JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Every week, a guest draws a card from NPR's Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Mel Robbins hosts one of the world's most listened-to podcasts. Her book, "The Let Them Theory," is a best-seller. But as she tells Wild Card host Rachel Martin, her success was built on early failures.
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RACHEL MARTIN: Who or what is your moral compass?
MEL ROBBINS: Me. I'm my moral compass.
MARTIN: That's a lot of confidence.
ROBBINS: Well, who else would it be?
MARTIN: Oh, I don't know. Lots of people lean on a religion, a faith tradition, literature.
ROBBINS: No, I have to answer to myself. I have to lay down on the pillow - lay my head on the pillow at night and feel good about how I was and who I was today. I have to wrestle with my own conscience. I have to decide whether or not I handled something in alignment with my deeply held values or whether I screwed it up and I need to apologize.
MARTIN: And that has always been thus for you? I mean...
ROBBINS: I think that I...
MARTIN: To have a pretty clear sense of your own sense of right and wrong and morality and...
ROBBINS: No, 'cause I think you develop it over time. And I spent a lot of my time screwing things up and doing things that I regretted and not knowing how to kind of get out of really toxic either behavior cycles or thinking patterns or all of that. And the more that I have learned and the more that I have worked on myself and the more that I've just kind of chipped away at it in terms of just waking up every day and trying to just do a little better and make better decisions and focus on living my life in a way that I'm proud of myself, the less I look outside myself for that reference.
MARTIN: What was the toxic, ugly stuff?
ROBBINS: Oh, God. We don't have enough time for that. Everything.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
ROBBINS: Everything. I literally had raging anxiety, unresolved childhood trauma. I, you know, had a huge problem with drinking. I would cheat on my boyfriends in high school and in college. I had just relentless self-hatred. I feel like I squandered my years at Dartmouth because I had undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia. I just tortured myself and other people 'cause I didn't know the issues that I were - was dealing with.
Like, I screwed up my kids because I didn't understand that when they got anxious, it made me anxious. And so I would, you know, if they didn't want to sleep in their bedroom, oh, sleep on the floor. Now what I'm communicating to them is, you're not capable of sleeping in your bedroom. You're right to be anxious. So I just make it worse.
So I just bumbled everything. And, you know, that kind of is the basis for a lot of my approach to how I am obsessed with trying to figure out simple ways to help myself be better and to help other people bump into the tools and resources that can really help them understand the problem they may be dealing with, understand that they're not alone.
MARTIN: Right.
ROBBINS: And if I had known the information that I know now, I would have done it differently.
SUMMERS: You can watch a longer conversation with Mel Robbins on YouTube by searching for @nprwildcard. Her latest book, "The Let Them Theory," is out now. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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