so awesome and he's hilarious. Who knows that if you're talking about grief, you'd be snort laughing with somebody. And it's the one thing we're all gonna experience. Nobody gets out of this alive. We're all gonna go through it. But he basically said the average.

Time.

Period that somebody reaches out for help for grief after somebody dies or has a living death, like, you know, they have a stroke or Alzheimer's. Five years.

Holy hell.

Five years.

Why?

The shame of feeling like you're supposed to be beyond it, and the shame of feeling like you're the only one. And so that keeps you trapped. And when you hold onto that kind of negativity or that suffering on your own, even if it's like, I can't figure out how to make this P and L work, I'm terrified that I'm not gonna make payroll next month or your little town, your town. Awards are coming out and the person that Secret shopped at your retail store was a real bitch. And now you're like, what are we gonna do? Oh, my God. And then you get frozen. Well, there's people out there that can help you. You can ask for help, but if you hold it all inside, it's gonna get bigger. And so I think we just do it reflexively because nobody wants to be the weirdo. And to me, it just is so liberating to not hold that over my own head.

Yeah.

And it's not that I'm proud of the crappy things I've done. It's not that I, you know, am celebrating the negative things or the crappy things I said to Chris or the ways I've mistreated myself or other people. It's that the only way I can truly move on is if I give myself the freedom. And you release it by being comfortable enough to talk about it.

Well, you also seem to do a really. One of the things that I love about your work online is probably a little funky, which is you really express so many emotions, and you, like, I will never forget you. You know, Oprah sent this. I mean, the way Oprah sends a bouquet. Jesus Christ.

Oh, my God.

That thing was the size of a basketball court. It was beautiful, but it was like, I've never seen a bouquet that big.

Enormous. Thank God we had sliding glass doors in our house. It would not have actually come through.

Just in the driveway.

It was huge.

It's actually amazing. It's like Oprah. Most houses. This is the most. You can't go bigger.

It was like, the size of these two chairs.

It's so funny. But what I love is sometimes, like, I go back to, like, the Taylor Swift lyrics even where, you know, she talks about how it is cool to try, and it is cool to get excited, and if you are doing something incredible, like celebrate it. And I struggle with that sometimes. I, like. I don't know. I just keep going, and I don't think about it, and I don't take that moment to have that emotional.

Okay, hold on a second. Let me just. Let me change this for you.

Oh, I can't wait.

These are the best days. Do not rip yourself off of the opportunity of taking a moment every day and really savoring something that went well.

So how do you savor it? What does that look like in your day?

So tell me something that went well today.

You know what? I had an incredible conversation before you with a guy by the name of Joe Lamont, who is changing. Have you Talked to this guy?

No. Who's Joe Lamont?

Oh, my gosh. He started the. This school here called Alpha School.

Okay.

You should maybe consider.

Oh, wait, I think I've heard about this.

Oh, it's.

He's like chain. It's like a Waldorf meets a this meets a that. And it's by all these entrepreneurs that started it.

So it's two it. He has. His schools across the US are top 1% students in every single course and category that they have.

Wow.

The students learn in two hours a day, AI guided, and the rest of the day is self discovery, plus outings, etc.

I want to go there.

Yeah, me too. That's what I said. And it's actually a little funny because it used to be this hardcore private equity. Nada. I was like, how was your EQ before Joe? And he was like, not high. And now he's the principal of the school. He's a billionaire. Billionaire, billionaire, billionaire. Was it so fascinating to me, though, is I. He said this line to me that I try to sink in. He was like. I was like, well, can we change education in this country? If there's a mom listening that does, like, her kid hates school, she's sitting there thinking, like, crying, I don't want to go to school anymore. It's so awful. Why do you make me do this? But what's the alternative, right? Can we change that in this country? He looked at me and he was like, of course. Absolutely. He's like, give not just me, but all of us a few years, and in two hours a day, we should be able to replace our curriculum and we should let. And then you know what his number one reason is to go to school. He was like, every child should love going to school. They should want to go to school more than they want to go on vacation. I was like, I don't know what kind of fucking school you got, Joe. But that has never existed for me. So anyway, so I had this beautiful conversation with him.

So let me tell you what to reflect on there, okay? That in the middle of running this massive company and like, being the CEO and having all these people whose salaries you can pay and all these people that you are impacting with your work, who are going on to launch businesses and getting the support and the guidance that so many entrepreneurs don't have, you are taking time and you have the time to speak to people that help you grow and think in new ways. And how freaking cool. So cool is it that you have built your life this way and you're self aware enough to know that these types of conversations help you feel more empowered.

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Do you think it's good for you or for anybody? Is it good for you to like show that bodily? Like I see you run out and grab that bouquet? Yes, like, because you can say that in your head and be really cerebral about it. But do you think that people need to show that they're excited about life?

I wish people would. Because right now what people are showing is I'm beaten down by life. And look, there's very real things to be worried about and to feel stress around. There are very real problems that people have. This is not like just smile and your shit goes away. That's not what this is. This is counter programming to the negative programming that the world is giving you and that you are wired for positivity. You're wired for growth. It's not a matter of whether or not you are, quote, spiritual because you are wired for spirituality. They've looked at people's brains and there's circuitry in your brains. Because spirituality by definition is this belief and awareness that there is something larger than you to this existence and that day to day you have moments where you feel connected to it. Spirituality can mean that you're out sitting in a deer stand and you hear a crack in the woods and then through the trees you see a Barred owl. And you just have this moment where you connect to something deeper. Spirituality could be singing a hymn. It could be making love to somebody that you love deeply. It could be being present when somebody dies. It could be just enjoying a cup of tea and taking a deep breath that there's something larger going on. And so to me, why would you want to go through life feeling that the only thing available to you is the heaviness and the disconnection? All of the division you see, which I think is this illusion. I believe that everybody right now is so beaten down and self silencing. But the vast majority of us, 90% of us, want the same things. We believe in the same things. We may disagree on how to get there. Like, is it two hours a day in the school? Is it three hours a day in school? I don't know. How do we pay for it? I don't know. We'll figure it out. But you have to get intentional about allowing happiness back in.

And you do this in a lot of different ways. You've talked about a lot of modalities.

Yes.

