Thanks, Jenny. I appreciate that. You know, this, this rule,
the five second rule really can have a very profound impact on
your life. And the craziest thing about this rule is how
it's so simple, it's almost cheesy. And it and I want to
tell you how it came about. Because really, what the simple
five second rule is, is that, you know, what if I told you
your life could kind of go to a whole new level, because you
made a decision within five seconds, because it turns out
that from the time you have an idea, your brain will talk you
out of anything in about five seconds, you've got about five
seconds from the time you get an idea till the time you've
talked yourself out of it. And you know, that's a that's a
pretty profound bit of research. There's a lot of neuroscience
behind this. And I honestly could do three weeks on this.
But I want to keep it super simple today, and really
introduce you to the core idea of it. And trust me, if you're
interested in a lot of the neuroscience and background and
all that stuff, there is just a lot of stuff in here. But I want
to go to one core idea. So the one core idea is, you know,
that everything in life all change in you takes courage. And
there's a reason why sometimes our courage fails. And so, you
know, I, I was thinking about how do we overcome those
excuses, you know, that fear sometimes, or, you know, that
that thing of man, I know, it's important to exercise, but it's
been 20 years, and I've made no, I've made no changes, you know,
it's, I know, it's really important to eat right, and I
will do it one day, when, but I just never get to some of these
things. What is it with that? What is it that causes us to
freeze? Or what is it in our mind? So I want to lay out just
a couple of things. Firstly, what is the five second rule? So
the five second rule, as I said, is so simple, it's almost cheesy.
And that is you count down from five. So you say 54321 move, you
take action, you count down, and you take action. That's the
whole, that's the whole thing. That's all there is. And so it's
54321 move 54321 go 54321 start speaking, step in, move forward.
And so the reason why this is so powerful, because counting down
like that, when you're when you, by the way, it does not work, if
you count up, the neuroscience is so weird on this, if you
count 123, because 12345, well, then there can be a
6789 1520 2000 5000, whatever it, there's no end to that. But
when you count down, your your mind, for a moment, goes into
pause mode, it freezes the old habits, it freezes the old ways
of thinking, it freezes your usual responses to something,
because it feels the countdown, and it's not sure what's coming
next, it's like a bit of anticipation. And in that
moment, you can find your courage, that countdown stops
your old mindsets, your old ways, your old pathways. So how
did Mel, so just if you don't know who Mel Robbins is, by the
way, today, she's, I think, the most sought after woman speaker
in the United States. And all came from this, she was a
criminal attorney. She, you know, was, you know, by law, all
he tends to had a great family, working super hard, and she just
became more and more overwhelmed by life to the point that she
couldn't get up in the mornings, kept hitting the snooze button,
was just exhausted. And many times her kids missed the bus or
went to school without lunch, or she couldn't get to pick him up.
She arrived late at work. I mean, she was just really in a
bad place. And so one day, she was thinking about all this. And
one of those late night things when you've slept into early in
the morning, and you can't go to sleep at night, your mind's
very active. And, you know, those modes that one gets into
sometimes, so it's like one or two in the morning, and she was
watching a rocket launch. And they did 10 9854321 launch, and
something triggered in her mind, she noticed the sense of
anticipation of that launch, she noticed that her mind got
fixated for that moment, she wasn't distracted, she wasn't
multitasking, she wasn't thinking about anything else,
she was just anticipating that liftoff. And when that happened,
she noticed a huge change in her interest level. And so she had
this thought, I wonder if I can launch myself out of bed in the
morning. So she said she thought
about it, she was going to sleep, that as she starts
surfacing in the morning, or if her alarm goes off, the minute
she starts coming away, she was going to count down from five,
and then say, launch and, you know, or move and get out of
bed. So the next morning, she did this. And so she started to
surface, she started with 54321, launch, and she found herself in
the bathroom. Before she had fully figured out what she was
doing, before she could hit the snooze button, and do the old
habits, she had somehow bypassed all her years and decades of
bad habits and bad training. She was fascinated by this, she
thought, well, maybe it was a one off. So you know what
happens next, right? She did the next day, the day after that,
it was into two weeks, three weeks did flawlessly did not go
back to the old ways. And so she became interested as an attorney
as a highly educated person, I think she has a Harvard Law
degree, very smart person. And so she decided to research this.
