Here with you. We're going to have such an amazing time. Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me right now. I am going to spend the next 90 minutes, heck, maybe we'll be here for a couple of hours answering your questions and giving you the advice and the coaching and the strategies that you need in order to push past the obstacles that you're facing, deal with some issue in your life, or level up your success. And so the questions that I'm going to start off with are questions that were submitted already in the comments. And if you have a question that you would like for me to address, if there's an area of your life where you need advice and you're looking for your strategies, for your business growth, for your personal growth, for something in a relationship, I want you to just put it in the comments below and I'm going to try to get to it. The questions that I'm going to jump into almost immediately are about self-confidence and self-esteem, about knowing whether or not you're avoiding something or you're lazy. We're going to talk about emotion and why it is so important for you to learn how to tolerate difficult emotions and what happens to your focus and to your health when you suppress the emotions that you're feeling.

I've got an excellent question that I'm going to dive into as well about how do I even know what I think I want is what I want? And And so as I jump in, I'm going to fly through these so that I can get through as many of your questions as you can. I see some of you asking, why do we got balloons in the back? Well, I'll tell you why. I am not only showing up here to coach you and to inspire you and to help you get clear about what you want to change and to prove to you that you do have the ability to change your life, to change your work, to change your financial situation in the next six months. We're going to talk about strategies for how you can do that, but I'm also celebrating the fact that today is the day that registration for my six month long coaching program. I only do it once a year. It's called Launch. I'm not going to talk a whole lot about it because I want to spend the time really engaging with you and serving you and giving you the advice and the strategies that you need.

But it is closing for registration in the next 2 hours. And so many of you have already jumped in. If you've already registered, tell me in the comments so I can give you a shout out. But I want to now jump in to the questions that you are asking. And for those of you asking for information, it is not too late to jump into this program. This is the only time I'm doing it this year. Information is right here. Registration closes in a matter of hours. And that's if you're watching this live. If you're seeing this on repeat, the program is already closed and you got to get on the waitlist for 2025. All right, you ready? Let's jump into the first question Our lucky person is Tarmara. I'm going to mispronounce everybody's name. I even say my own name wrong, so I'm just going to apologize right now for that, okay? So Tarmara, I think I'm saying your name wrong, but I'm going for it, okay? You have the great question, what is the difference between self-confidence and self-esteem? It's a really interesting question, and it is critical for your success and for your happiness in life that you know the difference and that you know how to create self-confidence and self-esteem.

So self-confidence and self-esteem, they are close cousins, okay? They are overlapping in a small way. One of the things to remember about self-confidence and self-esteem is that they both share the first word that's the same, self. Self-confidence and self-esteem Self is about yourself. Let me give you the definition. Self esteem is whether or not you value and appreciate yourself. Self confidence is whether or not you believe in your ability. You can see how they're related because they both relate to how feel about and treat yourself. Self-esteem being, do I appreciate and value myself? Because if you don't appreciate and value yourself, you have zero self-esteem. And that's why you get treated like a dormant. That's why you find yourself in broken relationships. That's why you can develop a story that you're a victim in your life, which you're not. At any moment, you can wake up and you can take control of your life. And self-esteem Self-esteem is a very important piece of the equation for you. Because in order for you to build healthy relationships and healthy boundaries, you have to start with yourself. And you've got to learn and develop the skill of self-esteem, which is valuing and appreciating yourself.

I'm going to get to that in a minute, okay? But you can see, can't you? You're following me, right? That, of course, if you don't value and appreciate yourself, why on Earth would you be in relationships where other people It all begins with you. Now, let's talk about self-confidence. Self-confidence is whether or not you believe in your abilities. So for those of you that struggle with self-doubt, I used to struggle with self-doubt all the time. It just paralyzed me. And self That doubt is the flip side of self-confidence, right? Because self-doubt means you doubt your abilities. Self-confidence means you believe in your abilities. And I want to unpack this further because Here's the cool thing about self-esteem, which is valuing and appreciating yourself. It's a skill that you need. And self-confidence, which is the belief in your abilities, is that these are not personality traits. These are not things that just some people are magically born with. These are skills that you can acquire. These are skills that you can build. These are skills that if you once had them and you lost them because you got fired or you went through a lousy breakup or Life knocked you on your rear end.

You can do the work to build the skill. Again, it's so cool. And you need to build the skill of self-esteem because you have to value and appreciate yourself. That is the It is the basis of self-respect. It is the basis of you giving yourself permission to go for your goals. Self-esteem, valuing, respecting yourself is the basis of boundaries, and it's a skill that you can build. And I'm going to talk in a minute about how you that. Self-confidence is also a skill. See, self-confidence isn't belief in self. Self-confidence is built by your willingness to try new things. Belief in self doesn't mean you have all this swagger and you think you're better than everybody else, and you have this arrogance that you think everything's always going to work out. That's not self-confidence, that's arrogance. That's what that is. That's a little bit of narcissism. Self-confidence is knowing that you can try and you're going to be okay. Self-confidence is your willingness to raise your hand in a meeting and say something, and even if it's stupid, you're going to be okay. Self-confidence is the willingness to take a risk, even though you're not sure how it's going to turn out.

Self-confidence is the ability to try something new. Even it's the ability to try writing that novel. That's how you build self-confidence, by trying. And this is also something to highlight, that self-esteem and self-confidence, it's often talked about in this very intellectual way, right? And you think it's a feeling. But the truth is, if you look at the research, both self-esteem, learning how to value and appreciate yourself, and self-confidence, which is this innate belief in your abilities, that you're going to survive things, that you can make things a little better through your effort and your actions, this willingness to take a risk and know it's not going to kill you. In fact, it's really important that you do that. That these two skills in life are things that you practice. And so how do you build self-respect? Well, it all comes down to how you treat yourself. And the fastest way to build your self-esteem, which is valuing and appreciating yourself. And this is a simple exercise that you can do right now, everybody. I want you to take out a blank piece of paper, and why don't you just tell me five things that somebody does who values and appreciates themselves?

Like, think about somebody, like even me. I have really strong self-esteem. I really value and appreciate myself. I don't think I'm the best person on the planet. I don't think I'm better than anybody else. I just value and appreciate who I am. And that means I'm rooting for myself. And it also means something really important. That I behave in a way that demonstrates that I respect myself. And so I want you to write down five things, whether It's somebody that you know in your life that you think really values and appreciates themselves. They have a healthy sense of self-esteem. I'm not talking arrogance here. I'm talking a level of humility. But you see this person that you know that they really just have self-respect, that they really value themselves. One of the reasons why you can tell that about me is because I take care of myself. I am very conscious about what I eat, not because I want to look a certain way, but because I know that the food I put in my body is a demonstration of whether or not I respect the work that my body is trying to do to keep me alive.

The fact that I work very hard on my marriage, I work hard to improve myself and to learn. I'm kind to myself. I'm very forgiving of my mistakes. These are all things that you can practice. Here's another thing that I do that might surprise you when it comes to building a level of self-worth, is that I really practice keeping my promises to myself. Okay, I'm going to just sip my water. I practice this, and here's a simple way you can start to build self-esteem. Set the alarm tonight, okay? I want you to tell me in the comments, what time, if you're going to take on this little game with me, tell me what time you're going to want to wake up tomorrow morning. If you were to just pause right now and think, Okay, what time should I get out of bed tomorrow morning in order to set myself up for true success so that I have a little bit of time for myself. I can wake up, I can do my morning routine, I can focus a little bit before the frenzy of the day starts, 6:00 in the morning, 5:00 AM, 4:00 AM, 8:00 AM, 5:15.