You also now go on tour cities all over the world, which I've got to go to one of these because they look so dynamic.

It's a show.

Yeah. Your face right now says it all. But some of these modalities you do live, from what I can tell from videos that I've seen of other people. What do you tell people to do tactically? They want to become more happier if they want to take more action in their life. And they're going, mel, boss me around.

Well, and here's what I'm gonna tell you. This isn't just your buddy Mel telling you this. There's Dr. Judith Joseph, who is. She runs. She's a principal investigator, which means she runs a lab as a PhD medical doctor and professor at NYU. Single mom, runs the only all female medical lab research lab called the Manhattan Behavioral Institute. And she is actually responsible for getting the research done that got the first postpartum drug passed through the FDA by the fda. So they do all these clinical research studies. She has all this new research, just has a huge research paper out about high functioning depression, which is this. You're getting it done, but just the wet blank. You can't feel anything. The prescription from Dr. Judith Joseph is small moments of joy. Small moments where you separate from the heaviness of the world around you and the burden of caring for aging parents and the burden of balancing the bank account and wondering how you're gonna get the loan Paid and figuring out how, like, to get the online marketing stuff done. And can I get my cousin's kid in here to run the Instagram account? Like, I hear you. Yes. How do I get the shop pay integrated into this thing? Like, when are we doing this? Somebody do our Internet strategy because I'm.

Running the cash register, giving me ptsd, right?

And so, like, so, of course, you. You have a. You've invested in all these Laundromats now. Like, Laundromats aren't enough. I got to make them fancy Laundromats, and I got to have an Instagram story, and I got to do that. But if I do that, then I can't go to the bank and, oh, my God, what am I doing? And so can you tell I've lived this shit. So I.

So you probably remember what my. My art, the smells that get me from. Like, I can. You could just put it in front of me. I would be able to smell a laundromat from anywhere, I bet. Fucking beagle.

Yes. And so I. What the hell is that? Say, is this menopause brain? What's happening?

You were talking about these small moments.

Oh, yes. This is where you are defiant in a world that wants to steal your joy and attention. This is where you say, no. And one way you can do this. It's gonna sound crazy. So if you are somebody that is working for somebody else, you got your big dreams. You're listening to this, or you're just getting started, or you're in the throes of like, oh, my God, all I do is work. Imagine a world where you could take 10 minutes and eat your lunch and maybe, oh, my God, go outside and eat your lunch. And if you're a nurse, you're now going, I could never do that. I would get fired. No, no, you do have a legal lunch break, but you don't take it. I can't step. You could step into the storeroom and just take a moment and sit down. Another thing you could do is if you don't even remember when you were happy or joyful, I want you to either go through your photos, just scroll back and find some photos that remind you of when you felt a little happier. And then write down a list. What did my life look like? What time did I wake up? What was I eating? How often did I see friends? And you'll notice your life holds the map back to moments of happiness you already know. You just don't do those things. And then the job becomes, oh, wait, I haven't painted in 10 years if I pick up a paintbrush. No, it doesn't pay your bills. It does something just as important, though. It pays something forward inside you because you start to feel a little bit more like yourself again. And there's also research around time management that, believe it or not, if you feel like you have no time adding in something, even though that sounds bananas, because I have no time. Mel, what do you mean, add in something? Add in one thing. Like if you used to sing at choir and you haven't done it in five years because now you're running five laundromats and you're worried about your social media accounts, go back and do that on a Thursday night, and that experience will fill something up inside you that makes you feel like you're actually a little bit more in control, which, oddly gives you more clarity about what you wanna focus on. There's so much research around this. So that's one thing. Second thing I would tell you to do is wake up every morning, this is so cheesy, and say, today's gonna be a good day. No matter what happens today, I'm gonna make today a good day. You could be going to a funeral and you could say to, you know what? I'm going to this funeral, and today is still gonna be a good day because I'm gonna show up for this family. And that simple thing changes the setting in your mind and helps you become more intentional about spotting moments where you can have a good day. Another specific thing I want you to do, and none of you will do this, but those of you that actually take this advice will make more money than everybody else that's listening and watching right now. Put your phone in the bathroom when you go to bed. You will not do it. I know you won't, because you're like, well, what do they do? But they need a problem. Here's what I want you to imagine. When you wake up in the morning, I want you to imagine the banker that you own money to. I want you to imagine the hacker that's been trying to break into your bank account sitting in the corner. I want you to imagine every business that you think is doing it better than you. Their marketing team is in there. I want you to think about the side of politics you hate and all the news outlets from that side sitting in there. And I want you to think about, like, people gossiping about you over here. Because when you wake up in the morning, as an entrepreneur, this is the only moment of the day, the only moment where you have Any fighting chance to actually think. It's the only moment where you have any chance to put yourself first. You have to fucking fight for those 10 lousy minutes. Because the second you pick up the phone, the hacker, the competition, the people gossiping about you, it's all in there. And you're not even out of bed. And so if you want to know why you are so stressed out and you can't sleep, it's because that fricking thing is right next to you and you're laying in bed and you're pouring it into your brain before you're even vertical. If you want to make more money, you have to fight for the first 15 minutes of the day. I call it the Hot 15. The Hot 15. I have built my business 15 minutes at a time. The Hot 15. And I go, I'm not morning person. I can't bullshit. Don't tell me that story. Because you can't think clearly at night either because you're exhausted. And you know, it used to be in business that the second you walked into your business day is over, all the plans out the window. Because now you're just in reaction mode. So the only chance you had was driving over. Like, I can think about what the one thing. And we'll get to the one thing rule. I know that's a Whatever His Name Is Keller book, but here I'm gonna tell you how to use it. So just hear me out on this. Imagine if you could carve out those first 15 minutes. And before you let the world into your brain and before you let everybody else's emergencies become your priority, you carve out 15. I don't even care what you do. You could have some fancy ass morning routine or not if you just for 15 minutes, I'll even give you this. Just lay in bed. Lay in bed. And here's what I want you to think about. What is the one thing that if I made progress, I don't want you to get it done. Because to do lists are just wish lists. That's all that they are. What's the one thing that if I made progress on this, it would be a good day? The one thing that matters to me. Now here's the catch. And this is why I am successful. I taught myself to do it before I looked at the phone.

