‘Women have more power than they think': self-help superstar Mel Robbins on success, survival and silencing her critics

The Guardian

2 days ago

'Putting yourself in this room today,' booms Mel Robbins from the stage of a sold-out London theatre, 'is a decision that's going to change the trajectory of your life.' Rows and rows of (almost exclusively) women gaze at the podcaster and self-help superstar, her image on a huge screen behind her. It's the final day of Robbins's first tour, this one to promote her latest book and viral sensation, The Let Them Theory – her tool for helping people detach from other people's dramas. Outside forces, she teaches, from annoying relatives to strangers in a traffic jam, are not in your control; nor are you responsible for what they do, feel or think (so long as they are not your children). It's a waste of time, energy and emotion to even try. Instead, you should just say to yourself: 'Let them.'
Robbins is bounding around, sparkling with charisma and no-nonsense charm, first in a comfy tracksuit (available from her website for £150), then in boss-lady blazer and sexy denim. For nearly two hours, she commands the stage – occasionally joined by her two grown-up daughters, one of whom, Sawyer, is the book's co-author – and the women in the audience smile, nod, hug each other and cry. By the finale, when the confetti cannons go off and yellow ribbons rain down to Coldplay's booming A Sky Full of Stars, I have promised myself I will (in no particular order) lose my perimenopause tummy, be nicer to my children and care less what other people think. I am, I decide, beaming to myself, ready to change the trajectory of my life.
Three days before I was fully indoctrinated into the cult of Mel Robbins, when I still had some semblance of cynicism and didn't have phrases such as 'You have everything you need inside you to make it' flashing across my brain like ticker tape, I meet her in a London cafe. Robbins has flown in this morning, but you wouldn't know it. The qualities that make her such a good podcast host – warmth, energy, humour – are intense in person.
People, she argues, mostly need encouragement. 'I think that's the number one thing in people's way,' she says, untouched iced coffee in front of her. 'This sense of discouragement: my life is fucked, so nothing I do is going to matter, or I'm too old, or I'm too late, or too this.' This is where Robbins comes in, and it seems to work. The 56-year-old has a huge, cultish following. Her podcast has had more than 200m downloads, she has 10m Instagram followers and Let Them has sold 5m copies since it was published in December.
She has celebrity stans, including Chrissy Teigen and Davina McCall, who called her the 'queen of beginning again'. Oprah has anointed her, saying, 'I have over the years read probably thousands of books. And Let Them is by far just one of the best self-help books I've ever read. It is right up there with all the greats … saying everything I was trying to say for 25 years.'
If you have spent any time on Instagram, Robbins will probably have been served up to you at some point, face framed by blond hair and heavy-rimmed black glasses, to dispense some no-nonsense advice. Someone may have sent you one of her podcast episodes, in which she interviews renowned doctors and professors, such as the Harvard psychiatrist and happiness expert Robert Waldinger or the orthopaedic surgeon Vonda Wright (though not all guests are so rational – at least one medium has appeared). Other shows might find Robbins spending an easy hour talking about herself and the lessons she has learned about everything from diet and relationships to boosting confidence and setting boundaries. Even if you don't know her name, you have probably been touched by her rules for empowered life. Maybe people have begun saying 'let them' around you when they're frustrated by friends' behaviour, or used the five-second rule (counting down from five before doing something uncomfortable) or high-fiving themselves in the mirror before breakfast – blame Robbins for all of that. She is the ultimate in personal brand-building – a lawyer turned motivational speaker who, according to legend, dragged herself out of an $800,000 debt to become a star of the advice economy in her 50s.
She wanted to do the tour, she says, to look her audience in the eye. 'It's just a reminder that who I'm reaching are normal people trying to get up every day and do a little better. I'm not trying to reach people who want to be billionaires.' Does she feel like a rock star, soaking up the adulation? 'I don't think about that,' she insists. 'When you have something this extraordinary happen this late in life, you're very clear about what matters – my family and my friends, and I'm mostly driven by the impact that I can make.'
