ADVICE QUEEN MEL ROBBINS - Learning to LET GO

BEFORE TELLING MILLIONS HOW TO FIND CONTENTMENT, THE POPULAR PODCASTER HAD TO FACE HER OWN DEMONS.

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ON the night of her son Oakley’s junior prom, podcaster and author Mel Robbins had a breakthrough. As she fretted about the teen forgetting to buy his date a corsage or failing to make a dinner reservation, her daughter Kendall called her out on her micromanaging. “Mom, if Oakley and his friends want to go to a taco bar for pre-prom, LET THEM,” she snapped. Those two words led to the 56-year-old’s fifth bestselling book, The Let Them Theory, in which she advises readers to stop worrying about others and “let them” make their own mistakes as a means of finding inner peace. “Yeah, it is a cheap trick — and it works,” she told The New York Times. “So you can criticize it or be cynical all you want, I don’t care.”

With a net worth of some $15 million, she’s made an industry of such common sense. The Mel Robbins Podcast averages 1.5 million weekly downloads, and her 7.1 million Instagram followers eat up insights like, “Stop wasting energy on trying to get other people to meet YOUR expectations. Just LET THEM show you who they truly are.” Her new book had more than 199,000 preorders its first week. But the queen of advice had to learn to take her own, struggling with addiction and facing criticism for airing her family’s dirty laundry. “I’m a person who is trying to do a little bit better, and who has been in really scary places,” she told the NYT. “And I think we are all equipped to help the person we used to be.”