The Mel Robbins Podcast
My Process For Achieving Goals: How to Change Your Life in 5 Simple Steps
23 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the five simple steps to achieve your goals?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. You know, there's this one piece of research that I first saw four years ago, and it has changed the way I look at my entire life. In those moments... where your life just feels out of control.
Research proves that the single fastest way to start to feel in control of your time and your life again is to add in something meaningful right now. Set an important goal and start pursuing it, no matter what your life looks like. Now, I know what you're thinking. I'm supposed to add something in, Mel? Set an important goal? I don't have time for anything else in my life right now. I get it.
That's the first thing I thought when I read this research too. Because you probably feel like you have no time. You're in reaction mode all the time.
I mean, how could you even think about your goals or adding in something meaningful or important into your life when you work in a hospital and your days are nonstop or you're a teacher and you're so overwhelmed before the first bell even rings or you're a caregiver and it feels like everybody else comes first. There's never any time for you.
That's exactly why you need to set an important personal goal right now. Because personal goals are how you reclaim yourself. That's how you say, I'm not just my job. I'm not just the things I do for other people. I have things that I do for myself.
And especially at a moment in time when the world feels so heavy, especially with everything going on, your personal goals, the things that bring meaning to your life, they become an anchor. in the storm.
See, the things that are important to you that you're working on that get you out of bed in the morning, that give you something to look forward to this week, the world can't take that away from you.
So I'm going to urge you, as you listen to me explain the importance of this right now and the five things that are going to help you really go after these important goals, I want you to identify something that is personal. something that's important, something that really is meaningful to you.
I mean, maybe you want to lose weight or start meditating or sell your art or leave the relationship or heck, put yourself back out there and fall in love with somebody incredible or run that marathon, pay off the debt, go back to school and get your master's degree, move to a new city, write the book, whatever it is for you.
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Chapter 2: How can setting a meaningful goal help you feel more in control?
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This week, save 20% on your first order at puregeniusprotein.com when you use code MEL. Plus, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm so glad that you're here. It is such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you right now.
And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this conversation with you, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. You pushed play on the exact thing you need to hear today. And I wanted to talk about this topic because I've been reading your emails. And so many of you feel overwhelmed, powerless, out of control.
You have no time. You're exhausted. The world seems to be falling apart. And at the same time, your life, your job, the demands of taking care of everybody, it's running you over. And so if you feel like you have no time for yourself, you're in the right place. Because today, I'm going to teach you how to take back control of your life, of your time. You're going to love this.
This is all based on research. The way that you reclaim yourself, your time, and your life is by setting an important personal goal. I get it. It's a little counterintuitive. You're super busy. You have no time, but hear me out. The research shows that if right now, in the middle of everything else that's going on, you add in something meaningful.
You will immediately start to feel more in control of your life and your time. It could be anything. Getting back out in your garden, going back and singing in the choir, something you haven't done in 10 years, volunteering in the community, getting your hospice training. Pursuing something meaningful right now is how you say to yourself, okay, things are crazy, but I am not just my job.
I am not just the emails I answer. I am not just the bills I pay. I'm not just the things I do for everybody else. I matter. And when the world feels heavy, you need something inserted into your week that lifts you up. It's almost like giving yourself a life draft. That's why it's important. These personal goals anchor you in the middle of the storm because a goal is something you've chosen.
A goal is something that you say is important. A goal is something that you can control. It's the one thing that the world or your job or everything else that you're doing can't take away from you. And I'm going to teach you five rules. Five rules that are going to help you get really clear about what you want right now, what's important to you.
And also five rules that reveal the mistakes that most people make when they go after their goals. These are five rules that if you follow them, you can not only start to insert this goal into a busy life right now, you'll also see yourself pursuing it successfully. They're all backed by science and research.
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Chapter 3: What are the two science-backed requirements for successful goal setting?
Give back. But you just haven't taken the time to insert it into your life because you keep telling yourself you got no time for that. You'll do it later when you find time. No, no, no, no. We're going to follow the research. Put it in now and you'll feel more in control. So I have a goal of increasing my grip strength.
And one of the reasons why is so many of the experts that have come on this podcast have been talking about for women in particular, our grip strength is a really important thing. And so I've been working on something just called like the dead hang, where you hold on to a pull-up bar. I'm not even asking myself to do a pull-up yet. I'm just holding on. Another one, drinking more water.
