The emotion itself is 90 seconds. The thing that makes it last for hours and days and years are the stories that we tell ourselves. Your dreams and the things that you put on your vision board have a very important purpose. They pull you through your fears. They inspire you to take action, but they are not necessarily meant to be achieved. I believe when you pursue your dreams and you keep going and you keep telling yourself that if I work hard something amazing is going to happen, you'll achieve something better, something that you don't even know or can even think about right now because it's not even on your radar screen. Those dreams are dots on the map of your life that pull you in a direction you're meant to go but you might never end up there because you're meant to end up somewhere else. I actually have an incredible quote of yours about dreams. You say when it comes to your dreams, you have two choices. Pissue them or be haunted by them. Mm-hmm. It's true. You can't forget a dream. You can't. Something that you want in your life. Once you really want it and you give yourself permission to feel that desire, there's something called the zygarnaq effect. And the zygarnaq effect is this thing that happens in your brain. And I also think it's tied into your heart and your nervous system, but it happens in your brain where when something is important to you and you can feel that wave hit you, your mind takes note and goes, oh, I'm going to put this on the list in the file of my mind called, this is important. And whenever you are near anything that's related to what's important to you, your mind changes. The live network and filter of your brain will change in real time to try to alert you to the fact that you're near something that is important to you. And I'm not making this up. This has been proven in study after study. And I think that's why your dreams haunt you. You can ignore them. You can shove them down. You can tell yourself you don't want it anymore. But if you've ever wanted something deeply, it doesn't leave you. It gets stored in the subconscious part of your mind waiting for you to remember that it's there and to get to work on it. If you've always dreamt of living in an amazing beach house somewhere, you will always think about it. And you'll either pursue it or you're going to be haunted by it. If you've ever thought about taking your grandmother's recipe and like doing something with that tomato sauce, you'll either pursue it or it's going to haunt you. And that's because of how you're designed as a human being. So you got two choices. You either do something about it, or you're going to live for the rest of your life with this thing in the back of your mind that slowly eats at you. So here's the thing, Mal, everything you're saying, I, when 1000% agree, like, but how do you, as you know, doing that first step, making that first move is very difficult. In those moments where you have a dream, anxiety can get in the way, fear can get in the way, imposterous syndrome can get in the way, you've pushed yourself through it. But what I love is about your book is you're actually giving very specific tactics and tools on how people can use this in order to get started so they can achieve the dream so they don't get freaking haunted by it because even by saying to someone, hey you're going to be haunted by it as we know, it doesn't do enough to then get them to act. So I really want to talk about the High Five habit and I actually, there are a few things that you wrote in your book that was so powerful of what it actually tells you about yourself and I'd love to go down those if you're cool with that. Yeah sure. So Etch, if you want to give us a

quick little preface on the High Five Habit in general and then we can start there. Okay, so let me tell you the story quickly. So I developed the High Five Habit. I tend to have this knack for finding myself in breakdowns in my life. I consider myself a life-tested expert. All the advice that I am sharing with the world is stuff that I figured out the hard way by screwing up my own life. And the high five habit is no different, okay? So I find myself last year at a very low moment. I am standing in my bathroom at a moment. I know every woman can relate to. There in my underwear. I'm looking in the mirror. And of course I am picking myself apart. I'm like I hate how I'm getting really jowly right here. And I don't like how I've got these like big lines that are starting. And then I notice you know I've got this like indent right here that I don't like and I don't like how I've got these big lines that are starting.

And then I notice, you know, I've got this like indent right here that I don't like. And I don't like these like kind of marks right here that go this way on my neck. I'm saying they should be lies. And then this boob hangs lower than the other boob. And I'm just picking myself apart because that's what I've been doing for the past four decades. almost all women and even men do it too.

This is what I'm finding based on the research of the book.

