The Let Them Theory

by Mel Robbins

Dr. Ramani has taught me that “hoping someone will change is what keeps you trapped in a relationship with someone who is emotionally immature or worse, emotionally abusive.” This has nothing to do with you. This person is not changing. You are the one who needs to change. And that’s where the Let Them Theory is life-altering. Let Them. Anytime an adult acts like an eight-year-old child, Let Them. This strategy is going to change your life. For you it might be a parent that gets angry, storms out of the room, and refuses to talk to anybody for several days or a weekend.

it’s never your job to manage another adult’s emotions. When someone pulls the silent treatment on you, or plays the victim, or erupts in frustration, Let Them. And then I want you to visualize an eight-year-old trapped inside their body.

You will also realize that their inability to process normal human emotions like sadness, insecurity, disappointment, anger, fear, and rejection is not your fault. And it’s also not your problem to solve. This has been happening to this person since they were a child. It is not your responsibility to manage their emotions or try to fix them. Your responsibility is to protect yourself from their emotional spiral and to see it for what it is: A person who has no idea how to handle or express their emotions in a healthy way.

Research shows that 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 is also nothing you can do that will ever allow you to control the emotional reactions in another human being, no matter how hard you try.

Adults are allowed to feel how they’re going to feel—and they’re allowed to be angry. Broken. Devastated. Overwhelmed. Shocked. Embarrassed. And extremely pissed off at you. You can’t control it. But you try to control it by avoiding the truth. We’ve all done this. It’s why you’ve found yourself staying in the wrong relationships or the wrong jobs or the wrong patterns of behavior for years.

It feels easier to avoid it, because avoiding it means that you don’t have to face it. But easier now makes it way harder later. Avoiding the hard conversations now won’t make them any better next year. In fact, from experience I can tell you that the longer you wait, the more painful it gets. Choosing not to do what’s right for you will do nothing but cause you more pain.

It’s not your job to protect everybody else from feeling emotions. Your job and responsibility is to live your life in a way that is aligned with your values and what you know deep down is true for you.

negative emotions are a mentally healthy response to life’s upsets.

Using the Let Them Theory, you can stay in control even when an adult is acting like a child and having an emotional outburst. Make the right decisions for you, even if they make other people upset. You maintain your power when you stop taking on the burden of others’ emotions and act in a way that aligns with your values.

Life isn’t fair. But at some point, you’ve got to wake up, accept that fact, and stop obsessing over what other people have, what they look like, and what they’ve achieved.

The hand you’ve been dealt may not feel fair. But it’s still yours. And what you choose to do with it? That’s where your power is. Winning the game of life requires you to focus on the cards you have and choosing what to do with them.

You must stop obsessing over the cards in someone else’s hands. Life isn’t fair. Someone will always seem to have better cards than you and comparing your hand to theirs will always make you lose. Stop focusing on the other players; that’s not how you win the game of life. Learn to play with other players, not against them.

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. That’s why it’s imperative for you to recognize when you are engaging in this first type of comparison. Stop. Let Them live their life. Let Me focus on mine.

What I’ve found is that being happier requires you to allow yourself to be happier. It is impossible to enjoy your life or love yourself and beat yourself up at the same time.

There is enough happiness, success, friendship, and money to go around for absolutely everyone including you. It is in limitless supply. No one is taking anything from you. Happiness, success, and money are waiting for you to get serious about creating them. I will say this again: No one else’s wins are your losses.

Other people show you what’s possible. When you see comparison as a teacher, you’ll realize other people aren’t taking anything from you; they are giving something to you. Other people have this beautiful capacity to show you pieces of your future that you cannot fully see for yourself yet. They show you possibilities that you didn’t realize existed or told yourself you are incapable of achieving.

Flip your jealousy to inspiration. See what’s possible through their example. The people you compare yourself to act as mirrors, reflecting back bigger possibilities—or

How do you flip comparison into inspiration? Simple. Say Let Me and look at the data other people’s successes provide. Anytime you find yourself playing the game of comparison, there is something really important happening. Comparison shows you the areas of your life that need more of your attention.

these people who stir up your jealousy are here to show you the simple fact that while you have been making excuses, they’ve been putting in the reps, slowly chipping away at the boring, hard stuff. They aren’t special; they’ve just been what you aren’t: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it. That is 1,000 percent the secret to my success.

Using the Let Them Theory, stop torturing yourself and use comparison to your advantage. Let others have their success and leverage it to fuel your own journey. Other people’s success is evidence that you can do it too. By turning inspiration into action, you begin to build the extraordinary life you deserve.

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, strengthen family ties, or create the love you’ve always dreamed of.

The reality is adult friendships come and go. Expecting friendship will destroy it. You need a more flexible and proactive approach. Which is why you’re going to find yourself saying Let Them and Let Me all the time. Let Them move away. Let Them prioritize their new friends. Let Them not have time for me. Let Them not text me. Let Them not include me. Let Them go to brunch without me.

There are three factors that I believe make great friendships possible: proximity, timing, and energy. These pillars are the invisible foundation every friendship is built on.

According to a University of Kansas study, to become a “casual” friend, you have to spend 74 hours with someone. And to become a “close” friend, you have to spend over 200 hours with someone. Let’s put this research in the context of friendships when you are younger, and how they change when you become an adult.

Friendships come and go. You can feel close and then you can feel distant. And none of this is personal. It’s proximity and timing. The Let Them Theory has really helped me loosen my grip on adult friendship. It will help you do the same, because the more you grow in your life, the more people will come in and out of your life. Let Them.