Thank you for jumping in and putting that in there. So whatever time it is that you just said, this is the time that if I were to actually get out of bed, I would create a little space for myself that would give me time to take care of myself, to exercise, to eat right, to journal, to meditate, to go outside for a walk for 10 minutes, to set myself up for success. Here's how you practice self-esteem. You ready? When that alarm rings, you get out of bed. It sounds weird, right? But just follow me here. If you set that alarm and you know that's the time to get out of bed, and instead of getting out of bed, You either hit the snooze button and you go back to sleep because you don't feel like it, or you pick up your phone, which so many of you do. And while you're in bed, you start scrolling on social media or checking emails or looking at text or whatever else. Hitting the snooze button and not getting out of bed or picking up the phone and not getting out of bed, that is an act of disrespect to yourself because that action shows you that you don't actually respect yourself enough to get out of bed at a time that you know supports you.

And so self-esteem, this big, big, big, big, big something really small that you do all day long. You build self-esteem by keeping the little promises. If you said you're going to go for a 10-minute walk, go for a 10-minute walk. If you said that you were going to send that email to somebody. Send the email to somebody. Because a person who respects themselves does what they say they're going to do. And a person who values and appreciates themselves does what they say What are we going to do? If you and I made a date, right? And you and I were going to go and we were going to meet at a local park at 6:00 AM, right? And that means you have to get at 5:30 in the morning and you got to get yourself in your car and you got to get to the park in order to meet me, your friend Mel Robbins. Why would you do that? Well, you do that because you appreciate our friendship and you appreciate me and you value me. And so you show me the respect because you value me by actually showing up on time and being there for me.

And so I'm trying to make you understand that this thing that you need, which is self-esteem and the ability to value and respect yourself, begins with you learning how to keep little promises that you're making that are in your best interest. Because when you start treating yourself with respect, that builds this sense that you're worthy of it. Isn't that amazing? See, right now, and I did this for decades of my life, I actually was looking for that feeling of worthiness outside of myself. I was looking for my friends to treat me in a way that made me feel worthy. I was looking for my significant other to treat me in a way that made me feel appreciated. And should they? Of course they should. But you've got to begin with yourself. Are you even treating yourself in a way that makes you feel worthy and appreciated? And if you're not, this is the first thing on your list to change. And just make a simple list of what would five actions be that demonstrate that you treat yourself with appreciation and worthiness and respect. What are they? You already know what they are. Write them down, and then your job every day when you wake up to build the skill is just do those things.

No matter how you feel, no matter what's going on, do those things. And the second thing that you can do to build this skill, which is so important because your self-worth and your ability to appreciate yourself fuels courage. It fuels resilience. It fuels your ability to focus and prioritize on yourself and to prioritize as what you want. If you don't value yourself, you're not going to value your time. If you don't value yourself, you're not going to value your goals and your dreams. You're going to be looking outside yourself all day long to try to fill the hole that only you can fill inside yourself. Another thing that you must start doing is you have to change the way that you talk to yourself. You have to because we can spend hours and hours and hours talking about the research related to negative self-taught, but Negative self-taught is a learned behavior. You picked this up from your parents or the people that raised you. You didn't even realize it. All that self-criticism is something you've been practicing forever. Whatever your native language is that you grew up in and that you became fluid in, for me, it's English.

I can speak it without even thinking about it. Negativity works the same way. And so another piece of this is you have to go to war against the negativity. You have to learn how to start calling out the little wins. You get If you're not in bed at 5:15 because you said you would, you better say, go me. Great job. I know that blew to get up that early, but I'm proud of myself. Call it as you see it. Start calling out the wins instead of just bashing your sofa everything that's going wrong. Why? Let's go back to the definition of self-esteem, everybody. Self-esteem. You can write it in the comments. What is it? Self-esteem is whether or not you value and appreciate yourself. How do you build self-esteem, everybody? By the actions and how you treat yourself and how you talk to yourself. Somebody that values themselves speaks to themselves as if they do. When you fail, you're forgiving and you look for the lesson. When you win something, you celebrate it. When you try your hardest, you're kind to yourself. You speak kindly to yourself. This is another critical aspect of it. We're going to get more into the self-confidence and the definition that I want you to just take from here is if you're somebody that's blocked by self doubt, the issue in your life is that you're not willing to try anything.

And here's where you need to understand the research. You will never have a breakthrough if you're not willing to try something new. You will never get unblocked if you don't do something different. Because self-confidence is built by proving that you believe in your ability. And maybe the ability that we're talking about isn't the ability to to accomplish something. It's just this willingness to try it. Because when you're willing to lean in and to try, guess what happens? You see yourself being the person that takes risks and that is courageous enough to place a bet on yourself. That even though you don't feel like going out into that networking meeting, that you still go. You're willing to try. That's the actions that build self-confidence. That after a heartbreak, you're feeling devastated your marriage is over. Yeah, grieve, be angry, eat the Ben and Jerry's, sing the sad songs, complain about it forever. But after you're sick of feeling down, it is time to start trying again because that divorce or that job where you got fired from, that rocked your confidence. Of course it did. So go down, milk that sucker, feel terrible for a little bit, mourn what happened, but then you better, at at some point go, Okay, this was Mel Robin's talking about, I got to believe in my ability again.

And so I'm going to start trying. That's all that it takes. You got it? Okay, good. That's the difference between self-confidence and self-esteem. Here, I promised that I was going to be short. I guess I'm going long tonight, so we're going to be here for a little while, right? And for those of you, I keep seeing everybody, for those of you that have already signed up for launch, welcome to the party. If you are just joining me, I'm Mel Robbins. I'm so So fired up. The balloons are behind me because we are celebrating the beginning of this extraordinary program I only do once a year called Launch. We have students registered from around the world. Registration closes in a matter of about an hour. You still have time. It is popping off. I'm so excited. So I just wanted to jump on and just dive into your questions, give you a taste of coaching and what it's like to actually be in my world when I am like, let's freaking go. I want to hold you accountable. I want to keep reminding you that you are capable of so much more. I'm going to keep telling you that that garbage that you're listening to isn't even your voice.

That is garbage that you picked up from your parents and generations way back, and it's time for you to reprogram your mind. I see somebody, Prophet Mother just signed up. Let's go. And yes, there are other therapists that are already in there. There are professors. There are people from around the world who just have big and a lot of ideas, but they need the accountability to stay on task. And so we're going to get you clear about what you want to do, whether that's to hone your therapy practice or that's to dip your toe in online marketing and build your online presence and thought leadership side of your business. There is absolutely anything that you are capable of achieving, but you got to be willing to make a choice that you're going to make it a priority. You got to be willing to get clear about what you are going to create and how you're going to measure whether or not you've achieved it. And then we got to break it down into the daily little reps that you do every day so that you can focus on showing up and just chipping away at what you're doing.

And so I don't care whether you got big goals and you want to triple your business or you want to finish that book, manuscript you've been writing for two years and you're sick and tired of stopping and starting, or you got to reinvent yourself, or you got 15 ideas, and you never get any of them done because you always have 15 ideas. And if everything seems important, nothing is important. And so we're going to talk all about how you get laser focus For real. Forget this self doubt garbage. Forget all the distraction and noise going on. And let's get real about what you actually value and what you want to create in the next six months of your life. And then once we get clear about that, then you are going to go into to execution mode. And I'm going to teach you how to create the results that you want in what I call the hot 15. Fifteen minutes a day is all it's going to take. That's it. You're going to be shocked at what you accomplish by getting maniacically disciplined about this hot 15 in the 15 minutes a day. I see Sylvia Skinner signing up.

