Sometimes I think I live under a rock.
Up until a week ago, I had never heard of Mel Robbins.
Have you?
Most probably you have.
At age 41, she was unemployed, $800,000 in debt and her husband’s business was crumbling. Today she is a New York Times best-selling author and a world-renowned expert on motivation and changing one’s behavior. Her work is translated into 41 languages and her podcast is top rated too.
Like many of us, she struggled for years with envy, jealousy, fear of change, and being overly sensitive to other’s opinion of her.
How’d she get past all that baggage? She shares her ground-breaking insights in her book Let Them.
Here are some of her most salient points on the path to self-empowerment:
Let go of things we cannot control
Allow other people in our lives to take charge of their own destinies and navigate their own challenges, thus abdicating our responsibility for other’s personal happiness.
When faced with a plethora of unpleasant tasks, who wants to get up in the morning? Not me. Probably not you. Not Mel Robbins either. But she did.
She forced herself out of bed
She pushed herself to take action
She fought through her fear, self-doubt and myriad excuses
All this revolves around Mel Robbins LET THEM mantra. It’s all about controlling our own thoughts, actions and responses. It’s all about letting go of the belief that we can control other’s actions and choices. And it’s all about not letting other people’s behaviors bother us.
Robbins emphasizes LET THEM is NOT LETTING SOMETHING GO – which implies surrendering to something. Let Them is coming from a well of strength – where we release our grip on how we feel things should go and allow them to unfold the way they will go, thus freeing ourselves to put our energies into our own silo.
Who can’t relate to life’s aggravations?
A child who chooses a different career path than what we deem appropriate and wise
A spouse who doesn’t eat healthy
A parent who blurts out insults without a filter
A boss who doesn’t recognize our worth
A friend who leaves us out of an outing
LET ME is the next step in our personal quest for peace, success and joy.
LET ME is our taking responsibility for what we do next when confronted with these situations and making it our personal choice to empower ourselves to be the change we want to see.
It’s hard work to change. It’s accepting the fact that very often life isn’t fair and that many people are dealt better hands than we were. It’s about not being jealous of other’s success but learning from them how they achieved it.
It’s hard work to change. It means showing up every day to do the tasks that are often boring, irritating and uncomfortable. As one of Mel Robbins’ friends, Jeff Walker, who is also a best-selling author, said, “You gotta do ‘the reps.’”
Let’s start right this minute to DO THE REPS!
Keep Preserving Your Bloom,
PS: Do you have a “Happy Place”?
A place that fills you with positive energy, warmth and tranquility?
A place where you feel a strong sense of belonging?
A place where so many of your nostalgic memories are stored?
Here is something I’m at least partially up to speed on: CNN at 10 pm on Sundays presents a six-part series on celebrity hosts’ happy places. And it’s titled “Happy Places”!
This Sunday Wolf Blitzer revisits Buffalo, New York – a city for him that is a re-charging sanctuary. I think this program may provide you and me with just that too.