Self-development is huge, from questionable wellbeing influencers to any number of writers and podcasters exploring what it takes to be healthy, happy and successful. What does it say about us, in the affluent west, that we all crave it? Are we all narcissists? 'No,' Robbins says with a smile, 'but we all have that self-centredness. I personally feel we're so overoptimised for productivity, but what I also hope happens is that, in listening to podcasts and reading this book, you're reminded of what's actually important to you. Most of us focus on the wrong things for too long, and then we realise we didn't spend the time we wish we had with our parents while they were here, and we realise we worked too many late nights at work and we didn't spend time with our pets or our friends.'
Is all this advice, overwhelmingly aimed at women, just another way to make them feel they need more, or to change, or be perfect? Robbins brushes over the question, saying, 'I guess what I want women in particular to know is you have more power than you think.'
She is sometimes criticised for not being a qualified psychologist or therapist, or for dispensing obvious or age-old advice, but that is to miss her talent – she has an ability in the way she distils and communicates information to mainline it straight to your brain. I know, because for years I've had her voice in my head in a way that few other wellbeing podcasters – and I've listened to them all at some point – take up residence.
Robbins acknowledges that her insights aren't necessarily new. 'Everybody has said 'let them' a bazillion times,' she says. 'This is stoicism. It's radical acceptance. It's the serenity prayer.' What is it about her saying it that makes people listen? She ponders for a second. 'I think this is a moment. I've said to our team: we never would have been able to orchestrate something as extraordinary as the timing of this – a modern twist on a timeless rule of life, for a moment where it feels like the Earth is spinning off its axis. All of the things that have lined up, I don't feel that it's me; I feel in service of something bigger.'
As a child growing up in Michigan, Robbins wanted to be a doctor like her father (her mother ran a kitchenware shop). Was she a confident teenager? 'I think people who knew me would say yes. What I would say is I was deeply anxious and insecure.' Her anxiety made her driven, she thinks, 'but I wouldn't call it confidence'. She 'barely made it through' law school – she had undiagnosed dyslexia and ADHD – but thrived in mock trials and oral argument. For three years, Robbins worked as a legal-aid criminal-defence lawyer in Manhattan, representing people who couldn't afford to pay for representation. It taught her to develop intimacy fast. 'The job is actually about trust, and building trust with somebody that didn't pick you.' And it exposed her to people who had had extremely difficult lives. It was around the time New York City was being cleaned up, and with so many petty arrests to process, Robbins would often work in the night court. 'When you're representing somebody in a bail hearing, one of the things the judge considers is ties to community. Night after night, I would go into that courtroom, and I would call out for family or friends for this person, and no one was there. It broke my heart.' Later, it would be the reason she ends her podcast with the words: 'In case no one else tells you today, I wanted to be sure to tell you I love you.'
By this time, Robbins had met her husband, Chris. When he got a place at business school in Boston, they moved. 'I went to a large law firm and wanted to die,' she says. With four weeks of her maternity leave with her first child left, she reveals, 'I had a mental breakdown and said, 'I'm not doing that any more.' An interesting thing about human beings is that when you have a defined problem, most of us are good at solving it. I found a new job the night before I was supposed to go back.' For the next few years, Robbins worked for tech startups and digital marketers, and wondered what to do with her life, so she hired a life coach, who suggested that actually Robbins would make a good coach herself. She loved it, and was good at it. She started a daily call-in radio show, Make It Happen With Mel Robbins, and a newspaper column, and was already laying the foundations of her empire: there was a development deal with Disney, and books and a talkshow planned. In a 2007 magazine profile, Robbins, then in her late 30s, sounds hyper, talking up everything about herself – her sex life and marriage, her body, her work. Call it hubris.
Within a couple of years her husband's business was struggling, leaving them $800,000 in debt. How did she cope? 'I wanted to kill him. I'm serious. I wanted to absolutely kill him. Those moments when things go off the rails in your life, it's easier to be angry than it is to be afraid, and I could tell he was afraid, which just made me even angrier, because I felt fearful that we'd never get out of the situation.' She felt incapacitated for about six months, she says. 'I drank myself into the ground. I was a bitch every time he was around. I withdrew from my friends. I didn't tell my parents what was going on.' She lost a long-term coaching job. 'I felt, how can I possibly give anybody advice when my life looks like this? I'm not even an impostor; I'm just a liar. And so my whole life kind of collapsed.'