And to her utter amazement, she found case study after
neuroscience study after another, that confirmed why this
worked. And so she started to interview neuroscientists, she
started to interview other research scientists to figure
out how on earth does such a tiny trick. It feels like a bit
of a Jedi mind trick. She was like, how can something this
simple, be so massively effective. And so what she
learned is that the way the mind works is it's a little bit like
think of a road system in your brain, right? And if you know,
you know, being from Africa and being in the bush, my family had
a game farm. And, you know, we would do these little trails,
we'd find these little trails where the animals had walked. So
the animals walk the same trails through the bush, and it makes a
little pathway, and you can follow that pathway, you know,
with a deer go and then the bigger animals come in the
pathway gets bigger, and so forth. And we didn't have big
cats, but we did have some giraffe and some, you know, some
very big animals like kudus about twice the size of horse,
it's, you know, really big, big back, and they're really heavy.
And they, they make a wider pathway. And then we decided,
well, one day, what we were going to do is we were going to
create roads, and you will like the sophistication of the civil
engineering, I'm about to share with you African style, is that
the worker had worked on the farm for, I think it was like
70. And his name was Abel, and Abel had a roll of toilet paper
on a stick. And he tied it to a tree. And this is really what
happened. And he just walked through the bush, and he knew
these trails, and he followed them. And then my dad followed
behind him with a D six grader, literally, and made a road
through the bush. Now, we could have gone later and tied that
road, I suppose we didn't, but we did put gravel down. And so
your brain is a lot like this. When you first have a thought,
it's like that tiny little pushing through the bush, you
get scratched, there's no pathway yet. You did a second
or third time you start to get rid of, you know, you start to
break off the branches that were scratching you. And slowly you
can walk through and then the path gets wide until eventually
if you did enough times, it becomes a highway. So think of
the first time you started driving, there were so many
pathways, there was no there was just like running through the
bush, like the key goes in here, I have to put in neutral, if it
was a stick shift, you had to put the clutch in, I have to
reverse, I have to think of this, I must stop, I must look
at the traffic. And it's so but now that there's a highway of
driving, I see Ben, you're driving there. So you're
illustrating the point. So there's a highway now. And in
that highway, your brain, you see the keys, and the next
minute you're at the mall, and you don't remember driving. The
reason is there's a highway now. And so what happens is, we have
developed highways of eating, highways of exercising or not
exercising, highways of, you know, learning what when you
learn something new here at the edge, your natural highway is to
fight it, because you have a working memory, you have a
working memory of how you sit down at your desk, how you work,
how you do the what you do. And so what the five second rule
breaks is it breaks the gets you off the old highway, it puts you
onto a new road, it puts you onto a new pathway. So disrupts
and interrupts default thinking. And it distracts your mind for
just a minute, on all the old ways, old excuses, old things
that you're used to doing, and it changes your physiology, not
just your psychology, but your physiology. And it makes your
mind fall back in line, it starts to submit to instead of
your mind talking you out of it, you're talking your mind into
it. That's basically what's happening. And this simple
little exercise
five-second rule starts to become like your starting ritual. It literally activates your
prefrontal cortex. Now, all that science to say that it works, the simple little idea works. So,
an example of this is, you know, Mal's been teaching this to a lot of different people.
