The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage

by Mel Robbins

There’s one thing that is guaranteed to increase your feelings of control over your life: a bias toward action.

Right before we’re about to do something that feels difficult, scary or uncertain, we hesitate. Hesitation is the kiss of death. You might hesitate for a just nanosecond, but that’s all it takes. That one small hesitation triggers a mental system that’s designed to stop you. And it happens in less than—you guessed it—five seconds.

Physical movement is the most important part of my Rule, too, because when you move your physiology changes and your mind follows.

You don’t hesitate all the time. For example, you don’t hesitate when you pour a cup of coffee in the morning. You don’t hesitate when you put on your jeans. You don’t hesitate when you turn on the television.

You can change your “default” mental settings and your habits one five-second decision at a time. Those small decisions add up to major changes in who you are, what you feel, and how you live.

You may think you’re protecting yourself from judgment, rejection, or upsetting someone, but when you make excuses and talk yourself into waiting, you are limiting your ability to make your dreams come true.

The world rewards those who are courageous enough to stop waiting and start.

The difference between people who make their dreams come true and those of us who don’t is just one thing: the courage to start and the discipline to keep going.

Waiting won’t help. Waiting will only make it worse. When you sit with fear and uncertainty your mind makes it expand; it’s called “the spotlight effect” and it’s one of the many tricks your brain plays in an attempt to keep you “safe.”

You can feel uncertain and be ready. You can be afraid and do it anyway. You can fear rejection and still go for it.

Uncertain AND ready. The "girl at the bar" example might be more "uncertain and unprepared"

“the girl” is not the source of power in the story. Tom is.

You can’t control how you feel. But you can always choose how you act.

As Wilson and Aristotle said, “Do good, be good.” Change your behavior first because when you do, you change how you perceive yourself.

Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi applied this concept to human behavior, blaming activation energy as one of the reasons why making change is so hard. He defines activation energy as that “initial huge push of energy that’s required to change”

There are two types of focus you need to master productivity: First the ability to manage distractions so that you can focus moment-to-moment on the task at hand, and second, the skill of focusing on what’s truly important to you in the big picture, so you don’t waste your day on stupid stuff.

think of one or two things I might not feel like doing but that I must do today—for my goals, dreams, and business growth. Researchers call these SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely).

Remember, as Dr. Ariely told us, the first 2 to 3 hours of the day are the best hours for the brain to focus on the tasks or goals that advance your own personal or professional goals.

Then I asked myself two simple questions: “What am I grateful for in this moment? What do I want to remember?” When you ask that simple question, you impact your brain at a biological level. In order to respond you have to take stock of your life, relationships, and work and search for an answer in the moment.

In a nutshell, since anxiety is a state of arousal, it’s much easier to convince your brain that all those nervous feelings are just excitement rather than to try to calm yourself down. When using this technique in experiments ranging from singing karaoke to giving a speech on camera to taking a math test, participants who said “I’m excited” did better in every single challenge than those participants who said “I’m anxious.”

Create an Anchor Thought