You always see me with this big mason jar if you're listening and you're not watching on YouTube. I almost always have a huge mason jar, big wide mouth one sitting next to me because I'm trying to drink more water. Here's another little goal of mine. I really want to feel closer to my adult kids.
And it means I got to kind of shift how I'm showing up because how you show up with your kids when they're young adults is different than how you stay close to them when they're adult adults. Maybe you've got a goal like this. Maybe you want to start a meditation practice or you want to start journaling. Maybe you want to sell your first piece of art.
Maybe you really want to get that business plan done. Maybe you do want to volunteer in the community. Maybe you're inspired to get a certification, like you want to take that yoga teacher training, or you just want to have an evening stretching routine, or maybe you've got kind of something big.
As you're listening to me, you're going, whoa, if Mel's going to give me five rules, I might as well... Work on writing that book. I might as well make a plan to move to a new city or a different country. I might as well stop talking about that YouTube channel or podcast and actually do it. Whatever it is that your goal is, it's going to be personal and it's important.
And once you insert this personal goal, this thing that's meaningful to you that you're working on, it's sort of like having a little secret project. You got a little secret quest that you're working on.
Kind of makes things feel like, okay, there's something else going on other than reading the headlines, other than answering the emails, other than making it to the next Zoom call, other than stressing about everybody else in my life. There's something going on that's important. And these rules are going to help you get clear about what that is and honest with yourself.
And they're going to help you get started. And more importantly, they're going to help make it easier week after week to keep inserting this thing in because you're going to find that every time you do, that week gets a little bit better. All right. So let's just jump in with rule number one. Now, rule number one. decide what you want and write it down.
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Chapter 4: How does writing down your goals impact your success?
It didn't matter because it was so meaningful to be connected to people and to have this thing every week to look forward to and to know that you were doing something for you and that did something important in your life. The same thing happened for me with Pure Genius Protein. A lot of people are like, oh, did you want to start a business?
I was like, I actually was not looking to start a business. It started as a personal goal. I just wanted to put my health first. My daughter looked at me about a year ago and she grabbed me by the shoulders and she said, mom, I have to tell you something. She said, you need to start prioritizing your health. You're 56 years old. You're running yourself into the ground.
You need to really take all the health advice seriously. I'm worried about you. I'm worried about how you are just running yourself into the ground. I realize you love what you do. I realize you care a lot. And you probably relate to that. You know, the reason why you're so tired and you're so busy is you care so much. That's why you do so much.
And so I started listening to the experts on this podcast. I got a resistance train. You've heard that too. I got to start prioritizing protein. Then I went to my doctor and my doctor's like, okay, Mel, for you and your health, you got to get about 125, 140 grams of high quality protein every day. Now I cook. I love to eat. I thought this isn't going to be a problem.
Do you know how hard it is to get 125 grams of protein every day? And so here I start going for this thing that I think is going to make me feel better, but I can't actually achieve it. So now it's making me feel worse.
And as many egg bites as I would eat and smoothies that I would make and chicken breasts that I would cook and salmon that I would roast and bars that I would choke down, I'm just like, I can't do this. I either can't get the goal Or I'm eating 5,000 calories and that's not part of the goal here. So I had a problem. How do I get more high quality protein in?
And I'm not going to sit around and wait for somebody else to solve this. I'm not going to cross my fingers and hope that somebody else figures out how to make this better. I think I want to get involved and solve this problem that I had.
And once I decided, okay, I think it would be very meaningful to work with world-renowned researchers and medical experts, become a founder of a protein company, something I've never done in my life, and work on this problem and make the product better. That would add a lot of meaning to my life.
And so that's how that became a goal of mine this year, to step into Pure Genius Protein, to recruit a world-class medical board, to really be committed to creating the best possible product you could because this was something I was looking for. So again, it didn't start out like, I'm going to start a protein company.
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Chapter 5: What is the difference between 'the will' and 'the way' in goal achievement?
And Dr. Doty explained that the fastest way for you to wire in the importance of this goal is to bring online as many sensory systems as you can, like smell and taste and emotion. Dr. Doty said, if you have a goal, he wants you to take a pencil. I'm holding a pen. It doesn't matter. You take a pencil, you write it down. And when you're writing it down, you're doing something physical, tactile.
Then you're gonna read it silently to yourself. So you look down and you read it silently. Then you read it out loud, okay? You're gonna volunteer for hospice. You're gonna write that book. You're gonna put yourself back out there and meet the love of your life. You're gonna do the dead arm hang for a minute. Then you visualize.