I know you're scared, but listen to me. The second that you make a choice to put yourself in an experience that you know is is going to force you to come alive, to raise your standards for yourself, to hold yourself accountable to something higher than your excuses and where you're at right now. And for those of you that are so busy and, oh, my God, you got so much going on, but it's for everybody else. What's interesting about the research, and we've had a lot of happiness experts on the Mel Robbins podcast lately, people from Harvard and really, really, really fancy smart places. We're talking the world's leading experts on happiness. Absolutely everything that the research points to, believe it or not, no matter how stressed or busy that you are, is that if you want to have a huge breakthrough in purpose, in satisfaction, and in meaning, check this out. It's not about removing things. This is really interesting research. All the research says it's about adding in one thing that is meaningful to you. See, the reason why you lack purpose in life is because you've given all your time and energy to things that don't have deep purpose for you.

Simply getting clear and honest with yourself that time is ticking and it is high time that you get serious about creating room, and I'm talking 15 minutes a day, for something that makes you come alive, something that gives you purpose. And for some of you, that means getting serious about growing your business. And I got news for you. You are going to hate, hate, hate. If you really want to grow your business, you're going to hate it when you work with Mel Robbins. You're going to hate having me as your coach because I am not going to tell you this song and dance about all the fancy stuff that you have to do, because here's the thing about business. It's very simple, everybody. Every single business has what's called income producing activities. Income producing activities are the actions You have to do every day that actually create sales. And you want to know something as a business owner, you hate doing those things. It's much easier to do your website, do all the fancy stuff and avoid the cold calls or avoid figuring out how to understand funnel marketing and stay up late and write emails.

You don't want to do that. It's hard. That's why you're avoiding it. And so you're not going to be able to avoid the hard stuff when you're in a program that I've created because I keep bringing you back to the truth. And the truth is this, you are 100% capable of achieving the results that you want. I don't care how old you are, how young you are, where you live in the world. You are 100% capable of achieving the results that you want, period. Second truth, You are giving away so much of your time to stupid things because you don't value it. You don't value your time. And the reason why I know this is because you're not achieving the results that you want. And you're giving your time away to social media and to doing dumb stuff on the weekends and hanging out with people that are wonderful and nice, but you've had the same conversations for five years. And you could see them once a couple of months, and the conversation change. And what's missing is higher value conversations. What's missing is valuing your time because you have something that you value that you're working on that makes you become more focused on how you're spending your time.

That's the conversation we're having in launch. And for those of you like, what are we talking about? The program that I do once a year is open for registration for about an hour. And then I close the doors. I don't do it again until 2025. And if you're only just hearing about this, I'm totally sorry. I only open up registration for about a week. We only do this once a year because obviously I've got a lot going on in my business and with Mel Robbins podcast and being with my family. And so I only do this once a year because when we start this program next week on Monday, boom, I'm all in because I've got some big things that I need to triple down on and launch, and I'm going to be doing it side by side with you in the same structure, the same curriculum with the same student body. It is so freaking unbelievable. Okay, so let me get to the next question. And please, everybody, keep, keep, keep asking your questions. I'm going to try to rapid fire now because I know I'm really taking my time here. But again, if you're sitting there going, Oh my God, I love being with Mel Live.

I love getting This is freaking awesome. That's what this program is. This program is this until October, plus daily accountability. You're going to wake up and get an email from me and like, Here's the three things you What do you need to do via Mateo. Let's freaking go. You're in. How many of you have signed up? Ashley, I see you have just signed up and you're like, Oh my gosh, I just got this spark. I'll tell you why. Because when you the choice, the experience begins. When you jump in, and for those of you that are like, I don't even know, is there a refund policy? You can absolutely register before the doors close in about an hour. You can try it for 14 days, and you just have to ask for your refund by May 13th. I think that's the date. Is that the date, everybody? It's 14 days into launch. You will have experienced live coaching by then. You will have had daily accountability by then. You will have been inside the private premium corporate course platform that we do all of this on. You will have downloaded your workbook You will have met the student body, and the student body is popping off, everybody.

Popping off. There is an hour left to register, and that is it. I see Patricia Neil is scared, but you're ready. Great. You know the interesting thing about fear, Patricia? Is that fear is the same thing as excitement. Fear is the same thing as excitement. Your body doesn't know the difference between an experience that makes you really excited and an experience that makes you afraid. The only difference between an experience that's fear versus excitement is what your brain is saying about it. Here's what I have to say about the decision to choose to put yourself into a community of people that is going to freaking push you, that is going to see your potential and be like, Come on now. Come on now. You can do a little more than that. Come on now. You can go for it a little bit more. Come on now. They're going to be there to clap for you. They're going to be there to celebrate you. They're going to be there to brainstorm with you when you go to your second venture capital meeting and you get told no, and you're like, what the... And you literally just want to throw in the towel.

Nobody in this community will let you stop. We're going to make you, because we're going to teach you, that life is in the doing and in the learning. And it's in these moments where you are inching yourself forward and you're learning and you're growing and you're making things happen. That's where you come alive. Here's how I describe this, because a lot of people are like, Is this a course? Is this? Here's how I would describe this. How many of you have done a marathon? I've run the New York City Marathon Run is actually an exaggeration. I basically walked, speed walked it. It was just bucket list, amazing thing to do with a bunch of my mom friends way back in the day. We're talking 2001. But here's what's interesting. Everybody thinks that the marathon is the 26.2 miles, right? The training that you do for it is the marathon. The race is the celebration. See, calling the Boston Marathon or the London Marathon or the Tokyo Marathon or the New York City Marathon a race, that's not what that is. It's a celebration of everything that went in to you getting there. And this experience is a six month celebration of you and your willingness to get up every day and try and your willingness to learn new habits and your willingness to build skills around respecting and valuing yourself and your time and respecting and valuing your priorities and your goals and this next chapter that you want to build and respecting yourself and your time enough that you're going to dedicate the time that it's going to take, which I've designed this experience to work for a busy person's life, because in order to successfully change, I know you're not your job or

your family, right? You have to be able to make the change happen in the life that you're already living. And so this will require less than 30 minutes of your time a day, except for on the days where we're doing live coaching, because those are typically over 2 hours long. And all the information about when the live coaching happens here and everything, by the way, even when it's live, gets taped and it gets uploaded into the plot. You can watch it over and over and over again, so you don't need to worry about missing anything. We've got high school graduations coming up. If you're gone for it's okay, because here's the thing, you're going to be learning something that you use for the rest of your life because I'm actually teaching the skills of clarity. I'm teaching you the skills of valuing yourself. I'm teaching you the skills of valuing your time. I'm teaching you the skills of actually waking up and focusing on the reps that you need to do against the project that you're working on so that you're making progress wherever you go. And it builds momentum. Everything that you learn, you're going to do against the project that you want to work on in your life or your business.

And so it's personal. And so these are skills that you're building. I've got a great question here from somebody, strawberries5151. How do you know Mel, if you're avoiding something or you're lazy? This is an excellent question. How do I know if I'm lazy? So there are two things I want to say We're going to talk about this, okay? Laziness feels very different than avoiding, doesn't it? Just stop and think about lazy. Lazy is just a general disinterest. In things. There's two words here that are important, general and disinterest. You're not engaged at all, and the laziness or the disinterest is throughout your life. Avoiding something feels very different, doesn't it? Because you know you're doing it. Avoiding something has this energy to it, right? It has this energy where you're actively not doing something. It's typically around something specific, isn't it? You're avoiding a person, you're avoiding a habit, you're avoiding a change, you're avoiding a situation, you're avoiding doing something. And so laziness is more general and it's disinterest. And avoiding is typically active and agitated, and it's about something specific, and you know it. And so here's my recommendation. Can you now locate which one you're in?