So you actually wake up, take action on the one thing, and don't touch your phone until you.

No.

How long? How many years?

God, I don't know. For as long as I can remember. I mean, like, probably at least consistently the last five years.

And is it like an 80% of the time every time, or is it 100% of the time every time?

It's like 80%, five days a week. Like, I give myself weekends off, but I do still think, like, what's the one thing? And lots of times, like, God, I gotta get that photo album done from the trip that we took for my dad's 80th birthday to Peru. That was 18 months ago. Christmas is coming. Oh, my God. And then I do nothing. But I thought. But I. No, I do something.

I literally take some action. You don't have to complete the whole thing.

Yes.

Just take a little bite of the.

I literally might send a text to my brother and say, dude, we gotta get that group photo going. Done.

Positive momentum compound.

Just one. Just one. Because here's the thing I want you to understand. What makes you feel out of control is that you're not progressing the thing that matters to you. And so you start to resent your business and the people that work for you and your customers because their emergencies become your priority. And now you're not getting that new AI thing done. Now you're not getting that kid hired to help with Instagram. Now you're not doing that thing you really know you need to do. Because the interesting thing about the stuff that matters is not going anywhere. So you can allow it to haunt you, or you can really understand this. Hot 15. So, for me, I actually have a morning routine. I'm disciplined enough over time, and discipline's the wrong word. I understand myself, and I set traps for myself. Like, one of the reasons why the phone is not next to me is because I am a lazy person. And I will pick it up. And so I have to put it walking distance. And now I've solved two problems, Cody. Because I don't like to get out of bed either. So the alarm's ringing across the room. I gotta get my butt outta bed to go turn the thing off. And then I flip it over. Because I've also told my family, if there's an emergency, call me. People will text you all night long. Cause they're bored and they have bad sleep habits and they want to vomit their stress on you, but they only call you if there's an emergency.

That's so good.

And so now you can sleep at night because you know if somebody's in trouble, they'll call you. If something's going on at work, they'll call you. I don't need to check my phone, because if it's really important, they'll call me. I keep my phone down. I make my bed right away. Then I typically go into the bathroom. Cause I have to go to the bathroom. And then I brush my teeth. I think about while I'm brushing my teeth, what is the one thing that matters to me today? I do this every single day. And then I look myself in the eyes, as cheeseball as this is, and I high five myself into the day. This is a bit of neuroscience and the reason why this is called neurobics. Lots of research around this. So the fastest way to change a thinking pattern is to marry it with an unexpected physical action. So there's a lot of research around writing with a non dominant hand or standing on one leg while you're doing something else for your entire life. A high five. Like I don't ever high five somebody, you know, I'd be like, I fucking hate you. Like I hope you fail, loser. Like forever. This has been go get em. I believe in you. Brush it off. You got this. And so you don't say a word, you look at yourself in the eyes and as you high five the mirror, you are taking the physical lifetime association with that and aiming it at how you feel about yourself.

You know, it's so good because you know, at least me, I'm similar. I need a bunch of. I will come up with every excuse on the Sun. I literally had this incredible neuroscience on the podcast scientist on the podcast the other day. And my brilliant world changing question was, I'm getting older, my hip hurts, I can't fucking stretch. I can't. I don't know why, but in the evening, I cannot make myself stretch. Like I can do billion dollar deals. I could do this. I can't get on the floor. This is the dumbest thing ever. And I had her help me.

What'd she say? I wanna know.

She basically said, why are you doing it at the end of the day when you're completely depleted, you've made all of the decisions throughout the day and you think that you're some sort of superhero that's gonna have more in the tank when you don't. You're tired, it's cold in the house, you know, it's dark.

The cold and the dark. Yes.

She's like, why would you think that that would work for you? And I was like, well, take it easy. You know, I don't know why, but I did it. That I tried for years. She's like, so we're going to switch it in the morning. And she's like, and you're going to text one person every morning and you're going to tell them you're doing it. That's it. And she goes, don't do 15 minutes. Do two. Which is like, I love your. Well. And then there's one other thing that you talk about, too, that has helped me a lot, too. You know, when I had a really. I got divorced previous to my husband. I was married before, and I got married really young and takes two to tango. Both of our faults. But my decision to divorce.

Yep.

It was probably one of the hardest decisions I've ever made because I made a promise to a human, and I said forever, and then I took a vow. And I'm religious. And at that time, I was maybe a little less than. But I was. Oof. And Latina mom and all the things. I mean, I think she cried harder, actually, when I got divorced than I did, But I was pretty devastated. And I couldn't find my happiness, Mel. Like, I just. I'm a happy motherfucker. Yeah. These guys know I'm running around here. We have long days. I'm going. It was gone.

We would be in a lot of trouble.

Oh, God. This place would be a.

You know how I feel about you. I'm like, mad you don't live near me.

Same dude. I'd be so. I'd be stretching like a motherfucker. If you live near me.

Let's go.

5, 4, 3, 2, stretch. You know? But I kept a happiness list because I had so few moments where I felt any happiness that when I did, I just wrote them down and it would be like, that's a pansy. Like, I love pansies. They look like little happy faces to me.

Oh, I love that. The little faces. The faces.

I don't know what it is.

I love that. Yes.

So I'd write like, I saw a pansy today. You know, the littlest things. And over the years, I've kept this list. And sometimes I'll have a little moment, and then I'll go back, like when I. And I'll say one thing. So do I buy a $5 pansy at the garden center? That would make me happy. You know? And so I love the word that you said, which is I need hacks to trick myself into it.

Yes. And here's the next one. When I walk into the closet, I have laid out my exercise clothes. Like, I have geranimals or whatever those things were that I used to wear from Sears. I have to step over it and ignore it.

Yeah. That's good.

And so no decision there it is like a middle finger on the floor. Pull it on. And now I go straight out the door with my dogs and I take a 10 minute walk. And while I'm on the walk I think about what's the thing I could do that advances the thing. And I still have not looked at my phone most mornings on a workday. Yes.

Until when?

