Mel Robbins: Your goals deserve five minutes

If you were one of the hundreds of people who listened to Mel Robbins speak at the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center late last month, you probably didn’t hit your snooze button the next morning.

Or immediately look at your phone upon waking up.

“I’m hoping everyone in that audience was inspired to wake up, hit the ground running,” she said. “I don’t think most of us understand how our minds and our priorities have been hijacked by what’s on our phones,” she said.

Instead, use that time to align your day with the values, priorities and that are important to you.

“That begins with the habits of the morning,” she said. “Productivity has nothing to do with when you get up. It’s how you get up. Your goals deserve five minutes: Think about your day to plan the one thing you are going to work on.”

Robbins spoke at Harrisburg Regional Chamber and CREDC’s annual event. The Business Journal caught up with her late Wednesday afternoon, just before she took the stage in front of 500 attendees.

Robbins is a sought-after  motivational speaker, a talent that was more happenstance than planned, she admits.

“It was an accident,” she said.

It was almost a decade ago when another woman in Robbin’s circle of friends was planning the first TEDx conference. The friend was networking with others to find speakers and needed someone who wanted to talk about how you jumpstart a change.

“Someone said ‘I know this woman named Mel and she’s had, like, 19 lives’” when it comes to career changes.

“This was the first speech I ever did in my life,” she said.

You wouldn’t have guessed it. Robbins comfortably worked the audience and the stage. Her speech mixed simple advice with humor and vulnerability.

It wasn’t too shabby for a first attempt, either. Since then, the speech had been posted online and viewed more than 17 million times.

Having 800 people stare back at you while on stage for the first time was scary, Robbins remembered.

“If you look closely, I had a neck rash. It starts appearing at minute one,” she said. “I did not plan on talking about the five-second rule, I forgot how to end the speech.”

It was a good thing she forgot.

That rule was the basis of her best-selling book, “The 5 Second Rule,” which elaborates on concepts of how to push yourself to achieve your goals. Her ideas and how she relays them resonate. Now she reaches about one million people a day online.

“I have been given a gift,” she said. “I can take extremely complicated research … and I can boil it down into actionable advice that you can talk about at a kitchen table.”

Robbins won’t be on the speaking circuit for much longer. She is launching a syndicated talk show, “The Mel Robbins Show,” in September. The idea of the show is a throwback to the old-school talk shows: No celebrities. Real people. Real stories solving people’s problems and celebrating the real things that people are doing.

Last night’s speech will be one of her last for awhile, she said.

“After that I have to do 175 shows in one year.”