And again, this is an example of the way that I teach, Because first you have to understand the concept so that you can locate yourself inside the intellectual piece of it, right? Okay, I know Mel that I'm struggling with what I think would be laziness because I'm just disengaged everywhere in my life. And we're about to have a conversation about what to do if that's you. Versus, oh, shoot, I'm avoiding stuff. Oh, my God, that's right. I'm avoiding making the cold calls. I'm avoiding the hard conversation. I'm avoiding the truth, which is I'm not in love with the person that I'm with anymore. I'm avoiding dealing with the fact that I don't like my life anymore, and I need to move. I need to shake things. I need to do something about this. I'm avoiding my creative calling. I'm not writing I'm not creating music. I'm not starting that YouTube channel. So let's talk about those of you that are like, Oh, no, I'm in the laziness disengaged camp. Here's what I want you to do if you're just generally disengaged, okay? Number one, I I want you to talk to a professional, and here's why.

A lot of times, and this is why I hate the word lazy, a lot of times when you're generally disengaged, it's actually something deeper. It might be grief. It could be depression. I bring this up because we have a really interesting podcast episode coming out on Thursday, May second. It is the kickoff for for Mental Health Month, and we have the remarkable Dr. Judith Joseph on. And the entire episode is about her groundbreaking research on a condition called high functioning depression. And there is a silent epidemic of this coming out of the pandemic because of the number of you that have been living with chronic stress that have just completely dulled down your nervous system. And so you just have this sense of feeling disengaged. And so that is something that I want you to take seriously, that it may have a deeper issue. And interestingly enough, the things that you need to do, if this is you, are simple to do, but they feel very hard. You got to get up in the morning. You got to start getting bright light. You got to start moving your body. And are you ready for this?

You to add something in that creates meaning for you. Maybe you need to start painting again. Maybe you need to go back to school. Maybe you need... I see Elizabeth just registered. I see somebody on LinkedIn just registered. I freaking love this. I see ancient wisdom saying, I suspect I have this. Ancient wisdom, do me a favor and please make sure you subscribe to the Mel Robbins podcast so that this episode is in your queue on May second. It'll change your life. But I can tell you right now that creating a project that brings a sense of purpose back, especially a project, according to her research, that taps into something that you haven't done in a while or something that you've put on the shelf, like the book that you were working on or the journaling practice or meditating every day. And another thing that's really important, if you're in the disengaged grief, just general camp, because this is something deeper going on, you're not a lazy person. That's not what's happening at all. In fact, I hate that word because I don't think anybody's lazy. I think laziness is what you see on the surface, but there's something deeper going on.

Another thing that you need to prioritize. And by the way, this next thing is something that a lot of people come into this six month program with me, and they prioritize friendship, fun, Putting joy back in their life. It's interesting because a lot of people come in and they want to work on their business and they want to do all this and they want to do all that, and they realize what's missing is not more busyness. What's missing is prioritizing joy, prioritizing meaningful time with family. They turn it into a project and it changes their whole life. Becoming intentional about the fact that movement is missing, bright light is missing, time with friends is missing, small moments of joy is missing, and then pushing yourself. It's going to require a push because you're not going to feel like it. You're going to think, Well, that's not going to solve my big problems. Actually, it does because, again, Where did we start when we started talking about 40 minutes ago? It all starts with you. It all starts with you. Now, let's talk about the other camp, which is actively avoiding. If you're actively avoiding something, there are two things that you need to look at.

One of them is, do you have a reason why you want to do the thing that you're avoiding? You don't have a big enough reason That's the reason why you want to do it. That's why you're avoiding it. It's not that you can't do it. It's not that you're missing motivation. It's that your fear and your worry is beating you. That's why you're avoiding it. You're afraid of the thing. And that tells me that you don't have a big enough reason why this matters to you. So that's number one, because I can give you all the tools. I can say you got to use the five-second roll, my five-second roll, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and boom, you got to do the thing. Because action, action, action, action, action, action, right? So that's true. But I also want to be a little bit deeper with you. One of the things that I've learned over and over and over again on the Mel Robbins podcast and interviewing some of the world's leading medical experts is that 73%, and this research comes from Dr. Addidi from the Harvard Medical School we just had her on. She wrote the best selling book, The Five Stress Resets, Five Resets, something like that.

She is the founder of the largest stress management clinic in the Harvard Medical System here in Boston. And so she has done all this research, and her research shows that approximately 73% of adults, 73% of us, are living in a chronic state of stress post-pandemic. And I want to explain what that means to you, because this relates to avoiding. If there's been an uptick in procrastination, if you find that you're procrastinating more, if you find that lately you're a really hard time focusing. If you find that you're more easily distracted, if you find that you are caught in that overth thinking loop, or that it's hard for you to drop it and relax, this is not an issue with you. This is an issue, according to Dr. Addidi, with your amygdala. Your amygdala is the part of the brain, and I'm pointing to the back of my head because it's like this little almond-shaped thing right here, and she was referring to it as your second brain, this tiny little part, little almond at the base of your bigger, more modern brain. This tiny little almond down here, it got turned on during all the craziness of the pandemic and all of the craziness that was going on in the news and poly and all that.

And for 99%, that's my belief, but her medical research shows that 73% of us are still in that that state of fight or flight. That's what it means to be in a state of chronic stress, that your fight or flight sympathetic nervous system is turned on. It means you're constantly revving and a little bit on edge. And the amygdala is super active and is not resetting back to a state of calm and relaxation and the confidence and feeling present in your body. And the reason why this is really important, it's important for all of us, but it's also important if If you got big goals, if you're trying to run a business, if you can never find time for yourself, but you got a busy life, you're still really good at responding, aren't you? Why? Because being responsive and reactive is a stress response. And so you can do that stuff all day long. But in order for you to change, in order for you to get strategic, in order for you to be present in your family and in your life, in order for you to think clearly, you cannot be in response mode.

And we know based on the research, and a lot of this research that I've looked at and written about in my books comes from Dr. Judith Willis at UCLA. But Dr. Addidi has been researching this forever. She is one of the world's leading authorities on chronic stress. Her research proves that when you're in a state where your amygdala is active and your nervous system is on edge, it impacts the functioning of your prefrontal cortex. In other words, you can't bring the higher functioning of strategy and focus and clear thinking and decision making online because your stress response has hijacked it. And here's why I say that. I see a ton of you going, this is me, I'm in survival mode. Oh my God, constant state of stress. And I see Karen, and yeah, and it's gotten worse since my dad passed away. I see so many of you saying, this is me, this is me. Well, I want to tell you the good news, everybody. I want to tell you the good news. Hold on. The good news is that I want you to stop saying, I'm stressed, and I want you to call it what it is.

My stressed state is activated. Because when you realize it's a state in your amygdala and in your nervous system, just like I've been teaching you, and this is again, my style of teaching. First, I want to teach you these critical concepts, whether they're talking about a marketing concept or a business concept or a goal setting concept, or we're talking about something that is related to your mental health or your body or your brain functioning. First, we got to talk about the concepts. Then I want to give you the tools, because now that you know, oh, this is just a stress state, the tools are very simple. You can literally put your hand on your heart, high five your heart. Lots of people have taught this for centuries. And just take a deep breath. In fact, do it right now. Here we go. And the most important thing about the breath is that the exhale is longer, and you can just keep your hand on your heart. And so the reason why I'm bringing this up when I'm trying to answer a question about avoiding is because you might be chronically avoiding something because you're one of the 73% of us that have an amygdala that needs to be reset throughout the day.