And then as soon as my mind is negative about my appearance, my mind goes negative about my day. Oh God, I forgot to text Lisa back. I need to finish up that report. Oh my gosh, my first Zoom meetings and I, oh, the dog needs to be walked. And now I'm going down the road negative about the day. The whole vibe is, ugh. And I don't know what came over me, but I just literally had nothing to say to myself. I really felt overwhelmed just an average low moment, and I found myself as pathetic as it sounds, raising my hand and high-fiving my own reflection in the mirror, brawless in my underwear. It felt good. I put my shoulders back. I felt a little bit like, OK, I got this. And I went on with my day. The next day, there I am again. And my mind is going negative and I'm like, no, high five. And that's what the high five habit is. But this is just the beginning. The high five habit book is full of a bazillion tools, but I wanna unpack this one. Because there's so much science here and for women in particular, this is unbelievable in how it changes you and your relationship with yourself. So first let's start with a high five. When, like think about when in your life, you have either given or received high fives. What does a high five from someone else or a high five that you're giving to somebody else communicate?

You're on the same team, you're like in together. Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's also like I think about it, you like give it to somebody before a big play. We got this. You give it to somebody when their attitude's going down. Come on, keep going, pick your attitude up. You give it to somebody in celebration. And so a high five communicates support and empowerment

and partnership and trust and celebration. And it's so powerful and we're so good at giving all of those things to other people. Like you and everybody, especially women, we cheer for our friends, we create birthday parties, we buy people presents, we do work for our colleagues when they're overwhelmed. We help our parents out with whatever. We're so good at cheering for our favorite musicians and buying people's stuff. We are horrendous at giving that same support and celebration to ourselves. In fact, we not only don't give ourselves support and celebration, we do the opposite. We tear ourselves down and we beat ourselves up and we pick ourselves apart. And every single woman I know is constantly saying, how the fuck do I put myself first? How do I do? How do I love myself? I know I'm supposed to. Well, I'll tell you how you do it. You put yourself first by doing for yourself what you've been doing for everybody else, because that's how everybody else became first in your life. You need to start to cheer for, support, and validate yourself, period. I realize now that I'm high-fiving myself, that I have spent the first 40 years of my life, either criticizing my reflection or ignoring it. How sad is it? It's incredibly heartbreaking and yet extremely familiar to me. Yeah. And I think a lot of women. Yeah. And believe it or not a lot of men.

There's a lot of men that don't want to look themselves in the eye in a mirror and be with themselves because they're so

focused on the things that they haven't achieved or the things that they've failed at and

so they're ignoring themselves. They're not being with themselves. And so first things first when you Take a moment in the morning to just stand in front of the mirror and be with yourself, and then you raise your hand in a gesture that you have always associated with celebration, support, belief, and empowerment with other people, there's a number of things that happen that can be proven by research. First things first, this is research out of Harvard. It's recent. They've shown in studies that simply taking a minute in the morning to get intentional about who you're going to be today and how you're going to show up, changes your productivity, it changes your level of confidence, it changes how impactful you are as a leader at work and in life. So this moment in the mirror is not to be diminished. This is a moment for you to be able to take a moment and intentionally align yourself with who you're going to be. Second piece of research is from a field of study called Narobics. It basically means when you marry a physical action with something a thought that's unexpected, you accelerate the development of new neuropath ways. And there's famous studies that have proven that if you brush with like your non-dominant hand while you're thinking something, it sticks in your mind because you have to focus, well the The same is true when you raise your hand and high-five your own reflection.

You see, you've been doing this for your entire lifetime. So there's already subconscious programming here, Lisa. The second that you raise your hand like this, it is so programmed in your mind to associate belief, cheering, empowerment, celebration, you know, with the high five itself, that it's impossible to go, God, I hate my neck. Boy, is that cellulite ugly? You can't do it because this part of the mind immediately takes over and does all the positive stuff with a high five. It's crazy. Try it tomorrow morning. You will not be able to criticize yourself. Now there's another piece of research around this, which is, you know, when you do a high five, we did one the first one we did, right? We didn't quite hit each other and the right, like, good smack. So what did we do? We did it. Correct. Because a good high five requires you to be present and intentional. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Oh, I'm going to lie.

High five. And so what I started to notice was that I was in real time shifting my relationship to myself. Instead of criticizing the woman I saw in the mirror or ignoring her, I was developing a partnership, a trust, a sense of self-validation.

I have my own back.

