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

by Mel Robbins

“the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and the awful, it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living. Heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.

As soon as I catch myself worrying, I use the Rule, 5- 4- 3- 2- 1 and I think of something more positive—like the thought of him smiling as he drives down the road.

was an infant, I remember experiencing that same tidal

worries and fear hijack your mind and rob you of the magic and wonder in your life. Brené

And why is it so hard for us to soften into joy? “Because we’re trying to beat vulnerability to the punch,” says Dr. Brown. When your mind takes you somewhere sad, dark, doubtful, or negative, you don’t have to go with it. I love what Hein wrote to me: “99.999% of the time, it has always been a fake reality that I had created in my head.”

I started to silently counting to myself, “5- 4- 3-...” and as I counted, I could feel the fear lowering inside by body. Counting yanked me out of my head and planted me in the present moment.

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.

“Nothing” in life is perfect. Nothing at all. But you can use 5- 4- 3- 2- 1 to quiet the mental chatter and learn to appreciate all of the small moments like feeling grateful for your daughter. Feeling

When you have a panic attack, that same “near miss” sensation rushes your mind and body, without any warning and with no preceding event.

Your heart races. Your breath speeds up. You might get a little sweaty. Your cortisol surges. Your body goes into a state of hyper awareness. Now that your body is in an aroused state, your mind is going to race to try understand why. If you don’t have a legitimate reason why, your mind will think you must be in actual danger. Your mind will go prehistoric on you and escalate the fear, thinking that danger is imminent.

As your heart starts to race, your mind races for an explanation so it can make sense of what’s happening to your body and decide how to protect you. Maybe I’m having a heart attack. Maybe I don’t want to get married next month, after all. Maybe I’m getting fired…maybe I’m dying. If

confidence in yourself is built through acts of everyday courage.

When you lose touch with the real you, you will feel adrift, you’ll lose confidence and your life will lose its “flavor of congruency.”

Professor Brian Little, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, just gave a great TED Talk, “Who Are You, Really? The Puzzle of Personality.” In it, he talks about the difference between extroverts and introverts and the things that make us who we are.

As Professor Little likes to say, “you are like some other people and like no other person.”

doing things that scare you actually make you more confident.

will start as just an instinct. It always does. First you take a class. A class leads to a certification. A certification leads to conversations. Conversations lead to opportunities. Small opportunities lead to larger ones. Maybe you’ll want to share something what you’re learning with people at work, so you use the Rule push yourself to do it. That’s when momentum kicks in.

The Alchemist. It’s one of the best-selling books of all time and has been translated into 80 languages. I’ve

The Alchemist was first published in Brazil, it failed. Miserably. “When The Alchemist was first published twenty-five years ago in my native Brazil, no one noticed. A bookseller in the northeast corner of the country told me that only one person purchased a copy the first week of its release. It took another six months for the bookseller to unload a second copy—and that was to the same person who bought the first! And who knows how long it took to sell the third. By the end of the year, it was clear to everyone that The Alchemist wasn’t working. My original publisher decided to cut me loose and cancelled our contract. They wiped their hands of the project and let me take the book with me. I was forty-one and desperate. But I never lost faith in the book or ever wavered in my vision. Why? Because it was me in there, all of me, heart and soul. I was living my own metaphor. A man sets out on a journey, dreaming of a beautiful or magical place, in pursuit of some unknown treasure.

And as Coelho wrote in the foreword, it starts with a belief in yourself, and that belief is grounded in the courage to push yourself.

The answers are inside of you if you have the courage to listen. You are like some other people and like no other person. You

Leave nothing important unsaid. Intimacy takes courage. Risking getting emotional or upsetting someone so that you can express yourself is scary, but the result is magical.

Deciding not to say what you feel creates what researchers call “cognitive dissonance” between what you truly believe (in your heart) and what you actually do in the moment.

Those problems build up and, over time, they can break your relationship. That’s what happened to Estelle during what

The truth is the shortest distance between two people and it may very well save your relationship.

Silence creates distance. Truth creates real connection,

Leave nothing important unsaid. 5- 4- 3- 2- 1 go ahead and say it. All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them. - Walt Disney