Will some people be a little awkward? Yes. Let Them. Will most people be warm and receptive? Yes. Let Them. Creating friendship really is about the Let Me part. And here are some simple things I did to make myself go first:

1. Compliment people everywhere you go.

People love to be complimented because they feel seen and appreciated. And it’s a foolproof way to break the ice with someone without feeling weird.

2.

Be curious. Ask them what they’re reading. Ask them what they ordered. People love ...

3. Smile and say hello to anyone and everyone you pass or meet. Being a warm and approachable person is a skill. If you practice it, it becomes a way of life.

4. Do this without expectation. The reason to be warm to strangers is because simply creating connections with other people will improve your life. The warmth you give to others always finds its way back to you.

Your relationships create a good life. Good friends make you happier, healthier, and bring your life meaning, and friendships are one of the things you’ll cherish most as you go through your life.

There are three pillars to adult friendship: proximity, timing, and energy. It’s your responsibility to understand these three pillars and adopt a flexible mentality and proactive approach to your friendships.

people only change when they feel like changing. It doesn’t matter how much you want someone to change. It doesn’t matter how valid your reasons are. Or that you are right in your opinion that they should change. Or how big the consequences are if they don’t change. If someone doesn’t feel like changing, they won’t. And worse, when you pressure someone to change it just creates more tension, resentment, and distance in your relationships.

Dr. K is one of the leading voices on motivation and behavior change. He told me, point-blank, that pressuring other people backfires because “you don’t understand the way people are wired.” What you need to know, according to Dr. K, is simply that a human being will always feel like choosing what is pleasurable now and avoid what feels painful. In the moment, the work it takes to change is painful and hard. That’s why no one is motivated to change—even when they know it’s good for them in the long run.

in order to make a change, a person must be able to separate themselves from the pain they will feel in the moment and the action that they need to take. That means while he is sitting on the couch, he is going to have to say to himself, “This is going to suck to exercise, but I’m going to do it anyway.” He has to do it. He has to separate himself from the pain. He has to decide to override his feelings and push himself to do it. You can’t do that for someone else. So Let Them sit on the couch.

And one of her findings is groundbreaking: that people believe that warning labels, threats, and known risks do not apply to them. That’s why my friend’s husband thinks he’s the only person on the planet who can be overweight and sedentary and never have a heart attack. It’s why he can convince himself that he can stay exactly the same, and nothing bad will happen.

In reality, what that situation requires is compassion, not contempt. . . and your audible sigh of disgust and bad mood isn’t going to launch them off the couch. In fact, those sighs of contempt are going to keep your spouse lying on the couch until they’ve lost the remote in the cushions. No matter how loving your intentions are behind the audible sighs, your spouse is feeling like you’re trying to fix him—which feels more like pain, which means he’s now going to move away from you. It makes him feel defensive, and that’s just going to close him off from feeling like changing even more.

Dr. Sharot, she reiterated that human beings have a hardwired need to be in control. It’s a survival instinct. Feeling like you’re in control of your life is what makes you feel safe. Feeling in control is what makes everyone else in your life feel safe too.

This is why you must let adults be adults. Let Them. Acceptance of another person, as they are, is the foundation of a healthy and loving relationship. When someone feels that you accept them as they are, they feel safe with you. The opposite happens when you pressure, change, criticize, push, or expect someone to behave differently than they are. This pressure puts you and your loved one in a battle for control, whether or not you realize it.

Here’s the truth: No one wants to feel pressured by their friends, family, or loved ones. What you want is unconditional love, acceptance, kindness, and compassion. You don’t want to be controlled; you want to feel deeply accepted for who you are, and where you are in your life.

Dr. K couldn’t emphasize enough that it needs to be THEIR idea to change, not yours. The husband needs to have a reason to push himself to do the hard work—other than just shutting his wife up. Otherwise, this change will never last, and the resentment between them will just grow.

People only change when they are ready to make that change for themselves. Stop punishing them for not changing on your timeline. Stop trying to “motivate” them into doing something they clearly don’t want to do. It is a waste of your time. It is stressing you out. It is ruining your relationship. It is not working. And most importantly, it is driving a wedge between the two of you.

Because there’s always something within your control: it’s YOU. The only behavior change that you can control is your own. And this is where your power is. The first change in your behavior is to stop pressuring and start accepting. Let Them be. When you accept them as they are, the frustrating and ineffective battle for control ends and you set yourself up to win the war for positive change.

Model the behavior you want to see. What I love about this research is that it’s a sneaky way to get someone else to change and believe it was their idea.

That’s the power of your influence, and you can use this research to inspire anyone in your life to change. Here’s how: First, Let Them be. Stop pressuring them to change. Accept that you can’t control their behavior or actions. Adults only do what they feel like doing. Your job is to accept them for who they are and where they are. Let Them be. Then, Let Me.

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 5 Whys method was created by Sakichi Toyoda, an inventor and founder of the Toyota family companies, as a way to help engineers uncover the root cause of a particular problem, and it’s now taught in business schools and engineering programs around the world.

Here’s how you use the 5 Whys method: Ask yourself: Why does this person’s behavior (or this situation) bother me so much? Think about it, and write or say your answer. And then, ask it again: Why does that bother you? And then again: Why does that bother you? And then again: Why does that bother you? And then a final time: Why does that bother you?