Well, if it's a good day, I will then do what I need to do right after the walk because I then drink a big mason jar of water before I have my coffee. And a lot of the things that I work on in that Hot 15 are longer term projects. Like this Peru photo album really nagged me for a long time. I finally got it done. It took like seven hours on a Sunday. It turned out great, but that was a lot. And anyway I, I typically use the Hot 15 for something that is really a longer term thing. Like I really started working on the concept and the let them theory book in that window. A lot of operational stuff I will work on in that window. There are like, if I'm screwing around with AI and trying to learn more and how to use it at a more advanced level, you know, I'll get on Microsoft Copilot and use it then. But it really, really has made a huge difference. Cause it taught me that you don't need a lot of time. And oftentimes if you can get yourself going, you will keep going.

Yeah, it's true.

And so it's really, really, really important. Now of course there are weeks, like production weeks where everything's on fire. I'm in Boston for five days. My EA is texting me at 5:30. Are you up? Plotty's in a half an hour. And I'm like, oh my God. Okay, I'm up. Like, you know, like. And so it's out there. But here's the thing. I might respond to Lynn, but I don't look at my phone for 20 minutes. Yeah. And now I'm back. I make my hotel. I make my bed in a hotel room. Yeah. Because like it's how I feel like myself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That way I feel like myself everywhere that I go. And so I'm still in my mind thinking about the thing. And so then once you pick up the phone, here's what I want you to understand. You are now in what I basically call phase two of the day. Five phases to a day. Phase one is from the moment you wake up to the moment you pick up your phone. That's why I want you to think about the Hot 15. This is where you protect your time and energy. Phase two is now you're in reaction mode and you are getting paid to react. This is what you're doing. Phase three is where you go out of that. Da da da da da da. And now you're starting to transition because we all know from three to five, if you're an employee and you work kind of typical hours, you're like, meh, I'm sort of out of here. We're not doing a lot of.

Not a contrarian thinking, but everywhere else.

Yeah. You know, like, just like, sort of. I'm just sort of like. Right. And then from phase four is all the stuff you do for life. Cooking dinner, being with family, all this stuff. Phase 5 is when you stop looking at your phone and wind down to bed.

What do you do? Read a book.

What do I do? Okay, so I'm a big bath person.

Yeah, me too.

And I typically. I will. On the work night weeks, I have a drink because it's like my one vice. That and weed. Like, I will. Well, I live in Vermont. I mean, come on. And so it's the one thing that, like, I did not have a drink last night. My brain was going for probably an hour and a half. I can have one sip of a Manhattan or a gin and tonic or a margarita. We're here in Texas. One sip, my brain's like, okay, we're done. It's the weirdest thing. And I'm done shaming myself about it. It's just my thing.

Me too. Mezcal wine.

Also. I do the Mezcal. It's a little too smok. Like a smoky Manhattan.

Wow.

Don't like the smoky tequila. I don't know what that's about.

We'll give you some different options. But I think the.

Oh, but let me tell you one more thing. Cause this is unbelievable. This is fucking unbelievable. Okay, Wait till you hear this. So you know how a lot of people have gratitude lists?

Yeah.

Steal this. Have a piece of paper next to your bed and write down every to do that. You didn't get to.

That sounds awful.

Oh, no, it's amazing. Wait till you hear what you're doing.

Okay, fine.

You're closing tabs in your brain. See, your brain runs on open loops. And if you had something like, oh, I gotta. One of the reasons why people have a hard time falling asleep is you're ruminating because your brain is trying to keep the loop open because the tabs aren't Closed. There is incredible research that has just. It's life changing. If you write down all the things you didn't get to your brain's like, oh, Cody's got on a piece of paper, we can close the loop.

Great point.

And research shows that doing that is as effective as a sleeping pill. That you fall asleep between 8 and.

10 minutes faster that pharma stocks dropping everywhere.

Yes. And then check this out. You don't have to worry because the list is right there.

I like that a lot.

Isn't that great?

Such a good point.

Because you know what?

I didn't realize it, but I do two outsourcing things to you, which is I have assistance now but. But back when I had my first one, which isn't that expensive to get all things considered. But like for a 1500 bucks a month you can get a virtual assistant. That's how I first started.

Okay.

And if I don't, if I don't write something down in the moment, it's gone. Like if you tell me your birthday, I'm going to forget it. If you tell me I august 24th.

Because I know you're going to be.

One of those friends that remember it's.

Only because you want to know why? Yeah, because it relates to me.

Yeah.

If it was some random ass I would have like don't care. I'm just kidding.

Don't do I don't care. I would prefer you didn't because then I'll feel bad when I forget yours. But I send a little note to my assistants and I just have them put it on my to do list.

I love that.

And so I do it pretty non stop. And now I figured out how to delay send on texts. You know how you can do send later so I'm not the dick emailing them at 11 when I can't. Whatever. And it's been a game changer. And I'll even say I'm stressing about this. Like can you just put one hour on your day tomorrow and you stress about this stuff instead? Like just kind of like put it somewhere, do something with it. Because you can't really transfer stress. She's not gonna internalize it like I do, but she'll be like, hey, I got that. I know you're worried about the doctor stuff. I've got it. I'll handle that for you. I'm gonna schedule it from three to four. And so I've never thought about having a little thing by my bed, but at first it gave me a panic attack. That idea. Well but now it makes sense.

This came from, I can't remember, the neuroscientist that just shared this on our. With the research involved. But it was just so counterintuitive. But once they explained the open loops of your mind and that this allows your mind to go, oh, I don't have to keep this open. She's got it.

You know, one thing I'm curious about with you.

Tell me.

You've had all this success now, and sometimes I think. People think, oh, man, when I have all this success, it's gonna be amazing. I'm gonna figure it all out, and all the negative emotions are gonna go away.

Right.

Do you still get, like, jealous? No. What?

No.

How do you not get jealous anymore?

I'll tell you because. Well, first of all, I understand jealousy. So jealousy is a very important thing to feel because you can only feel jealous of something you want.

Yeah.

Like, just think about it. I have zero interest in a yellow Lamborghini. If somebody drives past me in a yellow Lamborghini and a bunch of people.

Like, oh, God, look at that car.

