What Mel Robbins Gets Right (And What She Can’t See From Where She’s Standing)
I like Mel Robbins. I’ll say that plainly before I say anything else.
The Let Them Theory. The 5 Second Rule. The High 5 Habit. I’ve used pieces of her work. I’ve recommended pieces of her work. There’s something genuinely useful in a framework that tells you to stop waiting for permission, stop negotiating with your own fear, stop outsourcing your motivation to a feeling that may never show up.
But I’m a Black woman who identifies as a masculine of center lesbian, built in New Orleans, and there’s a place where her philosophy runs out of road. Not because it’s wrong. Because it was built for a different terrain.
The Quiet Assumption Underneath “Just Decide”
A lot of Mel Robbins’ work rest on a quiet assumption: that the biggest obstacle between you and the life you want is YOU. Your hesitation. Your overthinking. Your fear response. Push past that internal resistance and the path opens up.
For a lot of people, that’s true, and it’s freeing to hear it said directly.
But when you’ve spent your life being read before you speak – when a room recalibrates around your body before you’ve said a word – “just decide” leaves something out. I’m not only managing my own nervous system. I’m managing how I land on other people’s. Whether I work in a client meeting, a family gathering, or a hospital waiting room, I’ve already done a calculation Mel never had to teach because never had to learn it: what does this room think it knows about me before I open my out.
That’s not fear holding me back. That’s information. And no framework built on the premise that the obstacle is purely internal is going to fully hold a reality where some of the obstacle is structural, social and standing right in front of you.
“Let Them” Has a Different Cost Depending on Who You Are
The Let Them Theory says: let people think what they think, do what they do, react how they react. Stop spending your energy trying to control other people’s opinions of you.
I love this idea in theory. In practice, “let them” carries different weight depending on what happens when “they” act on what they think.
When a masc-presenting Black woman walks into certain spaces, “letting them” think what they want isn’t always a neutral actor of emotional freedom. Sometimes it’s the different between getting served at a restaurant without incident and not. Between a job interview going forward and quietly dying in the room. Between being misgendered by a stranger and embarrassed in the bathroom. “Let them” assumes the fallout of other people’s reactions lands evenly. It doesn’t. Some of us are doing real-time risk assessment that gets relabeled as anxiety when it’s actually just paying attention.
Where She’s Right, and Why I’m Not Throwing the Baby Out
Here’s the part I don’t want to skip past: there is real value in not making yourself smaller in anticipation of a reaction that hasn’t happened yet. I’ve watched that instinct including me years. There’s a version of “let them” that is genuinely liberating: stop performing for the people who were never going to choose you anyway. Stop pre-grieving relationships that haven’t ended. That part travels across identity lines just fine.
The issue isn’t the tool. It’s that the tool was built with a Black masculine of center lesbian in mind. So I take what transfers, I leave what doesn’t, and I build the rest myself.
Identity Is Architecture
This is the whole premise of how I think about brand strategy, and it turns out to be the whole premise of how I think about self-help too: your lived experience is not a deviation from the framework. It’s structural. You don’t bend your identity to fit someone else’s blueprint and call it personal growth. You take the parts of the blueprint that hold weight in your actual life, and where they don’t hold weight, you build your own beams.
Mel Robbins built a house. It’s a good house. It’s just not built on my foundation, and pretending otherwise would mean living in rooms that don’t actually fit.
So I’ll keep the High 5 Habit. I’ll keep “the 5 second rule” for the mornings I don’t want to get up and train anyway. And I’ll keep building the rest of it myself because some of us were never going to find ourselves fully in someone else’s mirror. We had to build one.
This is Identity Is Architecture in practice: taking a framework seriously enough to interrogate it, and taking your own experience seriously enough to trust it tells you when the framework goes quiet.
