In this motivational short, Mel Robbins argues that relying on family as the primary source of support for your goals is a mistake. She claims families often lack understanding or experience with your ambitions, leading them to question or discourage your pursuits. Robbins emphasizes that goals and the meaning they bring are your personal responsibility, not your family's. She illustrates this by recounting how she launched the Mel Robbins Podcast: two years of clarity, then deliberately "firing" her family from the project and instead building a support team of mentors and peers she found online, such as Jay Shetty, Stephen Bartlett, Alex Cooper, and Rich Roll. Robbins advises listeners to seek out communities, professional societies, and events where like‑minded people can offer guidance. She also warns that family pressure can cause people to adopt goals that aren’t truly theirs, urging a break from that influence to own authentic desires.
Chapters
When it comes to your goals and the things that matter to you, fire your family. You heard me right. Fire your family. See, you think that when you set a goal, your family is supposed to become your biggest cheering squad. That is the biggest mistake that you could possibly make. Most of the time, your family is not going to be your biggest cheerleader. Your family is going to be like, wait a minute, what are you doing? How are you doing that? Why do you want to do that? If your family has never done the thing that you want to do, they're not gonna understand why you wanna do it, and they're not gonna know how to get it done. And this brings me to a bigger point. Your goals and the things that bring meaning to your life are your responsibility. They're not your family's responsibility. And let me give you an example of what that looks like. So I have been hosting the Mel Robbins Podcast for 3 and a half years. But 2 years before I recorded my first episode, first followed rule number 1, I got very clear about what I wanted. And what I wanted was to start a podcast because I really wanted to have longer conversations with you. And I also wanted to learn more. But that was 2 years getting clear before I recorded my first episode. Now, second, I fired my family. I didn't even think about getting them to work on this because they'd never hosted a podcast before. So what did I do? Who was my team? Well, you know, I called my buddy Jay Shetty. I knew Jay from the speaking world, not from the podcast world, and I asked him for advice. I started following people online like Stephen Bartlett, Diary of a CEO, and Alex Cooper from Call Her Daddy, and Rich Roll from the Rich Roll Podcast, and really becoming a student. So you can create a team by following people that you've never met. What team could you join online or in your community of people who have done this thing or are trying to do this thing? What professional society is full of people? What events are out there that are talking about this? That's how you get the support that you need. When you fire your family, You have to take full responsibility for the things that you want in your life. Like, a lot of the mistakes that people make when it comes to goals is you start saying you want things that you think you should want. And oftentimes it's because of the pressure coming from your family that you think you should change your job, you think you should move to a different city, you think you should be interested in baseball or knitting or football or something else. And so firing your family also cuts this umbilical cord to the people you're related to and forces you to truly own what's important to you and why it's important to you.