I'm like, what car? The Hyundai over there. Like, what are you talking about? I don't want one. And so when you understand that jealousy is blocked desire, and what is it blocked by? It's blocked by your belief that you can't have it too. And when the settings in your mind are that beautiful white kitchen with the marble countertops are for other people. But I can never have that. You will feel jealous if that is meant for you. And I struggled with so much jealousy. I was that friend that wanted to be happy for my friends. I remember when we were struggling financially. Oh, my God. Have you ever had a friend? You're probably that. You probably have been that friend for people. But I don't mean that in a mean way, but have you ever had a friend who all of a sudden, like, moves to the nicer town or all of a sudden goes from renting an apartment to, like, some house? And they inevitably invite you over, and they open up the door, and as you're driving up the driveway, you're like, how the hell do they have this much money? And then they open up the door and they hand you the glass of wine, and you start to grip the wine glass as you're getting a tour other house. Hey, Cody, I'm happy for you. I was so happy for my friend because I love my friend, but I was so sad for me because her house looked like a fucking restoration hardware store. And then we rounded the corner and that bitch. She had the white cabinets with the marble. I never should have shared my Pinterest.

Board with that bitch. She stole my cabinet.

God, that's.

Oh, my God.

And then you get in the car, and then you basically drink all night. You got that smile.

Oh, no, that smile.

That smile. I was so happy. Were you? Then you get in the car, and if you're like a complete, emotionally immature jerk like I am, you turn to your husband and you're like, why couldn't you have been in finance? Why did you have to like people? Why are you a nice guy? And poor Chris is like. He's like shrinking like a turtle. He's like, I don't know. I don't know why I didn't go in. It would have made things easier. Oh, my God. This was me every day, all day long.

God, I need to meet this guy.

I was in radio in 2008. It was the first job. I got $25 an hour, $800,000 in debt. I loved that job because I could literally talk to strangers and not think about my problems. And I felt less alone. And the thing about radio that's so cool is it's one to one. And I fell in love with it. And as my career really started taking off, which would have been 2015, I'd suppose podcasting started. And I remember seeing it, and I always wanted to get back into radio. And I just kept telling myself, no, no. I talked myself out of starting a podcast for probably. If I'm 50, I'd say probably about six years. And I kept saying, it's too late. You missed the window. What are you gonna say? That Monk, Jay Shetty, Stephen Bartlett, that guy? Like, I. Like you stole it from me. You know, I got nothing to say. Who's got like, oh, well, they've all, you know. You know, like, this is what you tell. Oh, there's another restaurant in my. My. My sister's. I can't possibly become a real estate agent. My sister's. She's gonna think I'm. Of course you're copying her out. And so I would feel jealousy. I would see an episode release. And I was. Jay and I are friends. We're in a mastermind. We were just texting yesterday about something. He's a very, very, very close friend of mine. And I was like, I am so jealous. I'd see my buddy Rich Roll Fucking Rich. You know, he started a podcast.

Incredible hair.

Yes. Like, I. What am I going to say? And so I just kept talking myself out of it. And the jealousy, it's so amazing. The jealousy is a signal from something deep inside you. And the more jealous you are, the more it is meant for you. And what I want you to do is I want you to ask yourself, go beneath the surface. What is it about it? Like, if you're jealous of a friend's marriage, what is it about the marriage that is the thing that you really want in your life? What is that? And here's the truth. If you look at jealousy as a gift from your deepest dreams and from what is meant for you, and you understand that there is not a human being that can block your way, you do that for yourself. Just because somebody else has it doesn't mean you can't create something that's proximate to it for yourself. And when you block yourself from doing the work to create the things that you want, from doing the work to change your health or change your relationship, you will become more and more jealous. Because jealousies block desire. And the thing for me is that I don't feel jealous. And the reason why is if I even get a ting that feels more like a pull now, I just go, oh, I gotta, like, work on that. That's it. Like, every time around, our buddy Steven Partlet, I'm like, what tech are you using? Like, I don't.

What.

Okay, hey, guys, we gotta do, like, get the thing under the table that he's got. Yes. And then I can't. I never remember to click it. And then everybody's like, you've clicked it a thousand times. I'm like, oh, that was my knee. I'm sorry. Like, I just can't pay attention like Stephen does. So I. So I. But I see it as signals. I don't. Because here's the belief that I now have. I believe that most things in life that you want are there for the creating. That there is an infinite number of white kitchen cabinets. And if your friend is a bitch because you have the same cabinet color, let her be a bitch about it. Just take note that that's kind of who she is. That's okay. Let her. But don't block yourself from going for the things that you want in life. And, you know, that period of my life taught me something important, because it happened when Chris and I were struggling. It happened when I had told Chris, I don't believe in your ability to get us out of this. And that anger and that fear fueled me to go, well, I'm going to have to do it. No one's coming. It's up to Me, I'm doing it. And I was resentful. But I bumped into my ambition. See the reason why I could say to Chris, I don't believe in your ability to fix this is because he's not a corporate guy. I'm married to a guy who's a death doula. He's a spiritual psychologist. He created men's retreats. Like he is such a heart led guy. He is so unmotivated by. He would live in a yurt if I allowed him to, which I will not. I mean we live in Vermont, that's the closest and I love to camp. I just don't wanna live in a tent. But he is a true of the spirit and of nature person. And so I think I instinctively knew that he wasn't gonna get us out of it. Cause he's not built for that. What he was built for is actually grounding and healing our family in the aftermath of it. What he was built for is just is staying home and being the on call parent. When I was on the road 150 days a year because when I first started getting paid to spend, we still had liens on the house. You know when I gave that TEDx talk that went crazy viral is the first time I ever talked about the five second rule. This five, four, three, two, one move. And I had liens on my house. I was $800,000 in debt as I stood on that stage. And when people started to pay me, I said yes to everything. And you will have that happen in your career. You will take the world's worst deals because you have to. Because your highest value is actually security, safety and family. And so I said yes to all kinds of things that I would never say yes to now because it was aligned with my mission. Pay off these bills, get my family secure. Like I was not trying to be anybody. I was trying to solve a problem that I had. And as I got better and better and more and more and more successful, I just became much, much better at the business side of it and what I've learned and I say this to in every partnership meeting I have, you know that we get into like with these massive Fortune 10, Fortune 100 brands. I'll be talking to their CEO or their CMO about a project we're going to do together. And we'll go like, look, I'm not talent, I'm a businesswoman. And that's how I need you to relate to me. And that is like I discovered through that experience of being so in debt that I freaking love Building things. I love the business. I love the tech. I love being the first mover in something. I love figuring things out. I love being the person people are watching as an example, not because of my ego, but because it means I'm doing something that's making an impact.