And so, you know, people have used this. They're sitting, you know, they're sitting in a room,
maybe at a bar or a club. And the guy wants to go, you know, approach the girl sitting across
the room. And he's talking, guess what he's doing? Talking himself out of it, right? But if he goes,
five, four, three, two, one, move, the next minute he's standing in front of her and he has to say
something. There was a great story of she had just taught this. And there was a very introverted
engineer who was sitting listening to all this. And it was at some big company. I've forgotten
exactly who it was. It was, I'll think of the company's name in a second. But it was, you know,
a very large multi-billion dollar technology firm. Anyway, they'd done the conference, Mal had spoken,
and he was sitting there. And he saw the CEO walking by and he'd want, there were so many
layers between him and the CEO. And he thought, man, if I can just share this idea with the CEO.
And immediately he started with, you know, all the talking me out of it thing. And he just went,
five, four, three, two, one, walk. And the next minute he's in front of the CEO. And the guy stopped and said,
can I help you? And he shared the idea. And so, you know, the CEO said, that's interesting.
What's your name? And left. Now, nothing came of that particular story. But that guy did something
he had never done before. He created a new neural pathway in his mind, in his behavior. He'd opened up
a new opportunity realm because he had always used the excuse that he was an introvert
to allow, or I'm not good with people socially, as an excuse to talk himself out of it.
Now we all have excuses. That just happens to be one of them. So let's talk for a minute. I just
want to share a quick quote from Mel herself. She says, it takes just five seconds to change your life.
Sounds like a gimmick, doesn't it? It's not. It's science. I'll prove it to you. You change your life
one five second decision at a time. In fact, it's the only way you change. The five second rule has
transformed the lives of people around the world. The rule is easy to learn and its impact is profound.
It is the secret to changing anything. Once you learn the rule, you can start using it immediately.
The rule will help you live, love, work, speak with greater confidence and courage every single day.
It wakes up the inner genius, the leader, the rock star, the athlete, the artist, the agent inside of you.
Mel Robbins. So I want to share with you today just three key ideas about this. What is this thing?
How do we use this tool? And then I want to extend the challenge. Because one thing we have to break
when we're in a learning program like this, and we do a lot of repetition to give you so many
opportunities to start up and to start putting to practice. I'm going to end this session and we
will have a breakout here with your teams. And I would love to ask the team leaders, could you
enroll everyone in your team in a 30 day challenge? And the 30 day challenge is simply this, to use
the five second rule every single day for 30 days without exception. Now, if you drop a day,
that's easy. You just start at day one again. And the 30 days starts again. So you can't say,
oh, I dropped it off to day 10. That's okay. Day 11 can be day one. And you can just start again.
So you can, you do your 30 days may just take longer. So why 30 days? Because it takes a
minimum. Some people say 90. But this particular one is so simple. And it creates pathways so
quickly in your mind that I think 30 days in and you will never forget it. That moment when you
know you should get up right now and go to the gym and you're about to talk yourself out of it
that feeling of I don't have motivation. I'm tired. I don't want to do this that moment 54321
move, put on your shoes, leave. That is what we're doing. Now some of you may have to stack a bunch
of five seconds together to put you on your shoes, get out the door, get in the car, arrive at the
gym, get your first exercise. You may have practiced it five times before you even push the first
weight. So there you go. Whatever it takes, right? Whatever it takes. So why does this work?
Right? Well, three key ideas.
Number one, you need to understand how your emotions work
and that you have a huge control over them.
So, a neuroscientist called Antonio Damasio,
I think I pronounced it correctly,
says that the human beings are feeling machines that think,
they're not thinking machines that feel.
And we make decisions based about 95% of our decisions,
according to him, are actually based on our emotions,
not our rational thought.
That's a surprising,
that's a rather frightening statistic, if that's true.
So, why does this work?
We've talked before,
you all remember about the elephant,
the rider and the pathway, everybody remember that, right?
Do you remember the analogy?
The elephant is the emotions,
the rider is the rational part,
the pathways, the change, the direction we're trying to go.
So, if you just speak to the head, to the rational side,
and the elephant isn't interested in moving, guess what?
No progress will be made.
