Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.

I love this time of year, and I love it because I just am automatically in a reflective mood and I have been thinking a lot about

the last 12 months and reflecting on the highlights and the hard parts and all the

various things that happened over the course of the year and I just wanted to take a minute and share four important life lessons that are top of mind for me right now after all this reflecting and I don't know what it is about me,

but why do I have to learn everything the hard way?

Like literally, every lesson that I learn in life

for some reason causes me to have to suffer but I'm willing to do that

if it means that you and I can take these lessons and use them to create a better

life moving forward and so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to share these four lessons with you that I learned over one of the craziest years of my life and here's my mission. I really hope that you not only have fun with me today,

but I hope that I can save you the hassle

and the heartache of having you learn these lessons

a hard way to.

Just try to embrace and consider what I'm saying as a simple truth about life.

So I'm not only going to share them, but I'm going to take the time to unpack every lesson

and I'm going to do that because I really truly do not want you to have to

torture yourself the way that I always torture myself.

And before I jump into the four lessons, I thought a little context might be helpful.

So if you've been listening to the last couple of episodes of the Mel Robbins podcast, you know that

lately your friend Mel, well, she's been forcing both you and me to slow down.

And you know that that does not come easily for me.

It does not come easily for me to get into a very self-reflective mood. I'm not the kind of person to make a cup of

tea and sit in a comfy chair and just lounge around. And I have to laugh because as I'm talking to you right now I realize that it's not four

...