The 5 Second Rule is a blueprint for taking action and driving change. Offering her own blueprint for metacognition, TedX speaker and life coach Mel Robbins shows you how to transform your life, productivity, health and confidence with simple, everyday courage.
The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins
The 5 Second Rule is a simple and effective technique for driving change.
Speaking from personal experience, author Mel Robbins suggests counting down 5-4-3-2-1 before taking action, allowing your brain to switch from procrastination and fear based programming to activation and action. It’s a guide for driving change throughout your life.
Below are some of the key ideas I took from this book:
Key Insights
- You can treat catastrophic thinking with consistent bias for action.
- It’s not the big moves that define our lives but the smallest ones.
- Using the 5-4-3-2-1 rule is simple, even if the action itself is hard.
- If you have the courage to start, you have the courage to succeed.
- Procrastination occurs because we need activation energy to create momentum, much like a car needs energy to start.
- You validate your own ideas by pursuing them.
- EL James self published 50 shades of grey after writing Twilight fan fiction online.
- Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio suggests our feelings decide for us 95% of the time and that you always feel before you act. Therefore deciding to wake up is deciding how you feel about waking up.
- Either you run the day or the day runs you. Either you master your mind or your mind masters you.
- Feelings don’t count, only actions do. Just thinking about X doesn’t make X happen. Your dream won’t work unless you do.
- Go the extra mile, it’s never overcrowded.
- Parkinson’s Law = work expands to fill the time you give it.
- Procrastination isn’t something we control but it is something we understand. It is caused by stress that is often unrelated/external to the project at hand.
- Productive procrastination is essential for creative projects but destructive procrastination is where you put off something knowing the negative consequences.
- Cure anxiety by reframing the worry as excitement and you can trick your mind to accept a new context behind a natural physiological response.
- Don’t tell people your dreams. Show them.
- Use 5-4-3-2-1 to wake up early in the morning and own the first hour
- Use 5-4-3-2-1 to make positive life choices and neglect negative ones.
- Use 5-4-3-2-1 to ask difficult questions and seek clarity in relationships.
- The 5 second rule is a metacognition technique to flood your brain with activation energy when you feel an instinct to act upon your goals.