And when you visualize yourself doing it, I want you to not just visualize, okay, it's been a minute, now you drop. You visualize this. And you ask how you can get certified to volunteer. And then you visualize yourself going to the meeting. And then you visualize yourself driving the meals or sitting bedside with somebody. And see what you want in your imagination.
And as you do this, your brain builds the circuitry to make it easier in real life. And it's not just neuroscientists that can explain this. This is a technique that Olympians use. They visualize their routines before they do them because basically it's a way to do the mental reps to get your brain to anticipate what's going to happen. This is why pilots train in simulators.
Your brain loves rehearsal. And so when you combine all three, naming it, writing it down, visualizing it, works so well. Every sensory channel you activate lights up different parts of your brain. And when these systems fire up together around the same thing that you want, you create deeper, stronger neural pathways. And it allows the goal to really become part of your subconscious.
You're not just thinking about it anymore. You have encoded it into your brain. And now your brain's like, oh yeah, we're doing this. I can visualize doing this. You see how powerful this is? And this is particularly important if you're constantly like talking yourself out of everything.
Dr. Jim Doty says all of that like nastiness, all the ways you say, no, I'm too late, I'm too this, I can't do this. That's a part of your brain called the default mode network that is just in overdrive. Why? Well, he's already taught you this. Because repetition causes your brain to remember things. You know how long you've been saying this garbage to yourself?
And that's why you can use this process that Dr. Doty taught us on this podcast, and I'm simplifying for you right now. You gotta get clear about what you want, and you gotta write it down. because we are going to override that loop of negativity that's been in there probably your whole life.
If you don't declare what's important to you, if you don't get clear about what you want, the things that are meaningful, everybody else's stuff is going to fall right in the frontal line. So do not skip this step, okay? Now, once you know, what do you want? What is it that's important to you? Let's talk about rule number two. Okay, and I'm going to warn you, you're going to like this rule.
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Chapter 6: Why is consistency more important than intensity in pursuing goals?
I was the least supportive person in the family. Well, luckily for Sawyer, she had fired me a long time ago. She didn't care what I had to say. Because she knew it would haunt her for the rest of her life if she didn't pursue this thing that was meaningful to her. And that's why you got to fire your family. I'll give you another example. My husband, Chris, he is working on his first ever book.
I am so proud of him. I mean, this has been a goal of Chris's for probably five years. And he didn't start by writing out a book. You know what he started by doing? Getting clear that he wanted to do more writing. And that led to him joining a writing group online where it sounds kind of boring, but you basically just go on Zoom. And everybody writes. And then you talk about it.
And then there's assignments where you all write about certain things and read about your writing. And it was this beautiful thing that he did. And then that led him after a couple years of just being in a writing class. to say, hey, I'm very clear I want to write a book. I don't even know what it's about. I just want to write a book. And he's been writing a book for two and a half years.
Now, here's what I got to tell you. I haven't read a single word of his manuscript. And that's not because I don't care. It's because he hasn't asked me to. I don't really know what the book is about. I kind of have a general idea, but it's changed. I don't know the title. I don't know what he's thinking about for the cover design. I just know that every single day the man writes.
And I also know he fired his family. There is not one cell in Christopher Robin's body that is saying, your family's not supportive because he's not even expecting us to be. He's doing it for him. And I want you to just stop And really think about how powerful that is. How powerful is it to realize that you can do something just for yourself?
That you can insert something into your life that's meaningful to you without having to seek validation and support from everybody else around you. Because you're doing it for you. That's why this research is so important, that when you got clear about what you wanted, what you want is for you. And that's incredible. And that's available to you. Now, here's the nuance.
You're going to fire your family, but I didn't say you had to do it alone. What does that mean? It means don't make your family the support team. If there's something in your life that you want to do, first you got to get clear about what it is. You got to understand you're doing it for you because it makes you feel more like you and it brings something into your life.
And then ask yourself, well, if I were to do this with a team, What could that look like? And let me give you an example of what that looks like. So I have been hosting the Mel Robbins podcast for three and a half years, but two years before I recorded my first episode. First, followed rule number one, I got very clear about what I wanted.
And what I wanted was to start a podcast because I really wanted to have longer conversations with you. And I also wanted to learn more. I wanted to have a podcast where we could sit down, you and me, with some of the world's most renowned experts and interesting people and learn and gain from their wisdom and feel encouraged and inspired and just have our minds expand and our lives expand.