I see Lianne, I'm sorry if I'm screwing up your name there, saying, Well, what happens when freeze comes on? It's the same thing. When you freeze, that's a stress response. You guys want to know something crazy? You want to know what procrastinating is, which is you actively avoiding something you need to do. That is a freeze response. That's where that is. You can freeze like this. Another stress response is to flee, so to leave a situation, to run away from it, and the other one is to fight. A lot of you are going through your life or walking into work every day, like braced for a fight. You're just on edge Every time your boss texts you or slacks you where you're like, Oh, God, here we go. That's not the environment. That's your amygdala and your nervous system telling you to reset. That's what that is. Got it? Okay, good. Because now you can do something about it. I see this interesting question on YouTube from Ko, K-O. The whole purpose of self-improvement is always to strive to improve. So I always feel like I'm not doing enough. What should I do? First of all, the whole point of self-improvement isn't to always improve.

That's not what I think. I don't know whose definition that is, but I personally think the whole point of life is to grow into the person you're meant to be. And that growing and learning and tapping into your curiosity and leaning in and having new experiences and moving yourself toward the things that you feel called to. That is how you discover purpose. And this isn't a pursuit about improving yourself. It's a pursuit about discovering yourself. And to do that and to tap into the potential of who you are and to the dreams that are down there, what you're trying to do is remove the self doubt and the guilt and all of the conditioning from your life and all of the baggage from your parents and the generational garbage that got passed down to you and all of the messaging from society and all of the stress conditioning in your body and to take control and drop into your body and get reconnected to yourself and truly figure out what you want to do with the very short amount of time that you actually have while you're on Earth. If you're lucky, you get the average lifespan of a man is 73 years in the United States.

For a woman, it's up to 79. That's not a lot of time. And if you're watching this right now, you still have plenty of time to tap into the power that's inside you to change your life, to discover who you really are, to pursue the things in your life that really make you come alive. And so I, 100 100% disagree that life improvement is about improving yourself. I think the whole reason why I do what I do is because I spent years, decades of my life, probably the first 40 years of my life, so unhappy, hating myself, struggling with anxiety, constantly bashing myself, holding myself back, being competitive and jealous and insecure. I'm not proud of the person that I was. I was so unhappy, but I didn't know. I didn't know there was another way to go through life. One of the reasons why I'm on such a mission to make an impact and to share everything that I've learned the hard way is to save you the headache and the heartache that I caused myself because I didn't know. And one of the reasons why I started the Mel Robbins podcast is because I thought, wow, just imagine if we could have access to the world's most incredible thinkers and the latest research, and we could unpack it and distill it down into simple things that you and I could do in a normal life and insert into a normal person's day that would have a meaningful impact on how you feel.

And so to me, the reason why you're here and you're watching this is because I think you intrinsically know you weren't born to live your life in survival mode. You were not born to live your life in a chronic state of stress. You were not born and on this planet so that you could spend decades talking yourself out or writing that book or launching that podcast or starting that business. That's not why you're here. And I want you to wake up. I want you to wake up and realize that you can change how you think. You can change how you spend your time. You can change the people that you surround yourself with. You can change the books that you read and the media that you can consume. And I'm going to go all all the way back to what I said in the very beginning, which is it comes down to building this skill of self-esteem, which is valuing and appreciating yourself. Because if you don't value and appreciate yourself, You will never value and appreciate your time. You will never value and appreciate your ideas. You will never value and appreciate your needs.

And we have to start with the fundamentals of you treating yourself in a way a that demonstrates that you respect yourself, that you value yourself, and that you appreciate yourself. I've got this buddy, Matthew Hussian. By the way, for those of you that are signing up for launch, I'm so excited to welcome you in. If you are like, Why does she talk launch? I want to work with you, Mel. I love this coaching. I need this in my life. I need you more often live. I really want you to keep... I'm going to keep on going and answering questions, so keep on putting the the things that you want in the comments, and I will get to as many as I can. But I need to tell you in one hour, the doors to launch 2024 are closing. And if you're just learning that I offer a coaching program and it's open for registration right now. Sorry that you didn't hear about this sooner. I only open it up for a week, once a year, and we're not doing this again until 2025. All the details are right here. Jump in if you're interested before we close the doors.

The waitlist is going to I'll go up in about an hour for 2025. So if you cannot afford it this year, I'm still proud of you for being here with me, and I'm going to keep on coaching. And I love that you're making a responsible decision for yourself because I've been in a place where I haven't been able to afford things that I wanted to do. That's all right. You now know you want to do it, come back next year. But for those of you that are like, oh, my God, I should do this, but I don't know, I don't know, make an empowered choice. Get off the fence. Because I think You can tell now that you're experiencing coaching with me that I'm in freaking business. I'm not going to waste my time and I'm not going to waste yours. And the fact is that if you jump in, you'll see there's a refund policy. Try it for 14 days and see if it's fit for you. All you got to do is try it. Request a refund by May 13th. That's 14 days. You'll experience the live training. You'll experience the community platform.

You'll experience the daily accountability. You'll experience the popping off energy of being with a community of people that are up to big things instead of talking about the same old things. All righty, so here we go. Let's keep on coaching. So the information is right there, but you guys got an hour. I see Stacia. I think that's how you see it. How do we get more info on Mel's program? Melrobbins. Com/launch. Get in there right now. Get in there. Awesome. I see a bunch of you jumping in. Annie and Careri, I will see you next year. Make sure you get on the list. Terry, we'll see you next year, too. For those of you jumping in, though, let's freaking go. Let's freaking go. Okay, here we go. Cathy, how do I stay How do I stay feeling I am deserving? Is that the question by Sam? How do I stay feeling I am deserving? The way that you stay feeling deserving is the way that you maintain or you build any skill. You have to practice it. And again, I have a simple way to do this. I want you to come up with five daily things that you do that prove to you that you're deserving.

Is it getting out of bed on time? Is it drinking eight cups of water a day? Is it taking a walk because moving your body is a good thing? Is it writing Is it spending 5 nice things about yourself? Is it spending 10 minutes working on the real estate business that you want to watch? You stay deserving of yourself by treating yourself as if you were deserving. And so what do you do with somebody that you believe is deserving of your love and respect? You speak kindly to them. You show up on time. You support them in what they're doing. You probably You probably go the extra mile and point out what they're doing right. You compliment them. You encourage them to go do fun things. Just treat yourself as if you're a friend who's deserving of your time. But the most important thing here, everybody, is that confidence and self-esteem, it's not a feeling. It is something that you practice, that you practice. I've got this other one. Maddie Chrishan. He is 45 years old, and he grew up in an environment where men shouldn't cry. So this is conditioning. You, like Maddie, you have conditioning from your past.

There are things from your environment that have left its mark on you, whether it's self-criticism or telling yourself you're not worthy or saying somebody like me can't do things like that or things like that never happened to a person like me. Whatever it is that your conditioning is, Mel Robbins has news for you. You can change it, and you change it by first choosing to change it, and you continue to change it by waking up every day and taking the actions to change it. I know it sounds simple. It's not easy because it requires discipline and focus. But this is how you change it. So he's asking, now that I'm 45 and I grew up in an environment where men don't show emotions, I'm blocking myself from expressing my emotions. I don't share what I really feel. Instead, I suppress it Suppressing this is impacting your productivity. By suppressing it, I mean that I smile and I say I'm grateful when really I'm not. In other words, what that means, you guys, when you suppress your emotions is you lie. You lie to everybody else and you lie to yourself. When you're not allowing yourself to express, when you're not allowing yourself to express and feel, Normal emotions.