If you just speak to the emotions
and the rider isn't in control of what's going on,
the elephant will go charging through the bush.
And I can tell you, as an African,
if you see a bunch of teenage elephants
run through a bush, they can get really mischievous,
they can create a highway in the bush.
They just flatten trees,
they flatten everything when they do that.
And so, nothing stops them.
But so, what we're trying to do
is we're trying to speak to the rider and the elephant,
and that's why the five-second rule works.
So, here's another,
since we're on the subject of shocking information,
a research paper of 25 years,
and there's a fantastic TED talk on this,
about the fact that your brain has no emotional circuits.
Your brain has no emotional circuits.
What your brain does is it creates a prediction,
and then based on that prediction,
your brain will literally invent the emotion in the moment.
You wake up in the morning,
oh, that's terrible, I remember what I did yesterday,
I'm probably gonna get fired today,
and it makes a prediction, I'm going to get fired.
And when it makes that prediction,
your mind says, oh,
I know what emotion goes with that, depression.
It literally makes up the emotion in the moment.
So, you say, what, you mean I can control that?
You can, with a little bit of help,
but the five-second rule will get you there much faster,
we'll talk about that.
So, emotions that seem to be happening to you
are actually made by you.
Let me say that again,
emotions that seem to be happening to you
are actually made by you.
You, based on a prediction you made,
but if you change the prediction,
you can change your emotion,
and you can architect your own experience.
This is a mind-boggling piece of neuroscience.
This is some of the most extraordinary breakthrough.
So, university, I think it was Stanford University,
we did the research,
25 years to discover you have no emotional circuits
in your brain is incredible thought,
that you have much more control over your emotions
than you think.
Does that surprise anyone?
Is anybody really surprised by that data?
Some of you are.
It surprised me when I first thought,
but it also is exciting, isn't it?
I mean, it means that if you change your predictions,
you change your experience.
So, let's talk about the second big idea.
The second big idea is you can rewire your brain
through action.
The reason the five-second rule works
is when you count down,
as you start counting down,
remember your brain goes into pause mode,
it gets the old ways are suspended,
your old reactions, excuses,
lack of feeling motivation,
whatever is suspended for a moment,
anticipation builds as you hit.
Now, here's the strange thing,
your mind knows you're gonna get to zero
and you're gonna move,
and it works anyway.
This is fantastic news.
It works anyway.
So, in that moment, you release your courage,
you release, you get to do what you wanna do,
not what you've talked yourself out of.
And so, most of us spend a good portion of our lives
talking ourselves out of stuff,
whether it's just talking yourself
out of the gym that morning,
talking yourself out of starting that new business,
talking yourself out of speaking to the CEO
about your new idea,
asking your boss for a promotion,
whatever it might be,
whatever it is you're doing,
you're talking yourself out of it.
And what this simple rule does
is it gives you an action point that calls you.
Now, when you keep doing this action,
if you go five, four, three, two, one,
move to go to the gym,
and you keep doing it,
at some point, that highway will go from a little.
footpath to a nice gravel road, to a tarred road, and you will not need the five-second
rule anymore. Once it gets that well-worn, well-structured neural pathways in your mind,
you don't need these mental assist programs to get you there. This is just to get you
going on the new pathway, get you off the old highway of laziness and bad eating and
lack of exercise, as an example. I picked that because I know that will affect everybody.
There are very few people who say, oh, I eat great, I'm really exercised, I'm in great
shape. If there are people like that on the call, I just want to say, on behalf of everyone
else, we hate you. Not really, but well done, well done, if you're that person. I can't
say that because my wife's on the call and she's that person, so there you go. Take it
all back. All is forgiven, come on. The next thing is, if you use the rule to take this
kind of action, whenever you're facing challenging circumstances, difficulties, you'll be surprised
how many opportunities for growth this will actually unlock for you. This idea that, oh,
that's just the way my emotions are, that's just the way I'm wired, that's not true. You're
not wired that way. Your predictions have worn a pathway in your mind to such a degree
it's made you that way, but your emotions aren't you. There's a deeper you that's bigger,
more powerful than your emotions. There's a part of you, your inner being, if you like,
your spirit person in you that's far greater than your mind or your emotions. That's really
good news. So if you caught this idea that you can rewire your brain through this action
and this tool, there are others, but this one is one of the most powerful that I know.