I see you, Mel Robbins. We're going to have a great day today. We got this. No matter what it is that life is going to throw at us, you got this. And then of course, I put it on my story after a couple of weeks of doing it and people around the world started to post them pictures of themselves doing it and then all of their stories started rolling in about the difference that it was making. There is one woman that said that she's been struggling with dysmorphia for 20 years. Cannot look in the mirror. And after five days of doing this, can stare at yourself in the eyes with a grin. Five days. Five days. And the reason why is because of the lifetime association that you have with doing this for other people. So when you try this tomorrow, here's what I want you to do. Stand in front of your bathroom mirror and take a moment and just be with yourself for a second.

And then if there's resistance to raising your hand and high-fiving your own reflection,

what is that resistance?

And here's some of the sad things that people are saying that I think ring true for all of us.

I think most women can relate to this.

I think guys tend to have a reaction that's more in the, I think most women can relate to this. I think guys tend to have a

reaction that's more in the, I must be weak if I need this. When the fact is, if you've played team sports, you know damn well that there's nothing more motivating and there's no inspirational force that's more empowering than being cheered for by your teammates. belief that they have in you transfers to a belief that you have in you. And so we know instinctively how powerful this is, and yet we have been trained to deny it to ourselves. That somehow if you have to empower yourself your weak, bullshit. If you empower yourself, you're strong, you're smart. And so with women, and, you know, with men too, but I've found this to be the case with a lot of women. And this is super sad that there is this belief that if I've done nothing that's worth celebrating, I don't deserve celebration that I don't deserve celebration until I lose the weight and get to that number of the same. I don't deserve celebration until I get that job, until I'm dating somebody, until I buy that house, until I get through. And that's the opposite of what you actually need. You need celebration and support so that you can do those things that you deserve and you want in your life. And so here you are withholding the very thing that you need, support celebration love. You're waiting for somebody else to come waltzing in and give it to you, which they're not going to. And the secret to life is learning how to give yourself the support, the celebration, the validation that you as a human being need. So that's one thing that women feel. The second thing is this idea that if you are somebody that celebrates yourself, you're a bitch, right? That there's something wrong with you if you call attention to you and that may be because your mom You know kind of didn't call attention to herself and was uncomfortable being the center of attention Maybe you got the messaging that you needed to be seen and not heard Maybe it got reinforced in your family that you're supposed to be the good one or the quiet one or the, you know, nice one or the conscientious student or the this or the that, that there was a role for you to play and that if you stand there and validate yourself, that somehow it means that you're not all those things that other people need for you. It's complete and utter bullshit. And let me tell you why. When you were born, celebration, validation, all of that stuff was hardwired in you. Literally. When you were learning to crawl, you saw a mirror, you would crawl up to that mirror. Have you ever seen a baby go to a mirror? They like put their hands up. Look at that. Love and it's amazing. Love their face. That's in your DNA. That's what you are born to love the sight of yourself. Your life trained you that you're not supposed to do that. And so I'm on a mission to make everybody on the planet understand because this is both for men and women. It doesn't matter where you are in terms of gender and what or all genders that you identify with, every human being has three fundamental emotional needs to be seen, to be heard, and to be celebrated to the unique person that you are. We all love watching these videos go viral of caregivers, coaching little kids to be like, I'm brave, I'm awesome, I'm this. And yet as an adult, somehow we think it's stupid to stand in front of a mirror and tell that to yourself, you fucking need to hear it. And you're sad because nobody in your life is telling you. It starts with you. The other thing that goes viral all the time, or teachers standing outside of classrooms, right? Giving every kid an individual handshake. Why? Because that handshake alone makes somebody feel seen and acknowledged and supported. And I'm here to tell you, if you want that and you do want that, you need it. It is the most powerful source of motivation on the planet to feel those things. It starts with you and it can start every single morning with a simple high five in the mirror. Once you get the money, right? I know you love to talk to me. Yeah, once we get this, once we get the house once, we get we'll be happy. I for sure did it and I kept my head down and for five years I was grinding and grinding

and building quests and we were at the top of the game and that's when my health went terrible and for four years I've been struggling and I couldn't eat and I couldn't belly get out of bed and that's when I was like I'm like the typical cliche right now that money can't buy happiness and people don't I think really believe it until they've had

something like your business fails or my health fails and you're like wow if

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