“Your friend, Mel.” “The lady with the glasses.” Mel Robbins is down-to-earth, relatable — and an absolute powerhouse. Her podcast reached No. 1 in the world this year, her latest book, The Let Them Theory, led The New York Times Best Sellers list, and she is a Real Leaders Top Keynote Speaker and coach.
After 15 years of Army-crawling in the dirt, as she puts it, she recently erupted on the scene as one of the more followed and sought-after experts in mindset, behavior change, and life improvement; and her media company, 143 Studios, has worked with some of the biggest companies on earth.
In this exclusive interview with Real Leaders, Robbins unpacks insights from her new book and its wildly popular, research-backed The Let Them Theory. Plus, she gives a crash course on ChatGPT for business, explains why you need to get on TikTok Shop now, and gets real about her gravest mistakes as CEO.
Real Leaders: How do the ideas in The Let Them Theory apply to business founders and CEOs?
Mel Robbins: The Let Them Theory is a simple mindset tool that shows you in any moment in your business and your life what’s in your control and what’s not — and lets you take the power back and lead. It is particularly important in business because when you get yourself obsessed with the things about your business or your team that you can’t control, it’s going to stress you out. The more you’re stressed, the more you bring that tight, micromanaging, narrow-focused energy to your team and business, the worse your team is going to do, and the worse your business is going to do.
Let them is a recognition that this issue that’s bothering me is not where my power is. Therefore I’m going to recognize that and say, “Let them.” The thing that your team did, the nasty review that the customer left online, the deal that you didn’t win, the interest rates that you can’t control — already happened. The power is not in getting upset about what’s going on in the markets or about how hard it is to hire talented people. Your power is in your response, and that’s the second part of the theory.
After you say, “Let them,” you’re going to say, “Let me — let me remind myself at all times that I have three things I can control: what I think about this, what I do, and what I don’t do.” One of the major mistakes that I’ve made as a CEO is I often feel the need to do something and react out of panic, fear, or anger. All that does — because leaders bring the weather — is it spreads more panic, fear, and anger through your organization and team.
The third thing you can control — and this is where it changes you as a leader and trickles down into your organization — is the let me part. It’s also about let me manage my response to my feelings about this thing. Let me show up as a CEO instead of showing up like an 8-year-old inside a big body who’s constantly reacting to things and sending shock waves through an organization that needs something different from me.
RL: What inspired you to create a bonus chapter on leadership?
Robbins: There are two big topics that require and deserve more attention and detail: One of them is parenting, and the other is how to use The Let Them Theory at work. As a CEO I can’t just let my team do whatever the hell they want. I can’t just let things play out. I have to lead. So I wanted to lean more into those two specific applications of The Let Them Theory.
“Leading With Let Them” is a guide to remind you what you know to be true and give you some principles to use The Let Them Theory to be more effective. It’s about using the science of influence instead of trying to manage top-down. It’s about activating the motivation, skills, and interest of people who work for you to rise up. You’re doing it through people rather than feeling like you have to be the one directing everything. It’s a very different management approach.
Let’s talk about operations. Operations are people. A company is nothing without its people. I know everybody is extraordinarily nervous and excited about AI, but people are also concerned about AI and how we’re going to use it. At the end of the day, it’s still all about the people. Are the people who work for you excited to work for you? There’s a simple way you can tell. Ask yourself when you pull into work in the morning, do you think the people who work for you are excited to walk into the building? Are they excited when your name shows up on an email? Do you think people are generally open to what you have to say, or they roll their eyes at you because you’re a nightmare?
The Let Them Theory forces you to understand that you will get better results when you empower and influence people, not when you micromanage them. One of the hardest aspects of using The Let Them Theory, at least for me, is making sure I’m the one: Let me be focused on outcomes, and let me be clear about my expectations and what it means to deliver these outcomes for success. Nine times out of 10 if something is not going well in a business, if you use The Let Them Theory and let them know what the outcomes are, let them know what success looks like, let them have the resources they need to get what you have asked done, and then let me get out of the way and focus on how to nudge people along and lift them up inside a very clear container — that’s the winning formula.
The biggest mistake I’ve made is not being clear in my communication. If there’s a breakdown, it’s almost always about a lack of process, clarity, or skill set in a particular seat. It’s almost never about somebody’s desire to succeed.
If you take time to make this shift and you’re willing to go, “It’s on me. Let me lead the way, define the way, and then get out of the way and go into a supporting role,” it’s pretty incredible how things change.
RL: Where have you landed on leadership for yourself?
Robbins: It would be way easier if I were just the CEO. It is very challenging to be the person creating the content and the face of the brand and the company behind the microphone and in front of the camera — and do a good job as CEO.
I think about my business like we’re on a bus, and I’m driving the bus, and we’re going in a certain direction, and I’m the person as the CEO and the face of the business who defines the direction we head in, but I have to understand what seat in the bus I’m actually sitting in because I shouldn’t be driving it — that’s the COO. I should look at the GPS because I’m defining strategy. One of the most important things about leadership is understanding what is the best seat on the bus for you to sit in. (Jim Collins’ book Good to Great lays out the metaphor about having the right people in the right seats on the bus, aka the correct employees in the correct roles.)