Blame seemed the obvious response. 'And then you avoid doing what you really could be doing. It goes back to what we were talking about: discouragement. I believed at that moment, at 41 with three kids under the age of 10, and liens on the house and no income coming in, that I would never get out of this.' It was in this state, slumped in front of the TV and seeing an advert that used images of a rocket launch, that Robbins had the idea that, instead of staying in bed the next morning, she would count down from five and launch herself out of it.
It worked for other things – the idea being that if you give yourself more than five seconds, you will talk yourself out of doing something difficult or hard. In 2011, Robbins, who was still earning a living as a coach and motivational speaker, and had just published her first book, Stop Saying You're Fine, was invited by a friend to speak at a Tedx event in San Francisco. 'That was like a 21-minute-long panic attack,' she says with a laugh. She didn't intend to make her 'five-second rule' a thing, but she blurted it out towards the end. The video went viral (it has now had more than 33m views), then she published her second book, based on the 'rule', in 2017. Her next book, The High 5 Habit – essentially, high-five yourself in the mirror in the morning, setting a plan for the day, boosting confidence and silencing your inner critic – became a bestseller, and in 2022 Robbins launched her podcast.
It's in this arena that Robbins, by talking about overcoming adversity, feels infinitely more relatable. In her episodes on trauma, she has described being sexually abused by an older child while on a family holiday, around the age of 10. She has also talked about the impact of getting a later-life ADHD diagnosis, and issues her husband and three children have gone through; part of her live show is about how she improved her relationship with her eldest child. How does she feel about using her personal life and trauma in her work? 'It's easier than hiding it,' she says. 'So many of us are putting on a front, yet every one of us is going through something. I feel that sharing, like any good friend does with another friend – that's a way to make all of this scientific research relatable and understandable.'
When she's more open or vulnerable, is listener engagement greater? 'Here's what I do know – the uglier I look on social, the better the content does,' she says with a laugh. 'I don't even think about it as being vulnerable. To me, it's just easier to be honest. When you feel like you can't disclose something, you're judging yourself. Being free with your history and what you've learned from it means you don't judge, and you don't have shame around what's happened to you.'
If Robbins was successful before, her Let Them theory has taken that to another level. Essentially, it's simple: if you spend too much time worrying about what other people do or say, which you can't control anyway, you're giving them too much power. Focus on yourself. It isn't about being a doormat, or about resignation, she says. 'When you say, 'let them', you're not allowing anybody to do anything. You're recognising what people are doing, and what's in your control and what's not.'
This is only the first stage in the process. One problem with saying 'let them', she acknowledges, is that it can put you in a position of judgment and superiority. 'That's why it works, because when you feel superior, that unhooks you from the frustration or hurt you may feel.' But if that's all you do, she warns, you can end up isolating yourself. 'At some point you've got to use the 'let me' part. I think what keeps you from becoming an asshole and cutting people out of your life is: let me decide what I'm going to do in response.' Maybe that will be accepting you're the sibling who always checks in, or the friend who invariably makes the plans. 'Maybe, conversely, you're going to realise: I've been chasing these people all this time; they don't give me anything in return. Is this what I deserve? Maybe I should pour my time into creating other types of relationships.' That's the harder part. But, Robbins adds, 'If all people want to do is say, 'let them', then let them.'
How has her theory changed her life? 'I had no idea how much I allowed the outside world and meaningless bullshit to penetrate me and my peace, whether it was traffic or people walking slowly, or somebody who didn't text me back when I thought they should, or somebody's mood.' Applying her tactic helped, she says, 'to let them have their emotions and opinions, and then remind myself: what do I want to think about this? What do I want or not want to do?'.
Robbins's style can be quite tough. 'You think I'm tough?' Forthright, then. 'I think I'm honest,' she says. In her book, she writes that, if you're stuck in a job you hate, 'the harsh truth is you're the one to blame – because you are choosing to stay in a job that makes you miserable'. Doesn't that underestimate the reality for people who don't have the privilege of walking into another job? 'You always have options,' Robbins says. 'You may not have options tomorrow, but you have options. Even if you are living paycheck to paycheck and you are sleeping on a friend's couch, if you believe there are no other options, you won't look for them. It is important to recognise that, with time and consistent effort, you can create different options.'