It's normal to feel normal to feel sad. It's normal to feel angry, it's normal to feel sad, it's normal to feel frustrated, it's normal to feel lonely. When you don't allow yourself to to talk about it or to feel it, the act of suppressing it makes you feel ashamed of those emotions. You are treating yourself with disrespect, and it's not your fault. See, you were conditioned, thanks to your childhood, to believe that certain emotions shouldn't be expressed. The only way you are going to break this conditioning and reclaim your life and allow yourself the freedom to have the full experience of being a human being is to allow the emotions to rise. I want to show you something. This is something that is called the Anger Iceberg. What ends up happening for men in particular is that the acceptable emotion for men is anger. That's what rises to the surface. Is anger is what people explode. But I want you to see what's below the surface. Loneliness, jealousy, sadness, grief, nervousness, feeling guilty, overwhelmed, tired, insecure, shame, annoyed, anxious, regret, hurt, stress. All this stuff that you keep shoving down, these are all normal feelings.

But they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger when you shove them beneath the surface. And when you shove all these things that you are allowed to feel and will feel in the course of your life, when you shove them down, you are telling yourself that your feelings don't matter. And you got to stop doing this. The question is, how do you learn to express your emotion? Well, the first thing I would recommend is I would recommend that you start a journaling practice, okay? Every morning when you get up, there's a great journaling practice It's called Morning Pages, where I believe you just open up a blank book and you write stream of consciousness three pages, just gobbledygook. Just write down everything you're feeling. It doesn't need to make sense, but you've how to just start to train yourself to open the floodgates. I love doing this with a journal because you might edit yourself, but notice it. But if you were to try to talk to people since you've been conditioned for decades not to talk about your emotions, you will stop yourself. And so first you got to learn how to do this with yourself.

Let the floodgates open, and it's going to be difficult. Just do it every morning. Write out three pages, whatever you're feeling, thinking, just get the flood coming because We got to unjam this. Second thing that I want you to do is I want you to understand that most emotion has about a 90 second shelf life. I got to find I'm going to study on this. I can't remember what the study is. But if you can learn how to let emotion rise up and name it, Oh, I'm angry. Oh, I feel rejected. I think I'm feeling really lonely right now. You can notice it and you can name it. Then I just want you in those places to not push it down. Just notice, name it, and then here's where mastery comes, everybody. Emotions are normal. Learning how to breathe and create space for the emotion to rise up and notice it, you know what's going to happen? It's going to be like, In about 90 seconds, it'll start to fall down. And what you're doing is you're building capacity to feel normal, uncomfortable emotions. Almost no adult knows how to do this. I basically operate in my life as if every other adult that I meet is like an eight-year-old inside an adult body.

I used to be this way. I was so emotionally immature, meaning when an uncomfortable emotion came up, I was like an eruptor. I couldn't tolerate. I'd be like, wow. My husband's saying what? He's like an eight-year-old that when he would have an uncomfortable emotion go up, he becomes a turtle. He just gets very quiet and suppresses it, just like so many men. And in order to become emotionally mature, first you got to be self-aware that you're feeling it. And then you've got to have this level of emotional integrity, which is the ability to create the internal capacity to feel all these feelings that come up, notice that they're there, but not feel like you have to do anything about it. Because when you let emotions rise and fall, they disappear. They really do. And it's when you start to suppress or grip or you're afraid or you tense up or you make it wrong or you reach for the drink that the emotion stays around longer. Those are some things that you can practice now. It would also help you immensely to talk to a therapist and start gaining tools. It would also help you, by the way, to get into a group of people like the people assembling in this program launch and be surrounded by people that are building emotional integrity, who are getting clear about what they want, who are learning how to express in very constructive and empowering ways how they feel and what they're going to do about it instead of suppressing and doing all this stuff.

Let's see. What else do I got? Okay. Tom, I resigned two days ago from a job because my business did not value me. Fantastic, Tom. That's freaking fantastic. Congratulations. That is a huge sign of self-esteem. That action of leaving a job because you felt like you weren't valued, that is an example of an action that demonstrates to you that you value yourself. If you're in a situation where the people around you do not value you, do not sit and wait to change them because you cannot change another human being. If you value yourself, you will remove yourself from the situation. So fantastic. Yes, what's my first step forward? I want more for myself. Well, Tom, here's the first thing that I would do. Anytime somebody has a job transition, I always recommend that first things first, get out your bank account. I'm serious, get out your bank statement, and I want you to face what do you got for money. And I want you to find out what a runway do you have and how could you build yourself a slightly longer runway? Like, do you have six weeks? Do you have six months? Do you have a couple of years?

I don't know what your financial situation is, but you want to be dealing in reality so that you can create a plan that allows you the freedom to explore what's next without the constraint of feeling like the financial vice is on your head. So that's first. I want you to get realistic about what is the financial situation because that helps you to to be more powerful and effective in your decision making. If you have to find a job because your financial situation demands that you do, I've been in that situation before. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to look for that job so you can pay your bills, but I want you at the same time to carve out an hour a day to do the work, to figure out what the next chapter is going to be. Because as you're looking for that job, it eases the financial pressure. I didn't say you're going to take a new I said you were going to look for a job because that's the responsible thing to do based on the financial situation. But you are also now with all this newfound time because you're not working for somebody else, you're going to carve out at least an hour a day to work on your next chapter, define it, explore it.

And again, a lot of people in this program are doing exactly that inside the structure of this six-month course, that an experience that I lead only once a year, and it's only open for registration for another 45 minutes. So check it out and see if this is something for you. But that's what I would recommend that you do. I see somebody continuing to ask a question, and so I feel compelled to ask to talk to Yanny. Yanny is saying, Hi, Mel, I faced the death of a family member a few days ago, and I feel guilty for not talking to him and not being there for him enough, and now I regret it. What should I do? Yanny, I am going to assume that this was a sudden death based on what you're talking about. Given that this just happened a few days ago, you are in the stage of what's called acute grief. You may not even remember the conversation that you and I are about to have. Because when you lose somebody that you love suddenly, the amount of adrenaline and emotion that floods your body puts you into a state of shock.

Everybody deals with grief very, very differently. But I know that you right now are in a state where you are reeling from this. I think about grief when it happens right away in the acute phase of it as standing in an ocean as a tsunami is hitting, and just the waves and waves and waves and waves are crashing. And what you're feeling in terms of the waves and waves and waves is not only the missing of your friend and the sorrow, but you're feeling regret about how you behaved in the relationship and the things that you wish that you would have done. Number one, I'm describing this because I want you to locate yourself in what is an extremely normal experience. Everybody that loses somebody experiences what you are experiencing. Number two, what you are experiencing is horrible and it is temporary. I don't know how long you're going to be in this stage where the waves are crashing and your thoughts are swirling and your heart is just full of crushing sorrow. It is personal. But what I will tell you is that with time, those waves that hit you start to separate, and you start to come up for air.

And so you have to keep telling yourself, What I'm feeling right now is normal, and it will get better with time. This is a part of the grieving process. And what I want you to know is I don't know the particulars about what happened with your friend. I don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of weeks or month or whatever. But I do know this. You're not going to go through this alone, and you're going to be okay. So let's talk about regret, and let's talk about grief. Andrew Garfield, the actor that played Spider-Man, I heard him, I think it was on Colbert's show. He had just lost his grandmother, and he had the most beautiful thing to say about grief. That grief is something that you want to allow yourself to feel. Because grief is just all the love that you have for this person that you didn't get to express while they were still here physically. So grief and love are It's literally part of the same emotion. And allowing that grief to be in your body and be in your heart, that is a way that love is expressing itself for this person.

