Mel Robbins is an expert on leadership and defeating doubt, a motivational powerhouse, and the best-selling author of Stop Saying You’re Fine and The 5 Second Rule: Transform your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage.
Nine years ago, things weren’t going quite as well for Mel. She lost her job, and she was on the verge of divorce and bankruptcy. As things started to go off the rails financially, her attitude, habits, and ability to cope followed. “It was a major crisis of confidence, of belonging, of career, of marriage… of everything.”
When we experience adversity, the problems can feel so overwhelming that we don’t know how to solve them… and, in those moments, we will fall back on our habits, good or bad.
If Mel had discovered The Five Second Rule earlier in life, she would have been equipped to respond to that adversity a little differently.
So how can we use The Five Second Rule to get past setbacks or disappointments?
The first thing you have to understand is that your whole life happens in five second windows.
Throughout your day, whether you’re flying high or down in the dumps, you’re making decisions… and when you’re not paying attention, you make decisions based on self-doubt, procrastination, fears, excuses, and feelings.
However, within any five second window, you have the choice to ether let self-doubt pull you back down the path or beat the habit of self doubt and take a step forward. “Once you understand the power to these five second decisions, you have the secret to changing absolutely everything.”
How does The Five Second Rule work?
It’s incredibly simple: the moment you are facing a decision and you are beginning to doubt yourself, count 5-4-3-2-1 in your head.
Don’t count up, because you can keep going – when you count backwards, your brain is allowed to shift gears; you can turn off the interior region of the brain where habits are encoded and self-doubt lives, and turn on your prefrontal cortex.
By counting, which is an action, you are already making a different decision than listening to self-doubt, and by counting you are moving in a direction that is opposite of self-doubt. As dumb as it may sound, the actual act of counting is incredibly powerful.
After Mel started implementing the five second rule, everything in her life changed. She was changing your decisions, five seconds at a time.
Nine years later, she and her husband have gone from facing divorce and bankruptcy to celebrating 21 years of marriage and launching two multi-million dollar companies together.
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