There is nothing that is special or lucky or different between me and somebody who picks up this magazine,” Mel Robbins insists repeatedly during our interview. It’s a humble assessment that her longtime listeners and social media followers will recognize. The self-deprecating podcast host, author and motivational speaker wears her typicality on her sleeve and even flaunts her biggest failures as launchpads for her most listened-to and hard-earned words of advice. Among them is a particularly painful period that occurred 15 years ago. That’s when she found herself, at age 41, unable to get out of bed in the morning. She’d been laid off from her job. She was drinking too much. Her husband’s restaurant business was failing, and their family of five was suffocating under a mountain of debt—to the tune of $800,000. There were weeks when she couldn’t find a way to pay for groceries or gas. Robbins was desperate to get back on course, but she kept finding herself doing the opposite: nothing. The motivation just would not surface. That is, until she tried a little trick. She imagined she was a rocket preparing for launch, and she silently counted down: 5-4-3-2-1. With this simple practice, she noticed she was able to get out of bed before her brain could protest. “It felt like a small victory, but it was also a revelation,” she recalls in her latest book. “If I could push through those five seconds of fear, maybe I could push through anything.” The discovery was straightforward but effective: She had five seconds to act on any given thought before her mind could shut down the idea. She started using the countdown for everything she had been avoiding: getting up on time, confronting her overdrinking, finding a new job, opening a stack of long-ignored bills and making a plan to get out of debt.