As a leader, I have to recognize the things I do well, and if I’m not the best person to do some other job in this company, I need to get out of that seat and get somebody in it who can.
A major, major breakthrough for me was to understand that being a great leader requires self-awareness. The first step of self-awareness is that you manage your emotions and you are not bringing rain clouds and storms and dysregulation to your team because you’re stressed and fearful. The second step is self-awareness of your unique genius. It takes founders too long to replace themselves. The reason why is you don’t actually think about what is your unique genius — that only you can do in this company — and that’s the seat you should be in. Once you define the vision, what the outcomes should be, and what success looks like — and you have an organization where everybody knows the one thing that matters most today for their seat — things run very smoothly. The hardest person to get out of the way when it comes to an organization is yourself.
RL: You launched The Mel Robbins Podcast just three years ago, and this year it reached the No. 1 spot in the world. How did you do it?
Robbins: The first thing I ever did in media was host this little Saturday morning radio show in Boston, and I loved that job. When podcasting started to take off, I was like, “I need to get in the game,” but then I started saying, “I’m too late. There are too many podcasts.” Every time I saw somebody launch a podcast, whether it was my buddy Jay Shetty or anybody else, I’d be like, “Oh now I can’t do it.” It’s not true. There are 8 billion people on the planet. There is room for you. If you start putting it out there, the people who want to listen to you will find you.
We did the first episode from the floor of my closet. We were complete idiots. We had no idea how much work or how complicated this was going to be, but we jumped in with both feet. Even though I knew the formula, I didn’t understand the complexity of how to do it. This thing hit like lightning in a bottle — because name the other female podcast host my age (now 56) with a level of trust from corporations and people globally whose podcast is not celebrity-obsessed or slightly political that’s entertaining and you can relate to. There’s nobody.
It’s taken me 15 years of Army-crawling my way through the dirt to get to a point where people are like, “Wow, she’s everywhere.” I’m still the same person I was 15 years ago when my husband’s restaurant business was going under, and we were under crushing debt, and I was just trying to wake up and do a little better each day and solve the problems we were facing. The core of my business is sharing all this learning with everybody else. My business is about helping people see a bigger possibility for themselves and giving them the tools, expert resources, and encouragement they need.
Having a business model that is ad-supported so that 99% of what I do is free to everybody matters to me because I have been in periods of my life where I felt like I was the only one with this struggle, I couldn’t afford to talk to a therapist, or I was so stressed and lonely, and I didn’t know there were simple solutions to the issues I was dealing with. I’ve been really focused on how to create an audio or video experience or book that’s worth somebody’s time. I start with the end user in mind.
The second thing is I’ve never changed my focus, and this is super important. I am a one-to-one brand. You will never hear me name my audience. You will never hear me talk about everybody. I have always thought about what I do as a walk with a friend, and I have put that intention at the forefront of everything.
The final thing that has really changed the game over the long-term is I play the long game. I’m very aware of the lever points of what I want to control and what I don’t care about controlling. I have always cared about controlling my content and owning it. Eight years ago when I first self-published The 5 Second Rule book and audiobook rights, everyone thought I was crazy. No it didn’t make The New York Times Best Sellers list. It did something way better. As it’s gone on to sell millions and millions and millions of copies, it’s been translated into 50-some languages, and as it went on to become the most successful audiobook ever launched in history by a self-published author — I own it all, and I set a precedent. As you look at The Let Them Theory explode around the world, guess what? I own it all too because I’m smart enough to understand the longtail of any business deal. As a business owner, I will never do a deal for money now that in success I would be pissed off that I didn’t make a smarter deal, which means I play the long game because I bet on myself.
RL: You’ve said that better leaders create a better world. What is your vision for a better world, and how do we get there?
Robbins: I’m very discouraged that we’ve gotten to a point where people seem incapable of having conversations with opposing or different points of view, because everything is not a zero-sum game in life or in business. Not every win has to mean somebody else loses. To be for somebody, you don’t have to be against something else. And I am deeply concerned that politics, business, everything has become entertainment. Everything is reduced to a sound bite. Everything is about the profit and not the people.
One of the things I fundamentally believe is that 95% of people have a good heart. They’re a kind person. They want to do well. Start from that truth — that most people believe the same things and are just looking to show up at work and feel like they know what to do in order to do a good job, and they have the tools and the resources to actually get it done, and when they do a good job, they’re acknowledged for it, and there’s not this constant beat down of everything that’s wrong.
The way that I see a better world happening is it starts with each one of us, and this is also part of the principle of The Let Them Theory. It’s easy in today’s world to look at the headlines, the economy, or the constant drumbeat of change and feel overwhelmed and powerless. My message is simple: You’re not powerless — because the power is not out there; the power is in how you respond to these things.