We're in a moment, she says, 'where the headlines are terrifying, economies are faltering, AI is coming, jobs are redundant. You don't know if you're going to get laid off.' That's beyond your control, she says. 'Say: let them lay you off. You're recognising it could happen, and reminding yourself to not waste time and energy worrying, feeling like a loser, feeling like you've got no options. So let me, every day after work, spend an hour getting my résumé together, networking and doing what I need to do to build skills. You will feel empowered when you focus on what's in your control, and what's in your control is what you put your time and energy into.'
It can be applied to big or small things. Robbins describes herself as a 'very political person'. 'If we're ever going to get things back on track in terms of people feeling stability and peace and support, you can't burn through all your energy feeling powerless. You've got to remind yourself: I actually have the power to change this. If it bothers me, the more energy I spend arguing about it and venting about it, the less time I'm spending getting myself organised to change this.'
With Robbins's increased success and profile has come, inevitably, more criticism. How does she deal with that? 'Let them,' she says instantly. Does it not hurt when she reads horrible comments about herself online? 'No.' She doesn't look, anyway – people who are intent on misunderstanding aren't her problem, she adds. Does she think male podcasters get an easier time? 'Yes – no question. Absolutely.'
One of the persistent allegations is that Robbins plagiarised 'let them' from a poem that went viral in 2022. She has always said she hadn't seen the poem and her inspiration came from the night she was trying to micromanage her 18-year-old son's school prom, and her middle child, her daughter Kendall, told her in a moment of exasperation to 'let them' – get soaked in the rain, have tacos if they want them, just let them. 'Anybody that can't see that a poem is very different than a book that makes a case for a theory, with an 18-page bibliography, doesn't want to see, and doesn't understand the word plagiarism either,' Robbins says.
I agree it's a fairly weak criticism, as is the complaint that she has stretched a basic idea into a whole book (and now tour) – something that could be applied to just about every self-help book ever written. Her podcast remains free and, unlike many other motivational 'influencers', she doesn't flog online courses, or supplements. I take more issue with some of the oversimplistic things she says: 'Success, love, happiness, money, friendship – these things are in limitless supply,' said the multimillionaire Mel Robbins to the billionaire Oprah Winfrey, on the latter's podcast.
Robbins says she follows her own rules 'about 90% of the time'. When she's at home in Vermont, she gets up around 6am, makes her bed, 'so I don't crawl back into it', and high-fives herself in the mirror. She might take a bite of a banana, 'because of what Dr Stacy Sims said about cortisol and women never working out fasted'. Sims, a physiologist and one of her podcast guests, says that, for women, exercising on an empty stomach means burning lean muscle and holding on to fat. 'I was like: motherfucker, we've been gaslit by the fitness industry. It's incredible what she shared about women not being little men.' Robbins walks her dogs to get her early sunlight (it helps with the circadian rhythm), drinks water before her coffee, has breakfast. She has a regular walking group with friends. She likes to cook, so she'll start prepping dinner when she does lunch, then it's bath and bed not long after 9pm. 'I'm so fucking old,' she says with a laugh. 'But I love my sleep.'
In the middle of it all is work. She wants, she says, to be an example 'of leaning into new things and reinventing myself over and over, and clawing our way out of debt in our 40s. There's so much you can do.' Robbins, similarly to Oprah, controls her empire. 'I don't want to be in a situation where I'm pissed off about the deal I made, and if I'm in control of what happens, the only person I can truly be mad at is me.' Is she a life coach or a media mogul? 'I'm just your friend, Mel,' she says with a bright smile.
A few days later, on stage, Robbins is so overcome with emotion, she can barely get her last words out: 'I love you, I do, and I believe in you.' There are cheers and whoops, and that blast of confetti and Coldplay, and we leave on a high. I chat to two women, in their 40s, who had been sitting behind me, emotional at points; one has a delicate tattoo on her arm of a dandelion releasing its seeds and the words 'Let them … Let me'. They love Robbins, says Eva (with the tattoo), 'because she's so normal. She's been through stuff like all of us have, but she's got grit and determination, and she's an example that, if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything.' Her friend Hayley says the years and the struggles since the pandemic have left her feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. 'I know that I need to make a change,' she says, eyes shining. 'She makes you believe you can do it.'
The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins is published by Hay House UK at £22.99. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Her podcast is available here.