Well, I mean, one of the first things you said to me when you walked in here really resonated with me that the best builders in the world have, I think, which is you really care about the people you serve. And I'm not, like, paying you lip service.

No.

Because you came into my office and you said, hey, you really want to do this podcast thing? You have to obsess on who are you talking to? And then you told me, you know, at my podcast, here is who we are talking to. And then you're like, and remember, they're giving you an hour of their day. They don't have it. They could give it to anybody. They're giving it to you. What are you doing with it?

Yes.

And you use the word maniacal. You said, we are maniacal about giving that person value.

Yes.

And then we talked about all the things you won't do that could make you a ton of money and even more famous.

I don't want to be famous. Like, I. That's. That is not why I got into this.

Like, you want to be a famous life coach.

No, fuck you. No, I literally, that's the. Like, it's an occupational hazard. But I live in a town of 3,000 people in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. I live on a mountain, and I look straight down a valley, and I do not see human beings. And I am a real small town. I shop for my groceries in a store where you can buy Carhartts and feed and fishing poles and fertilizer. And so I love just being a normal person. And when your success comes after you almost lose everything that matters to you, you do not forget what matters to you. And so to me, I am motivated on the business side by, like, one rule I have in business is don't ever take a deal that you will be pissed off about in success.

Yeah.

Always bet on yourself. Unless you have to pay your bills, then you take whatever deal you can until you can strike better deals. But always look at the long tail. And so one thing that I think a lot of people don't understand about the extraordinary success that I have built is I own all my content. Publishers do not own my books.

I do know what.

Oh, yeah. I do joint ventures. And I've severed all my audio rights with 8 million.

Fuck. That was so small. But that's a big bet. Because if people don't know, why would you take.

If you don't like.

If one was the advance, do you think they advance? No, but if they would have offered you millions for. Luckily, who cares?

They would have paid me pennies on the dollar. An advance is a loan for your ego with shitty math. That's when it advances.

That's good.

It is. And there are writers out there that need the advance to be able to pay for their life. Take the advance and then be smarter about your next deal and make sure book number two does not have that attached to it. The second thing I will tell you, though, is you must sever your audio rights on every single book you do. An audiobook is like having the world's single best rental property at a beach town. And there's no cost.

Yeah.

100%. Because it's one digital file. And it will be around in perpetuity.

And it's pure value. Like, how are they not gonna. If your audience is paying 15, 20 bucks for an audiobook, and there's no.

Cost to creating the audiobook and no cost to shipping or stocking or storing or returning or warehousing an audiobook, why would you give somebody that did nothing?

I feel that intensely.

Yes.

It's all about ownership and betting on yourself.

Yes.

Which I think, like.

Which. Which I was forced to do because nobody would give me a book deal.

Yeah.

In 2017. Yes. Wow.

And that book sold over a million copies too, didn't it?

Yes. Largely because of the audiobook.

Fascinating.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's how I discovered that by mistake.

My mom, Laurie, is a giant Mel Robbins fan and has read Let Them and gave me your first book and then gave me Let Them after I had already read it. And I think one of the coolest things for anybody who hasn't read them, my favorite part. You're not very. People make books that are so long these days, and you kind of make the book only as long as it needs to be. To give you as many examples and instances.

Because I can. Because I'm controlling the deal.

Right.

I'll give you another thing. So here's another thing to think about. So make sure if you have a physical product, that you really think about the product in the environment. Yeah. Like when we did, for example, the. And I think about this obsessively about everything. So I think about the thumbnail of the Mel Robbins podcast as a consumer product.

Yeah.

So what does that thumbnail look like on Spotify? What does it look like on Apple? What does it look on somebody's car display? What does it look like on YouTube? What does it look like on the television screen where 30% of our audience on YouTube is playing it on a big screen? What does it look on an iPhone? And we photoshopped our top runners into those environments. It's why we didn't end up going with a black background, which looked better, but in the environments it didn't pop. And so the book, the design of the book was very simple. The test was this. If you were walking down a beach half a football field away, could you go, oh, that's that book.

Whoa, what a good fucking idea.

And so think about the environment in which you are trying to break through and is it recognizable? Because we over complicate everything and understand that people are so overwhelmed right now that the more that you can simplify something and the more that you can be useful and people can get it like that, the more successful you're going to be.

I'm dying to come to this tour of yours.

You're coming.

I want to know, give me like one instance of like, what is one of the magic moments at Mel Robbins? Like, what is a moment you remember about the show?

Well, I should say that this was one of the hardest things I've ever done because we hired the person that we ended up hiring is the person that does tours for like Kendrick Lamar and the Super Bowl. So they're just singing at a different level. And I get into the opening call and Charlotte's here in the room with me, who works on my team, who's one of our senior managers who was part of the tour core team. And they're like, yo, you know, you could do a speech cause people are coming to see you. Or you could do something that nobody has ever done in spoken word. They've never done this in a podcast tour. They've never done it in comedy. They've never done it, like in any kind of spoken word book event. I'm like, well, what's that? They're like, you could put on a show. I'm like, well, what do you mean? They're like, well, instead of telling everybody, what if you brought it to life? What if you didn't tell the story of being in the bed? What if we got you in a bed and you acted it out? What if we brought to life the whole process of the book? What if we made it an actual show with sets, with everything? And I was like, yes, I had no idea what they were talking about. And of course, because I have made a living doing speeches, which, by the way, speaking is, you have an hour, it's somebody else's event. You don't have to fill the seats, you don't have to put on the event. You have an hour, you show up, you do your thing, you leave. So I was so dumb because I'm like, oh, I got this. Oh, this is easy. No problem. And meanwhile, Charlotte, my daughter Sawyer, and two other members of the team, they were working with the. They're like, putting all. We did a four day workshop where we mapped, oh, this is gonna be great. I got this. I got this. They started putting together the animation deck. Now I'm thinking clicker, PowerPoint.

I'm going to.

