The high- 5 challenge…Give it a whirl!
Admittedly, I’m obsessed with Mel Robbins. You know how sometimes you can’t explain something, but you are just attracted to someone’s energy? The minute I heard about her 5- second rule, I took a deep dive into her book and theory behind why counting backwards from 5-1 would actually get me to take an action. So naturally I tried it, and it worked. I’m not going to say that I do this every morning when I’m getting out of bed – sometimes I want to hit the snooze button and stay in bed and just chill with dog and my coffee. But, I found that this worked with many different things where I found myself procrastinating. I just counted backwards and boom! The second you start counting, you are pushed into action. You look around, you are alone, and you realize that nobody is going to do whatever it is you want to do, but you. Sitting and doing nothing will not change your life. You must make -a -decision to change your life, and I learned this when I tested out her theory.
So recently it’s all over my feed about Mel’s new high -5 challenge. And this morning, Mel was on the On-Purpose with Jay Shetty, and I couldn’t pull myself away. You see what Mel’s dialed into is the following: small goals equal small wins – and many small wins equal confidence and when we are confident, we will keep going. When we keep setting BIG goals, and they are unachievable, we feel failure and we quit. Think about any diet you’ve tried. You starve yourself for a month, try all of the latest tik tok workouts, and you actually gain weight! Don’t roll your eyes, we’ve all been there…We throw in the towel and go nuts eating and drinking whatever we want…Eventually we try again, but we don’t ever believe we can achieve what we really want. So, if we can set small goals, we can celebrate and gain momentum and forward energy that we need to keep going. When I graduated the Jay Shetty school, and had my comprehensive exam for a panel to review, I specifically talked about goals being small and easily doable because once we can find things that work, we are pumped! We gain confidence, we may talk about it with friends and share our success, and we keep going!
Mel’s theory is that we get up, make our bed, brush our teeth, and then look in the mirror and throw up a high five to our self. We don’t need to say anything, we don’t need to set ridiculous affirmations that we don’t even believe… just the act of doing it that sets our day off on the right foot. It legit takes 2 seconds. She gave this example – when we give someone else a high five, we get an emotional response of feeling excited and happy. What immediately came to mind for me is when a girl I work with told me she just graduated college, our hands both went straight up into a huge high 5, and I remember feeling so proud of her and happy for her happiness, that it’s true, we don’t second guess the motivation behind a high 5…it’s already programmed into our brain.
Sadly, Mel pointed out that rather than high five ourselves, we look in the mirror and go ham on the beat down. We see our flaws (that’s if we even look at in the mirror), we look at our wrinkles, flabby arms, fat belly, thick thighs, dark circles under our eyes and everything else we don’t like about our body…Guilty as charged…As I think about it, I’m not even sure I look in the mirror! Yikes, that’s really harsh. We need to build up a self -awareness so that we don’t compare ourselves to others, don’t experience jealousy, and want what everyone else has. When I say I’m obsessed with Mel Robbins, it’s not a jealous obsession, it’s an “I think she’s amazing at helping empower people to live their best life” and isn’t that what it’s all about? I want to study people who inspire the heck out of me, not be jealous of them. Let’s start to celebrate ourselves. Then we can genuinely be happy for others and their success. The goal is to lift each other up, but I for one, had never thought about lifting myself up…until today! I did my first high five in the mirror and it felt so good that I did it twice! Let’s Talk!
