How I stopped caring about what other people think (and you can too)
Before, I'd have felt the need to send a detailed explanation as to why I couldn't make it. I would have spent ages worrying about everyone thinking I was flaky and unreliable and feeling guilty for bailing at the last minute.
But that's all changed since I read The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. The self-help author, podcast host and former lawyer's latest book is based on two little words which help manage how you interact with people and day to day life. It's such a simple mantra but it seems to have a transformative effect.
Robbins, a New York Times bestselling author who has been endorsed by everyone from Oprah to author Jay Shetty, is a self-help guru in the US and also starting to make waves here in the UK. The 56-year-old motivational speaker, who was diagnosed with ADHD at 47 and has more than 22 million followers across her social media platforms, wrote her latest book with her daughter, Sawyer, and is bringing the accompanying tour to London in June.
The Let Them Theory, which was published in December 2024 and reportedly sold over 1.2 million copies in the first month, looks at how we can free ourselves from judgement, drama and the opinions of others. It addresses simple fears – failure, change, disappointment – and turns them on their head.
As someone who was raised in the 80s and 90s, at a time when girls were conditioned to be people pleasers who put others first (who could forget the cringeworthy Girl Guide pledge: 'I promise that I will do my best… to serve the Queen and my community, to help other people and to keep the (Brownie) Guide Law.') it helped me realise I have no control over what people say, do or think. And I don't have to try and please them.
The concept is painstakingly simple but taps into something deeply psychological and liberating. 'Let them' sums up the tension between control and acceptance.
As psychologist Dr Louise Goddard-Crawley explains: 'So many of us expend an exhausting amount of energy trying to influence other people's behaviour, worrying about how they perceive us, or hoping they'll act in a way that suits us. But the truth is, people will do what they do. The sooner we accept that, the more peaceful and in control of ourselves we feel.'
That is the real power of Let Them. 'It's not about disengagement or passivity – it's about freeing up emotional bandwidth for the things that actually matter, and things that you actually have some control over.'
Such as how we respond and react to things and spend our time.
Before reading the book, I would often make the journalist faux pas of reading the 'below the line' comments on articles I had written, which would leave me feeling deflated at best and upset at worst. I would lie awake wondering what my friends and family might think. I have, over the years, had comments on everything from my appearance to my parenting to my grammar. Sometimes, I could spend hours stewing on it but now I don't even bother to read them because 'let them'.
Before, as someone who works from home and spends too much time on social media, I would have checked Instagram repeatedly to see who had and had not liked my posts. In the absence of real life colleagues, I would have sought external validation online. I would have wasted energy overthinking why people who look at every story I post, especially friends and other journalists, never 'like' any of my posts. As someone who is a prolific 'liker' and engager, I have always found this to be bewildering and confusing.
I have realised, however, that it's actually really liberating to realise that you have zero control of other people's opinions of you. It frees you up to, in the words of Robbins, to 'be your authentic self'.
Source: Psychologist Dr Louise Goddard-Crawley
There is also a very helpful chapter in the book about the ebb and flow of adult friendships, something which I very much relate to. Robbins says that adult friendships are based primarily on three things – promixity (being in the same place, workplace, neighbourhood or social circle as someone), timing (being at a similar stage of life) and energy (the level of connection and affinity you feel with someone).
I have in the past been someone who has invested a great deal of time into my friendships but applying the Let Them theory and realising that friendships can largely depend on such things as proximity and timing, things which are essentially beyond my control, has helped me reassess my expectations. Accepting and realising that some friendships have naturally faded and that it's fine to just let that happen has been a game changer.
It's also laid open the gauntlet that some people, like the ones I let go of during a particularly difficult time in my life when my autistic son was put on a reduced timetable at school and I became something of a hermit, may come back into my life. Let Them has helped taken the onus and pressure off myself to make that happen.
I've also tried to remind myself about the Let Me part of the book where you let yourself get irritated by something or someone (like one of my children refusing to tidy their room) but then let it go and move on.
The Let Me rule has given me permission to take ownership of my feelings. The other day someone honked at me for overtaking the car in front and I felt a fleeting surge of road rage. I didn't wave at them to apologise. I allowed myself to feel irritated and allowed them to let out their frustration and then I moved quickly on.
As Robbins says, 'by letting other people live their lives, you finally get to live yours'.