We show up for rehearsals. We have. First of all, I had never, ever, ever done my own events. I just. I was kind of honestly nervous people wouldn't show up because I thought, I've never gone to a podcast tour. Who shows up for a podcast? Like, I don't even see the audience. People like, oh, they're gonna show up. I'm like, really? Maybe the venues are a little too big, guys. Like, this was me. This. All the shows sold out in 20 seconds.

That is so insane.

It was insane.

And there are like thousands of people in the audience.

Oh, yeah. Every venue was between three and five thousand people. Jesus. And I was so pissed off because I did not understand that you had to request that they turn off dynamic pricing. And there was such a surge, like, now you understand as a consumer what a racket this is. There was such a surge of interest that all of a sudden what happens is all the bots buy them and the ticket prices go up. And, like, I was so angry at how expensive the tickets were because of the demand and then the resellers and all the. That I came on the first call afterwards and I said, I'll be damned if somebody's paying $1,000 in coming to this thing and they do not have the show of their life. And so we invested in three documentary style cameras. We built one of these screens that is the quality of what you would see at Coldplay. So that if you were in one of the seats on the balcony, that it felt like I was right there. It mattered so much to me because I was mortified that people were paying this kind of money. And we have this huge confetti explosion. Because my favorite part of the Coldplay concert is when they explode all this confetti. And I had Paid for those seats that are the first rung, but we weren't on the floor. And you're, like, reaching and pulling a groin muscle to try to get one confetti thing. And so I'm like, we are gonna shower this place. We are gonna rain it down with confetti. If you're in the chute, we got fans. Cause I wanted it to just feel like this sensory thing. And we lost so much money on this thing. Even though events are so hard. Oh, my God. Even though we sold it out, I made every mistake of the world with merch. It was just so dumb. Like, oh, my God. My merch went to the place where. You know, I always wonder when somebody wins a Super Bowl. You know, the other team had the hats printed out too.

Oh, yeah?

Where do those go? Well, they go wherever our shirts went, like, because we didn't sell them. So I. So I. So anyway, I. But, but. So we get to rehearsals. I think Charlotte is about to have ptsd. We get to rehearsals, and I'm like, what are all these people doing here? There were 35 people there. There were cases of stuff like. I'm like. And everyone's panicking. I'm like, we got this, guys. And then I realized I'm like, just show me the clicker. We'll start working on the slides. They're like, there's no slides. You have a 47 animation deck that is fully stacked that can't be changed. And Jason over there cues it based on you hitting the lines of the show. You don't know.

Oh, God. Sounds awful.

It was awful. And so Charlotte was forced to create a makeshift teleprompter because I didn't know my own show. Cause I'm a me too. And then, of course, I drag my two daughters into this who both don't want to do it with me. And what could be more fun than to work out your mother daughter trauma on a stage as a comedy skit with your two daughters who don't want to be there and you don't know your own show.

Oh, my God.

Uh huh. So basically, I stayed up all night memorizing it. If you walked into my dressing room the first two nights of that show, it would have smelled worse than any porta potty at a construction site. The stress, diarrhea. I have never, like, I make a.

Living in a porta potty at a construction site.

Yes, I have. Yes, I have.

We did a video there. And that is a smell, Mel.

Yes. You got to pull up your pants. You like have to brace like you don't want to touch it. You have to hold your knees when.

The barrier gets broken. When you have to suck the stuff out is really. That's just. That's the ticket right there.

So.

So come to the show, everyone.

Oh, my gosh.

So.

No, but. But. So the first night, it was so awful because I've never spoken at night, so I didn't even. It didn't even occur. People would be drunk. They're coming for a good time. Half the people were dragged there on a date night and don't even know who the hell I am.

Oh, my God. Yeah.

And then, like, it just was one thing. And then we didn't put mics out into the audience, so we didn't have a return. And we had never done a full rehearsal. Cause I didn't know the show. And so we get out there, the lights were too high. We could see everybody. I don't know the show. My daughter's like, this sniff is a penguin. Every joke we're cracking that we thought sounded great. Above the garage and virtual Vermont, we can't hear anybody laughing. So we were looking at each other like, this sucks. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This is terrible. Like, I'm acting like, this is horrible. So we walk off stage. The whole crew's like, that was amazing. I'm like, I quit. I'm gonna do an Adele video. This is the worst thing I've ever done in my entire life. I stayed up that night. I had three martinis. I stayed up till 1:30 in the morning. I was so upset. I'm like, I'm making a video. We're canceling the show. We're not ready for this. So I was like, I'm not doing that again. We go to bed, and I wake up and I'm laying in bed. I did not follow my Hot 15 that morning. I called my husband hungover, and I started crying. And I said, honey, it was so terrible. Like, it was so awful. Sawyer hates it. The kids don't want to be here. What have I done? Why didn't I just do a speech? And he's like, mel, get your fucking ass out of bed. And you get back to that theater and you go learn your show.

Oh, I like him.

And there was something. And at some point, you just have to rip the band aid off.

And.

Do the thing and ship the video and post the podcast episode and walk out on that stage. Cause you're never gonna be ready for the first time you do it. It was so cringey. People loved it. I didn't love the experience of it. The show is fantastic. People love, loved it.

Now you're doing it again and it's selling.

Oh, no, no. But I mean, the first night, even the second night, it was like, fuck it. Like, let's just have fun. And we. It was way better. And then the third night, oh, my God. By the third night, all the wheels were off. We were having a blast. It started with six Boston police officers. Only in Boston. Six Boston police officers come in at the beginning of the show because two women are fighting at the let them theory show. Fist fighting that they have to get removed by six Boston police. Thank you. Thank you to the Boston police officer. Boston's finest.

This is so Boston.

Yes. And so we just. Are we. And so here's going back to the fact that I'm crazy intentional. Here was my intention for the show. My intention was to have fun. It was to try something I'd never tried before. And by the time we were done, to feel like the closing night at the Apollo Theater in London was the best show that we did of the entire tour. That every single time we did it, it got better. We learned something that we had a lot of fun doing it and that people really loved it. That was my intention. And then I would say, and I just don't want to lose too much money. And my sister in law, who's my CFO would text me and COO would be like, would you please stop saying that in meetings because people are taking you seriously. And that's what happened.

It's incredible.