I've just loved using it. So we said there were three points. So the first point we went
through was understand your emotions and the control you have over them. And then we talked
about two, you can rewire your brain through action. And then three, start with one win.
Start with one win. So I picked three. You can pick any one you want, but if you don't
have one, pick one of these. So I'd like you to pick one because in the worksheet, which
you're about to get into, you will be able to fill in which area you want to go after.
So here's one. Let's talk about exercise. We all believe that we should exercise more.
We thought about it many times, et cetera, as we've discussed. But did you know that
exercise is 100% mental? The physical work part is just the result of that mental activity.
And here's the big key there. When you do this pathway well enough, it becomes an identity.
You're not an overweight person trying to exercise. You're a healthy person exercising.
It's like, I'm not somebody trying to give up smoking. And then somebody offers you a
cigarette. You don't say, oh, I'm trying to give up. The identity there is I'm still a
smoker. I'm trying to give up. But if you switch the identity to, again, it's 100% mental.
If you switch the identity to, I'm a non-smoker now. Somebody offers you a cigarette. Oh, I don't
smoke. Notice the difference. Not I'm trying to give it up. I don't smoke. The identity there
is I am a non-smoker. You've switched from smoker to non-smoker. You've switched from
a non-exerciser to an exerciser. You're switching from an unhealthy person to a healthy. I am a
healthy person that is now exercising. You say, well, it's only been a day. Sure, but you've
switched your identity. And now you're on your road. Now we're just going to exercise every day
because your new identity allows you. So what you did is you changed your prediction.
You changed your prediction. My prediction is one day I'm going to stand on the scale,
see the number, and it's going to look different. You notice some of the other, I'm sure you're
hearing some of the other trainings coming through as we're talking. Or number two,
so exercise number one. Number two, productivity. Of course, we've been talking a great deal about
that here at The Edge. And so, you know, one of the, you know, one of the two biggest issues
with productivity is we've talked about is distractions. The ability to manage distractions.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, turn off all social notifications. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, turn off all the distractions.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, start my deep work session. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, open my
book and write my Monday morning queues. If you got behind in your queue book, super easy way to
get back every Monday morning or even start today if you're a bit behind, write your new to-do list.
Next Monday, new to-do list. Why? Because every month, each time you're transferring things from
last week's list to this week's list, you can ask yourself, can I delete this? Can I delay this? Can
I delegate it or can I automate it? All those mechanisms only kick in if you've actually
started. So what the five-second rule gives you is the ability to start and to take action
and the action rewires your emotions. So for many of you, productivity, right?
Third one you might want is take control of your mornings. Owning your mornings is one of the best
ways to increase your life, your productivity, your sense of well-being, and your sense of
accomplishment. So according to Duke professor Dan Ehrli, he says the first two or three hours
of the day are your brain. Two to three hours after you've woken up, your brain is at its very,
very best. So that's really interesting. So that's not the time to be doing email.
Use it for your deep work, for doing something creative, for moving your business forward. Don't
use your very best time for your very lowest functions. Again, we've done training on that.
Here's another little bit of a shocking theory. Again, more research and about the idea
that every time if you hit the snooze button, it actually has a harmful brain.
It harms certain brain functions and that harmful effect can last up to four hours.
So no more snooze buttons. The snooze button might be the worst invention for human psychology ever.
It's very damaging. You put yourself into a very unusual, unnatural mental state. I'll just leave
it at that. Well, we'll skip the science because I want to land this. I want to give you a chance
to break up into a breakout session. So Jenny, back to you.