Right now. Things that are really important to do or to be around other people that love this person. Things that are really important to do is to talk about this person and things that you loved about this person. The thing about regret is this. No amount of regret is going to bring the person back. If this person loved you, which I know this person did, what would they want for you? They would want you to go and live a big and beautiful life. That's the best way that you could honor this person in your life. And so that's what you will go do. Now, the regret is there because it is your higher self trying to teach you something. If you feel guilty for not talking to someone and not being there enough for someone, that doesn't mean It doesn't mean you caused the death. It doesn't mean you could have prevented it, and it certainly will not bring this person back. But what it can do is guilt can be a very, very powerful tool in your if it motivates you to change. So there are people in your life that are still here who you're probably not talking to enough and probably not being there enough for them.

The thing to get from the guilt that you feel is the lesson, which is to show up differently in your life to the people that you care about. That is an incredible way that you could honor this friend of yours. The final thing that I'm going to say to you is, I don't know what your personal beliefs are, but my beliefs are that your loved one, they're still around. There is nothing preventing you from writing this person a letter and reading it to them. It could be a very beautiful thing for you to do to feel a sense of at least expressing how you feel in a constructive way and expressing the love that you feel. The final thing I'm going to say to you is that it takes time because grief is not something you actually move through. Grief is something you learn to live with. Because, again, grief is simply another expression of loving somebody that's no longer physically here. All right, let's keep going. What do we got? Any No more questions, everyone? What do we got? Oh, here we go. Okay. Again, I'm going to keep taking questions for another 10 or 15 minutes.

I'm going to try to rapid fire these guys. I appreciate you hanging with me as much as I can or you can. I want to remind everybody that if you're loving this coaching, if you're loving Mel Robbins' live coaching, if you're loving the accountability and intensity that happens when you can see that I am all in and we are working towards the same thing here, this is exactly what my six-month program is all about, giving you the accountability, the advice, the reframes, the perspective, the structure, so that you can move forward in your life, and so that more importantly, you can learn and practice the skills of showing up consistently for yourself, of taking the risk risks that are going to create the results that you want, of doing the work and the reps that you're avoiding to change the areas of your life that you really want to change. That's what this is about. There are thousands of alums that have graduated from this program for more than 99 countries. Their testimonials are absolutely bananas. This is life-changing. And so the doors are closing in about 30 minutes. And I'm going to keep on coaching you guys, but I want to make sure you know that this is an opportunity for you to experience this year.

I'm not doing this again until 2025. Whether you have a professional goal, whether you have something personal you want to work on, whether you have no idea what the heck you want to work on, you just know you need clarity and you need somebody to hold you accountable. This is what you've been looking for right here. All righty, here we go. Lee. Hi, Mel. I'm 52 and I'm still single. Why is Why is it easy for other people to find relationships? And how do I stop comparing myself to others? So Lee, here's the thing. I don't really know why it's easy for other people to find relationships and why you I am. That's probably a much more complicated answer. Okay? So I'm not going to give you some surface level thing when I don't know the background about your story or your history, and I don't know what you may be dealing with in terms of patterns from your past. But I do know this. It's not that you haven't found someone. It's that you haven't found your person yet. I would suspect That there are areas of your relationship with yourself that you have yet to work on.

That you don't value yourself in the way that you need to learn to value yourself, that you don't appreciate yourself, that there is some area of healing, whether it's in trust or it's in trauma or it's in worthiness, that you've got to get serious about so that you start showing up in the world differently. And the thing about comparison is that we all do it. It's impossible to be a human being and not look around and see what everybody else is doing. The question is, how is that comparing helping motivate you to do the healing that you need to do so that you are happy and in love with yourself? And how is it helping you to understand the mistakes that you've made in the past? Maybe you've been with the wrong people. What's fascinating is there's this interesting piece of research that we just dug into. I think it was for one of the Mel Robbins podcast episodes that we just did. I wish I had it top of mind, but check this out. They did this huge study about relationships where they found, this is unbelievable, that when you change a relationship, so you go from dating one person to the next person, to the next person, to the next person, Okay?

And you think that changing the relationship is going to change how happy you are, you're wrong. Changing relationships makes you happy for, I don't know, the honeymoon period, like when a relationship is new and it's all exciting and your adrenaline is flowing, that's fun. But then guess what happens once the newness wears off? You're not any happier. Why? Because you're in all those relationships. The only thing that will help you have a happier relationship is changing yourself. I think it's fascinating. And so I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer, whether it is that you're picking the wrong people or that you're too picky or that you don't trust people. But there is something there to get serious about with a professional, and feeling sorry for yourself is not going to solve this problem. I don't have much more information about that, but I don't know why you're still single. I just want you to learn how to love yourself a little bit better. Lisa, I'm 67 and I'm starting from scratch. I feel too late to everything. I want to pursue, but I know I'm meant for more. How do I start believing in myself?

Lisa, it's not about believing in yourself. It's about doing. Belief, it will not begin with belief because for years you've looked around and looked for evidence for all the reasons not to believe in yourself. Your job is the same job as my job, which is to prove through your actions that you are going to work for what you want, no matter what the stupid stuff up here says. I'll give you a quick example. For seven years, I wanted to start a podcast. What's interesting about it is I knew what I wanted, and I had a lot of self-doubts. I was full of excuses. I would look around and compare myself, be like, Oh, there goes my friend, Lewis Howes. Oh, that person's, Oh, there's 5 million podcasts. I'm too late. Everybody else has already done it. I'm too old for this. What does a 55-year-old woman business got doing competing with all the celebrities doing it? This person. I was full of excuses. I told myself over and over and over again for years that I had missed the window, that I was too old, that there were too many people doing it, that somebody had already done it, that there wasn't enough room for me.

I bashed myself and bashed myself and bashed myself. And if you're doing that, nothing is going to change until you make a choice that regardless of how old or young you are, regardless of how many mistakes you've made or not, regardless of how successful you are or not, and regardless of how many other people are doing the thing that you want to do, that you're making a choice to try it. Because if you avoid choosing something that you really feel pulled to do, you will never, ever, ever, ever feel something different in your life. You will forever, until the day you die, Be the person that was too late. You'll be the person that, oh, woe is me. Everybody else did it. I didn't do it. You'll be full of excuses and regret, and I want something different for you. But you You got to choose it. Here's the thing, everybody, you don't have to choose it because you think you're going to be successful. I finally got so sick of my excuses and so sick of watching friends of mine and other people start podcasts as I was sitting around telling myself I was too old and I was too late and I was too this and too that and do the other thing.

I finally was like, I got to choose what I want, so I'm going to try this. And for 18 I made this decision, I'm going to try this. I had such a busy business and busy life that I literally launched the podcast by studying the podcast industry for 15 minutes a day for 18 months. I became a student of it, and I started. See, that's the thing. It's in the choosing to try and the choosing to wake up every day to lean in and try some of the things that you want. With without any expectation that you're going to win, without any expectation that you're going to be as successful as you dream about, but just choosing to start. It's in that, that the experience of changing your life begins. It's in that that you start to unleash and unlock the potential that has been lying dormant and dead inside you underneath the self doubt and the excuses and the regrets and the avoiding and the stagnation and the thinking. It's in the trying and the action that you come alive. Forget about whether or not it works because you're slowly dying and you're slowly killing your dreams by thinking about what you want.

