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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mel Robbins
Read between
June 5 - June 15, 2025
You can’t control how other adults behave, and stressing about it diminishes your power. You’ll never reach the full potential of your life if you continue to allow stupid things or rude people to drain your life force.
Every time you say Let Them, you acknowledge that you cannot control this situation that is stressing you out.
If I’m still thinking about it an hour from now, I should do something. If it’s going to matter in a week or a year, then I definitely need to do something. In the situation with this lady and her dog, I knew it would bother me every single time I walked my dog at that state park.
Professor Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Adults will have negative opinions about you—no matter what you do. Why? Because adults are allowed to think whatever they want.
Let Me do what I want to do with my one wild and precious life. This approach is liberating because
When YOU are proud of yourself, you hold all the power.
Someone is always going to be disappointed by the decisions that you make. Don’t ever let it be you that’s disappointed. And don’t let guilt drive your decisions.
What I love about this idea of stepping into someone else’s Frame of Reference is that understanding where someone is coming from may not change their opinion or yours, but it will deepen the connection that you have while you navigate your relationship.
By learning to focus on what you can control—your thoughts, your actions, your energy, your healing—you unlock the power to change not only yourself but the world around you. It all starts with you. That’s how much power you have. Anytime you improve yourself, it improves all your relationships. And this is particularly true with family.
People can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves. Most people haven’t gone to therapy, haven’t looked at their issues, and they don’t want to.
most human beings have never done the work to understand themselves, heal their past, or manage their own emotions. If they haven’t done that for themselves, they are incapable of doing that for you and showing up in a way that you deserve.
Why are you always the one who has to adjust? Why do you take on the responsibility for someone else’s happiness—at the expense of your own? You will always come last if you let other people’s emotional immaturity have power over you. Instead of taking on the weight of someone’s disappointment, anger, or guilt, you’ll learn a liberating new approach: Just Let Them react.
most adults are just eight-year-old children inside of big bodies. The next time you’re with this person and you feel yourself getting triggered by something they say or some way that they act, I want you to just imagine the fourth-grade version of them present in the room with you. Because what
most emotions will rise up, and then fall away, within 90 seconds, if you don’t react to them. You cannot control your emotions from rising up. Trying to is a waste of your time. The better strategy is learning to just Let Them rise up and then fall without reacting. There
Let Me is the part where you remind yourself that this too shall pass. You are stronger than anyone else’s emotional reaction.
Psychologists will tell you that the root cause of many disorders is an obsessive need for control. As you are learning in this book, anytime you try to control something that you can’t, it just makes you feel more out of control and powerless.
If someone has done something better, and bigger, and cooler than you could ever imagine, Let Them. Let Them have their success. Let Them beat you to it. Let Them do it in the smartest and the coolest way. Their success gives you the formula. Remember
to remember this the next time you find yourself burning up with comparison or anger about what someone else is doing: I told Molly, “You should thank her!” No one should feel sorry for you. If you are jealous right now about someone else’s success, GOOD. I’m happy for you. Jealousy is an invitation from your future self. It is inviting you to look more closely at someone else—not to make you feel inferior, but to show you what is possible.
Maybe you’ve been playing so small that you can’t see how big and beautiful your
That’s why I say this kind of comparison is your greatest teacher. Not because it shows you what you need to be doing, but because it galvanizes your power and awakens your anger. And you need your anger as the fuel to get you going.
“The truth is you don’t have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren’t: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it.”
had been avoiding that responsibility for a decade. This experience forced me to look in the mirror and be honest with myself about what I wanted. Jealousy was in fact a message from my future self. Seeing my friend win allowed me to see bigger possibilities for me winning too.
The more you release your expectations, control, and the need to fix others, the more your relationships will flourish. It’s never too late to find amazing friends, make amends,
When you push someone, it only makes the person push back. You’re working against the fundamental law of human nature. People need to feel in control of their decisions. You want people in your life to change, but pressuring them creates resistance to it.
If someone doesn’t feel like changing, it doesn’t mean they’re lazy or that they don’t want to change deep down. More likely, it means they feel discouraged, like they can’t change, it won’t work, or that it’s just going to be too hard and they’ll fail.
Everyone thinks they are the exception to bad outcomes happening to them. Which
It means that all those threats, worst-case scenarios, passive-aggressive comments, eye rolls, and scare tactics aren’t even registering in the other person’s brain. You are wasting your time, your words, and your breath. No wonder you are so frustrated and stressed out by the situation!
Let Them live their life. And you want to know what else you are saying? I trust YOU to figure it out.
Model the behavior you want to see. What
In the ABC Loop, you have three steps: A: APOLOGIZE, then ASK open-ended questions. B: BACK OFF, and observe their BEHAVIOR. C: CELEBRATE progress while you continue to model the CHANGE.
The point is not to be “right.” The whole point is to communicate in a manner that neutralizes any tension and creates the space for positive change to happen.
In this method, you’ll ask “why?” five total times until you feel like you’ve gotten to a much deeper answer as to why this bothers you so much.
The thought behind this technique is that getting the person to talk about how THEY feel will encourage them to think about the disconnect between what they want and their current behavior.
“I want to apologize for judging and pressuring you, and I realized I’ve never asked you how you feel about your. . .”
What’s in their way is a lack of belief in their ability to change—they don’t think they can. I love this because it shifts you from a place of judgment
to compassion, and it creates space for true connection and change to happen.
When someone you love is going through an internal struggle, they will not get better for you, their kids, or their family. They have to want to get better for themselves. You may not understand it. You
no one gets sober until being drunk is more painful than facing the thing you are running from. Hearing
that the only way somebody gets stronger is by facing the things they feel too weak to face.
that you’re looking for someone who is capable of helping you become your best self and co-creating a beautiful life together.
People’s behavior tells you exactly how they feel about you.
Your job isn’t to interpret it or second-guess it. Your job is to let people reveal who they are and how they truly feel about you and accept it. And
Forget what they say. Watch what they do.
If your best friend were being treated this way, what would you tell them?
Never feel bad about asking for what you deserve. Never hint about something as important as a commitment. Being able to have honest conversations is the foundation of a loving and healthy relationship.
She focused on the value of her time and what she was looking for.
the #1 mistake that people make when they are trying to take something to the next level is focusing on the other person, rather than focusing on the value of their time and what they want in life. And it worked—because he stopped dating everybody else, and
I have really loved spending time with you. And I know myself, and I’m really looking for a commitment. I wanted to talk to you because I want to see if we both have the same vision for where this is going. I value my time and energy, and I don’t want to put time and energy into spending time
with someone if it’s not going to go to the next level. And I’ve reached that point with you. It’s been really fun. I love spending time with you. But I only want to invest more time and energy if we’re going to go to the next level. And if you don’t see the same thing, this has been great. But I just know myself and I need to choose to invest the time that I have with people who want the same things that I want.