And so it was such an incredible gift because at the age of 56, to do something that far out of your comfort zone and to stretch yourself creatively, it brought out that sort of standup side in me that I could express in a way that I can't express all the time. And it allowed me to, like, perform and really make an impact differently. And I loved it. And so we're going. And the other thing that I loved is on my deathbed, I will remember that experience with my daughters.

Oh, fuck.

As one of the highlights of my life. Like, we worked out so much shit those, like, four weeks. I don't recommend it, but, you know, just you. The amount of things that happened and the amount of growth and connection that we shared and that I shared with the extraordinary women that were. And men that were part of that team, I will just. It changed me forever. And so, yeah, we're gonna do it again. And we're starting in new Zealand and Australia and then melrobbins.com. what's that? Yeah, melrobbins.com and the only two shows that have tickets, the only two are Houston and Dallas. The only two tickets left. So you're not buying any. Nobody's buying anything here. We're giving you the tickets.

No, no, I like buying my.

No, absolutely not.

Also, I swear to God, if you make me cry on this podcast, I told Stephen to his now by a buddy, I was like, I'm not coming on. If you try to make me cry, I won't do it. I want to shove my feelings down where they're supposed to be inside, like an adult. And anyway. But you can feel what that torment to you. And I think it's so cool you putting yourself out there. And if you're listening right now and you haven't taken that big risk that makes you want to throw up a little bit, here's your chance.

Well, and the other thing is that when you do a podcast or you create a show or you write a book or you have an online business, you don't see the people you're impacting. And so it is one of the greatest joys when I bump into somebody and they're like, oh, my God, I listened to that thing and it helped my son with anxiety or, wow, I sent my husband this thing. It really helped him negotiate a raise. Seeing and meeting people is incredible. And so to be in a room of people who consciously put themselves there, who are there to have a good time, and there because they want more out of life and because they want more for other people, there are very few spaces you can go in today's world like that. And so the energy of that was just transformative and electric and celebratory. And there were so many stories that came out of people meeting really good friends, people starting businesses with people that they met, who they were sitting next to. And so that was also one of the big things. And I'm going to give you one other piece of advice for your business. So I am driven by the impact it's very important in your business and in life to understand what data is important and what isn't. I do not have the back end data to what's happening in the podcast. I don't ever look at the rankings. Once a week, I'll be like, so how are we still doing okay? Like, literally, right, Charlotte? Like, that's. Are we still doing it? We still are. And I'm like, every time I'm legit surprised. We Are we're still in the top five of the world. Really? Take that, Bartlett. No, I'm just kidding. I love Stephen. At the London show, he was there with Mel and I was on stage talking about jealousy and I did this whole thing about the podcast and I'm like, that Steve Bartlett guy, fuck that guy. And then. And he's in the audience and I'm like, just kidding. I love you, Steve. Stand up, Stephen. And then I gave him a big shout out. He is a incredible friend, incredible mentor, that guy. He is a solid human being, like one of the best.

So is Jay too.

Jay is. So are you.

Wow.

So are you.

You know, but you guys are all OGs that have had all this massive success and it'd be really easy for you guys to not share the homework, to not help, to not whatever. I mean, Jay. I went to Jay's show in London at a. It must have been the same theater, Apollo maybe. And I brought my. One of my right hands, Christian. And Christian is a very British 25 year old. And so when I say stiff, so much love that he is not Jay Shetty's main avatar. Right. And so we just went to support Jay, not that he needed it. It's totally fucking s. He's fine. But we're in like the front row.

Yeah.

And I have Christian who went to Cambridge. You know, he's serious, he's very smart. And you know, Jay's show is huggy and emotional and, you know, not British in a lot of ways. And so Christian's next to me. And do you remember, did you go to Jay's show?

Uh huh.

So you know that last part of Jay's show where he has you turn to whoever you took and you look him in the eye and you say I love you to them. And I have my employee Christian next to me and he turns to me and he looks at me and he goes, you don't pay me enough for this. And I died. So this day, we've been together for five years. He's incredible. A dear friend of mine and somebody who works with me. But what we joke about to this day is that tour that Jay Shetty that we weren't even the target avatar for was. So it's a story we talk about to this day because Jay took a risk and did a thing that we will never forget being there for. I will never forget.

Yes.

And so your tour, I am sure, is the same.

When Stephen came, he's like, I actually can't do a live event again until I reinvent everything I do, you just completely raise the bar. I was so proud of the fact also that we went for it, because I cannot tell you how many people that I have never met before that are a list like Bobbity Body, but who reached out to say, I want you to know that I'm a fan from afar. And I have been in four meetings this week where your name was used to say, well, you could do it this way or you could do what Mel Robbins did. Whoa. And it's really cool to show people what's possible. But it was only possible because we were really driven not by, like, flexing, but by making. Making an impact. Like, I wanted people to know we put everything into that experience for them. Like, I even paid for people to be handed a bag with stuff in it, a gift. Like, who pays for their own thing? A dummy who loses money. But anyway, that's a different story. So it's very important to understand what is the data that's important. And so for me, the thing that I want you to steal is we do this thing that means so much to me. In fact, Charlotte, who's sitting here, who's a senior manager who does all kinds of things in marketing and all kinds of brand projects and strategic initiatives, she started her career with our company, 143 Studios, by assembling this email. I'm going to tell you, steal this idea. It's called an impact email. Every single day, every one of our 50 employees and everybody that is an agency partner that we work with receives an email that is a roundup of what people are saying today about the impact that some piece of content had on their life. Not a, hey, I love you, Mel, but a, oh, my gosh. I just listened to this episode with Dr. Dawn, the cancer person from the Mayo Clinic. I'm so excited. Thank you for putting this out. I sent this to my sister. So that front and center, the impact that the content that we're putting out, the impact that it has on a real human being is front and center to everybody that works for me and with me. And that is a way to keep a piece of data that is very important to you front and center to you and the people that work for you. And it's not just the customer stories up here. We put it in the inbox so that you see. And it's not us summarizing, it's the screenshots so you can see the name, you can see the photo. It comes from every platform, every social media comes from the inbox. It comes from the reviews. Because that's what matters.

That's why you win. Mel Robbins. Thank you so much. Watch.

Thank you. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu. Is that guy with the binoculars watching you? Us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings.

Very.

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