And so it's in the choosing. And I'm talking not just once, but you got to wake up every day and go, Where are the 15 minutes that I'm going to spend today on this that I want to do? Because in the choosing and the doing, your actions prove that you matter, that this matters. This is the secret to everything. Because the things that you want, guys, they've been there forever. They're not going anywhere. That's why you feel so much tension, no matter how much doubt and how much excuse and how many years have piled on top of those things that are in your heart. It's still there. That's why you feel tortured about it. And that's why action is the answer. That's why. And so I get that you're scared. Do it anyway. I get that you're 67. Who cares? I'm 56. When I started the Mel Robbins podcast, 18 months ago, there were 6 million podcasts. 6 million. Yeah, we're now top 10 in the world on both Apple and Spotify. It's absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. And when When I started it, I didn't expect to be this successful. I did it because I knew that there was this calling inside me that was pulling me toward it.

You're either going to avoid that calling inside you, which makes you basically feel like the walking dead, or you're going to choose what's inside you and you're going to start working toward it because that's what's going to make you feel valued by yourself. Yeah, it takes courage, and yes, it takes discipline. And yes, there are going to be days that you don't do it. And then you're going to get up and you're going to chip away it again. And then slowly but surely, over time, what happens is you see yourself as a different human being because you're acting like a different human being. And then momentum starts to kick in, and then all kinds of cool things start to kick in. And that's what we're talking about here. That's what we're talking about here. The simple things you can do every day that lead to the results that you want, whether that's tripling your business or raising the venture capital funding, or launching the YouTube channel, or finishing that book, manuscript, or reinventing your life after divorce, or learning how to get the ADHD under control and create simple systems to hold yourself accountable, or building momentum in the side hustle that you've launched, or learning AI and marketing practices so that you can automate that aspect of your business.

And every sales, oh, my God. I think that there's something magical happening. Don't you think? I feel like there must be the ghost of somebody in here. That felt really cool. You know what? I think that is, I think that's the universe saying, get off the fence. If launch is for you, stop sitting around watching me and get your rear end in this before the doors close in a matter of minutes. We are closing out for 2024. I'm not doing this again this year. If you're on the fence, that was your sign to stop sitting around and make the leap because It's only in choosing to take a risk in yourself and to put yourself in a group of people that will demand more of you and to put yourself around someone like me who is going to demand more of you and to put Puce yourself around people that are up to big things in life that will create big things in your life. How many minutes do you have left? Not enough, not a lot of time. I don't know why you're asking that question. If you're interested in them being this, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, melrobinds.

Com/launch. It's not even a course, the experience. Six months with me, accountability, coaching, structure, no BS. Just you and your potential and your coach and friend Mel Robbins on your tail for the next 26 weeks. You got big stuff to do? All right, prove it. Prove it. Prove it. Jump in and let's get busy. You got it? Good. All the information's there. You won't miss a thing because everything that happens is, even the big live trainings that we do, all the times are already listed. If you're going to miss one, who cares? We record it. We put it up in the course platform. You can watch it 55 times if you want to. It's there. It is created so that you can create results and changes in your life in less than 30 minutes a day. Half of that time You're going to be working on your project and on the actions that you've been avoiding. How you like them, apples. That's how this works. We are going. This is about execution. It's about reps. Here we go. All righty. Oh, and Jennifer, six months with Jennifer, too. I freaking love that. Jen, I'm honored that you're in there, too.

Let's go. I think that's it. I think that's it. Any last final questions? Anybody else that just jumped in? If you're jumping in, let me know. Get your butt over there before we close the doors, because I'm going to tell you something. I don't get around. 07:01 PM Eastern. That is literally 30 20 minutes from now. The waitlist for next year goes up. Dana, you just signed up. Tina just jumped in. This is going to change your freaking life. You are not going to believe what happens in your life. I want to show you guys something. Okay, here's one. Vicky, last year, became a published author because of the accountability in Launch. Sarah is an alum, and because of Launch, she went back to graduate school. She's a professor at a program in Harvard. Mel's program, show you how to dream again. Here's another one. Giovan. Here's another alum. I loved listening and being coached by Mel. I got so many aha moments, so much support. It was absolutely incredible. Launch changed my life. I went back to school. I'm graduating with my bachelor's in entrepreneurship. I started a new career. I moved. I created a space for me.

If you told me a year ago, I'd be where I am today, I'd say you're lying. Because where you are right now is you're not doing anything. You're letting the self doubt, the the procrastination and the chronic stress stop you. Let's change that. Because when I can get you to start taking the actions that you've been scared or just too overwhelmed to take, you will believe in you. You will have the results that you want. I can't wait to have Mel as my coach. Her program is less expensive than my coaching program, and I'm so impressed. This is such an incredible and comprehensive program. I hope you'll join me because you'll benefit from the accountability, whether it's accountability, clarity, or just space to get creative. You're going to love this. I love this one. Wait to hear this. A year ago, the office I'm sitting in at this very moment was a spare bedroom in our house. A year ago, I didn't have a business name or a running website. A year ago, I thought I was just going to have to stay stuck in a job I no longer loved and thought that I missed the boat on new opportunities.

I literally did not realize how far I had come from doubt and despair to opening my own business. My dreams are coming true. Thank you, Mel, and this experience called Launch. My experience in Launch has changed my life. I came into the program broken as my husband of 26 years asked me for a divorce. It was a complete surprise, and I was devastated. Mel gave me life-saving tools to deal with my situation. I wish I would have taken this class sooner as I feel like a completely different person. I believe I discovered the Launch program when I needed it most. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to take charge of their life. I was feeling so low. Here's another alum. And at a crossroads, when I first discovered the launch program, now I am so far into my own dream of achieving what I wanted and to work to my fullest potential and launch my training course and raise my profile as an independent investigator, I can do whatever I put my mind to. And I would only be able to know that and do that because of what I learned in launch.

I've launched the first part of my business. I'm confident enough to launch the second one. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I could go on and on and on, but here's the thing. Registration is closing and you're wasting time watching me when I want you to jump this program and spend the next six months with me. So check it out. If it's for you, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, jump in. It's risk free. You got two weeks to try it. And the refund period goes from now until May 13th. So you can be in it for two weeks to just experience the magic I'm talking about. If it's not for you, I'm proud of you for being responsible. I've been in a situation where doing something like this would have been a stretch. And so if this is something you want to do, but this isn't the year to do it, just put yourself on the waitlist for next year. No problem. You'll get notified if we do it again. But if you're on the fence and you're overth and you're frozen and you're avoiding and you're questioning, come on now. Choose yourself. Trust yourself.

And let's freaking go. The experience of changing your life and achieving that goal begins the moment you choose to jump into this experience. All righty, I'm going to jump off because I want to give you a chance to get yourself in before the doors close in a matter of minutes. I also want to get into the community and our private course platform and welcome you with open arms. I cannot wait to be your coach. I cannot wait I can't wait to spend the next six months together. I can't wait to see the progress that you create when you get the accountability and the structure and the coaching and the encouragement and the support that you deserve. I can't wait to see how you come alive and flourish when you are surrounded by a community of wildly successful and positive and motivating peers of yours that are going to be celebrating your wins and coaching you through the things that come up and helping you strategize when you have big goals and obstacles. It's just going to blow your mind who's already registered to be in the class of 2024. So do not miss out on creating the life you could be living.

Do not miss out on the opportunity to work with me. I can't wait to do this with you. All righty. I love you. I believe in you. I believe in your ability to create a better life. Thank you for being here with me for a couple hours tonight. Thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting the Mel Robbins podcast. It is because of you and your time that you've spent with me and the number of times that you share these episodes with people that you love that you have made the Mel Robbins podcast one of the most successful podcasts on the planet. We are number 10 on Apple today. We're number 10 on Spotify today. And we've been that way since the beginning of the year because of you. I love you. I believe in you. That's why I do this, because I know that you have so much potential and love to give, and I want to see you unlock it and unleash it. All righty, I'll see you in launch.