The world will become a better place if we can learn how to sit in a room and be with people who have different ways of seeing things. Be the mature adult who’s able to let them have their opposing point of view, and then step forward and try to understand why they might have that point of view.
RL: What’s next for you?
Robbins: What’s next for me — and I think this is also a very hard thing in business — is not taking on more. I would like to get better at what I’m already doing, and that is a very new skill for me because as an entrepreneur and a CEO, I have always chased the next thing.
Breaking it Down: 5 Ways to Lead Better
Robbins co-wrote a free companion guide to The Let Them Theory for leaders with her business coach, David Gerbitz. The bonus chapter, “Leading with Let Them,” identifies five behaviors to amplify a leader’s ability to influence others.
- Let Me – Focus on What I Can Control
- Let Me – Reframe Mistakes as Growth Opportunities
- Let Me – Manage by Outcomes
- Let Me – Be Personable and Present
- Let Me – Be Consistent
She tells Real Leaders why No. 3 is most critical for leaders:
“I have been such a micromanaging freak before The Let Them Theory because I was constantly stressed out. The problem with micromanaging is that what you’re communicating to your team is, ‘I don’t trust you. You can’t do this.’
“Micromanaging happens because you never even bothered to truly communicate what you wanted done, how you wanted it done, by when, and how you’re going to measure it. How am I going to know that this is actually done, and are there steps along the way that are important to me that you follow so I can understand how this got done? That’s on you, it’s not on your team.
“Managing by outcomes forces you to actually stop the Zoom parades and define very clearly, what does this job look like in terms of this person’s roles and responsibilities, and what does success look like in that job?
“Most of us are so busy running our business and doing things the way we’ve already done it that quarterly or annual goals or revenue targets are the only things we’ve defined — but do you know what a successful week looks like? What are those outcomes? Because that’s actually what your team needs. Your team needs a level of clarity about the outcomes for this week because just as the business world is in a constant state of change, so too are the priorities and requests on the desks of the people who work for you.
“This is a simple way to apply this: From the CEO chair down, does everybody who works for you know the one thing that matters most that they get done today? If people in your organization cannot answer that question, what the hell are they doing? They’re guessing, and that’s not their fault. It’s yours.”
Download “Leading with Let Them” at melrobbins.com/work.
Crash Course: How to Use ChatGPT to Create Your Winning Business Formula
Robbins believes that every leader can achieve business success by following an existing formula.
“In today’s world you don’t have to guess because even if you’re innovating, somebody has figured out a problem, a goal, or something you’re trying to do somewhere else,” Robbins says. “They’ve probably given a speech or written a book or a blog article. It’s all out there, so stop guessing and start looking for formulas.”
How do you find the right formula for your business and see it through? It’s simple. “One of the best tools that you have is ChatGPT,” Robbins says. Here’s how to use it — and you won’t find this in the pages of her new book either:
- “Write down the problem you’re trying to solve or the innovation you’re trying to create or the growth that you’re trying to have.
- “Challenge ChatGPT to think like the world’s best business coach analyzing the top business growth in the world and come back to you with a 60- to 90-day plan of exactly what you need to do.
- “You’re going to get a formula in a nanosecond. Keep iterating that until you get a formula that feels good.
- “Put it back in, and ask, “What is the team I would need, and what are their roles to get this done?”
“I’m constantly doing this,” Robbins says. “I’m constantly saying to my team things like, ‘Well, I understand that it takes us this long to go from taping a podcast to actually creating the 73 assets that go with the podcast, from the episode to the social media assets to communicating with the guests to the blog articles to the description to the thumbnails online to the titles of the podcast — it’s unbelievably complicated what we do — but I would like to know has anyone else out there, whether it’s in television or movies or processing engineering code, figured out how to actually find the roadblocks that keep slowing us down?’ We can hire a consultant. We can search online. So we are constantly looking for ways to improve the way that we do things in industries outside of our own. That’s the way you use a formula.”
The challenge lies in the resistance. “Here’s the big pushback that most CEOs and entrepreneurs have around formulas,” Robbins explains. “They say, ‘Well then I’m copying everybody.’ The fact is the second you have the formula, that’s the easy part. You have to use it, and that’s the hard part. Once you start applying it to your business, you’re going to make it your own.”
Hot Tip: Why You Should Sell on TikTok Shop
Robbins suggests that you own the rights to your books and other products so you can sell those items on TikTok Shop. She explains, “TikTok Shop is a wholesale play, which means it doesn’t actually get reported as a book scan, and most authors are so focused on making The New York Times Best Sellers list and having sales reported. I’m not. I’m focused on the impact. What’s incredible about TikTok Shop, the formula I figured out, is because it’s a wholesale sale, I get to set the price and turn our entire audience into an affiliate, and anybody who recommends the book can make a percentage of the sale of the book. That means I’m an affiliate on my book too, so now I make money on the back and front ends. How cool is that?”