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Chapter 7: How can you make time for your goals even in a busy life?
That's how you get the support that you need. And one more reason why this is important. When you fire your family, you have to take full responsibility for the things that you want in your life instead of outsourcing them to your family. Like a lot of the mistakes that people make when it comes to goals is you start saying you want things that you think you should want.
And oftentimes it's because of the pressure coming from your family that you think you should change your job. You think you should move to a different city. You think you should be interested in baseball or knitting or football or something else. And so firing your family also cuts this umbilical cord to the people you're related to and forces you
to truly own what's important to you and why it's important to you. All right, that's rule number two. stop outsourcing your motivation to your family. Fire your family. And I hope you're starting to feel a little relief because once you stop outsourcing your goal to the wrong people and you start taking ownership, change becomes possible and your goals don't feel so out of reach.
And so here's what we're going to do though. We're going to take a quick pause for a minute because I want to give our amazing sponsors a chance to share a few words. And while we do, don't go anywhere. Because up next, we're talking about rule number three. Incredible research about the two requirements of every goal.
And once you hear it, you're going to realize, oh my gosh, that's the reason why I haven't made my goals stick. Stay with me. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. Today, you are learning how to set and achieve your most important goals. And that brings me to the third rule. And the third rule is another critical thing that most people don't understand. I know I certainly didn't.
And once I learned rule number three, which comes from groundbreaking research on goals, I understood why I had had a hard time keeping and sticking to my goals. And it had to do with the fact that I didn't understand that there are two requirements that are necessary for you to achieve a goal. And this research, it's gonna change the way you think about goals for the rest of your life.
It comes out of the University of Oregon, and it was conducted by professor and psychologist, Dr. Elliot Berkman. Dr. Elliot Berkman is also the co-director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. And his research explains exactly why
you may have not been able to meet goals in the past, or you haven't been able to kind of like create the changes that you're looking to see in your life. And what I love about his research is it's super specific. It gives you a template and it's empowering because he says there's two requirements for any goal, any project, any change you want to make. The two requirements are the will and
and the way. So let's unpack these according to the research. Think about the thing that's important to you or the problem that you wanna solve, the goal that you're gonna insert into your life right now, okay? And so the first component that we gotta have based on the research is what Dr. Berkman calls your will. That's why.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of not quitting when pursuing your goals?
That is the first critical component of your goal. And that is what's going to fuel you. All right. This feels like a great moment to hit the pause because one of my goals, honestly, is to be a gracious and great partner to the incredible sponsors of the Mel Robbins podcast. They're the ones that allow me to do this and make it free for all of us and millions of people around the world.
So take a listen. And while you do, share this episode with someone that you love. Text it to the friend that either has a big goal that they're working on, or even better, text it to that person in your life that hasn't made time for themselves in a decade. Let me inspire them with these rules.
When we come back, we have so much more research and more of these incredible rules for you to learn that are going to help you achieve your most important goals. Stay with me. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins today. You and I are talking about getting clear about what you want and achieving your most important goals.
And I'm sharing five research-backed rules that will help you create more meaning and take back your time in a way that really improves your life where you are right now. I'm so excited for us to jump right back in. Now let's talk about the second component. And this is the way. You got the why and you got the way. Thank you, Dr. Berkman. And what does that mean?
That just means how the heck are you going to do this thing? So let me give you a very obvious visual for the way that I think about this piece of the research, the way. Where you are right now, imagine that there is a beautiful brick path
that is in front of you that leads you to the thing that you want to insert into your life, this important goal that you have, whether it's writing the book or it's doing the dead hang or it's volunteering for hospice or it's going back to graduate school, this brick path leads you from where you are to the thing that you really want that's important.
Every single brick just represents one action that you're going to take, whether you take it once a day, whether you take it once a week, whether you do something once a month, because the way that you do anything, the way that you lay a path is just brick by brick by brick. And we're going to get into how you're going to insert action now into a crazy busy life. Don't worry about that at all.
But there's a couple things I'm going to share with you based on research that will help you start to think about, okay, well, how do I start doing this thing, okay? And the first one I want to share with you is really fun. This research comes from Professor Katie Milkman.
She's one of the world's leading behavioral scientists, an endowed professor at Wharton School of Business, and she has this incredible trick to make your goals stick. Okay, you ready? Now that you understand what you want and why you want it, and we've fired your family, how do we make this fun? It sounds obvious, but I think so many of us go through life with the wrong mindset.
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