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The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
‘He wrote five songs about washing dishes!' The lost Woody Guthrie gems rescued by AI
With mass deportations of migrants across America – not to mention reports of people being put in shackles or made to kneel and eat 'like dogs' – Nora Guthrie is disappointed there hasn't been more noise from musicians about the issue. 'I've been out protesting every weekend,' says the 75-year-old daughter of singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, and founder of the Woody Guthrie Archive. 'And I've found myself asking, 'Where are the songs for us to sing about this?'' In need of a track that meets the moment, she turned to Deportee, a song her father wrote in 1948 in response to a plane crash in California that killed four Americans and 28 Mexican migrant workers, who were being deported. 'A few days later, only the Americans were named and the rest were called 'deportees',' explains Nora's daughter Anna Canoni, who recently succeeded her mother as president of Woody Guthrie Publications, over a joint video call from New York. 'Woody read about it in the New York Times and the same day penned the lyric.' Originally a poem, the song (often subtitled Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) was first popularised by folk singers Martin Hoffman and Pete Seeger and has since been covered by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell. Now, though, leaps in AI audio restoration technology mean we can finally hear Guthrie's own long-lost, home-recorded version, and it's striking how powerfully it speaks to the way migrant workers are demonised today. They 'fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil', he sings, 'and be called by no name except 'deportees''. Singer Billy Bragg argues that 'When the ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] are rounding people up in fields, the song could hardly be more relevant.' Initially a single, Deportee also appears on Woody at Home, Vol 1 and 2, a new 22-track treasure trove of Guthrie's final recordings (including 13 previously unheard songs), made at home in 1951 and 1952, just months before he was first hospitalised with the neurodegenerative Huntingdon's disease that led to his death aged 55 in 1967. 'He'd been blacklisted [during the McCarthy era, for activism], so he couldn't perform as much and couldn't get on the radio,' says Nora. 'Huntingdon's was seeping into his body and his mind. The tapes are a last push to get the songs out, because he senses something is wrong.' Guthrie's advocacy for migrant workers and social justice was informed by lived experience. Born into a middle-class family in Okemah, Oklahoma, he was just 14 when the family lost their home and he subsequently lived through the dust bowl, the Great Depression, the second world war and the rise of fascism. 'He had to migrate from Oklahoma to California,' says Bragg. 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Woody at Home contains previously unheard songs about racism (Buoy Bells From Trenton), fascism (I'm a Child Ta Fight) and corruption (Innocent Man) but also showcases the breadth of Guthrie's canon. There are songs about love, Jesus Christ, atoms … even Albert Einstein, whom he once met and took a train with. It tickles Nora that her father wrote 'no less than five songs about washing dishes'. Guthrie wrote Old Man Trump, also known as Beach Haven Race Hate, about their landlord, Fred Trump – father of Donald – and his segregative housing policies. Woody at Home premieres another song about him, Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord. 'It's really the story of how the guy who has everything gives nothing and the guy who has nothing gives everything,' says Nora. 'My favourite bit is when the landlord gets to heaven laden with gold. They send him to hell and he goes, 'Let me see your manager. I'm gonna buy this place and kick you out.' The arrogance and entitlement are astonishing, but it clearly defines someone we all know. We lived in Trump buildings. We know who they are.' The family moved to Queens where, when Nora was 11, she answered the door to an inquisitive 19-year-old singer-songwriter called Robert Zimmerman. The future Bob Dylan had read Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory. 'I was a little upset because I was watching American Bandstand and had to answer the door,' she chuckles. 'There was this guy standing there who looked dusty and weird. I slammed the door and ran back to American Bandstand. But he kept on knocking.' The 2024 Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown dramatises the iconic 1961 meetings between the teenage future legend and his hospitalised, dying idol. Nora loves the film, but points out: 'My father wasn't in a room on his own like in the movie. Woody was on a ward with 40 patients, in a psychiatric hospital because there were no wards for people with Huntingdon's at the time. There was a sunroom to the side where Bob would meet him, take him pens and cigarettes. My memory is that Bob would not only sing his songs for Woody' – Dylan subsequently recorded a heartfelt tribute, Song to Woody – 'but that he'd also sing my father's own songs to him. I can't emphasise enough how kind Bob was, but he understood that Woody needed to hear what he'd achieved.' By then, Guthrie was very ill. 'Because of Huntingdon's I didn't have a dad in the traditional sense people talk about,' Nora says with a sigh. 'He couldn't really talk or have long conversations like we're having now. We couldn't have physical contact because with Huntingdon's your body's always moving. You'd have to hold his arms back so you could hug him. If we ever went out to a restaurant people would look at us like he was drunk and that hurt.' Nora became Woody's carer and, in her tireless curation of his legacy, has been caring for her father ever since. 'That happened accidentally,' she says, explaining how she'd spent 10 years as a professional dancer when – in 1991 – Guthrie's retiring manager called her in to sort through boxes of his stuff. 'One of the first things I pulled out was a letter from John Lennon,' she says, fetching the framed letter, sent to the family in 1975, for me to see. It reads: 'Woody lives and I'm glad.' The next find was the original lyrics for This Land Is Your Land. 'It was a treasure trove.' From which there is more to come. His descendants hope to spark today's young songwriters – and protesters – in the way Guthrie did for Dylan, Springsteen and countless others. 'I see us as the coal holders,' says Anna. 'We keep Woody's ember burning so that whenever someone wants to ignite the fire in them, Woody is hot and ready.' Deportee (Woody's Home Tape) is available now on streaming services. Woody At Home, Vol 1 and 2 is released on Shamus Records on 14 August
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Daily Mail
Take the near-impossible quiz that was used to determine if applicants at Vogue were fit for the job
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