'No One’s Coming'
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On TikTok, I recently heard the most inspirational phrase I have ever heard.
In a video by a healthy lifestyle influencer named Sydney Buheller, a motivational speech plays over sequential images of the young woman’s daily routines. The speaker is Mel Robbins, an American lawyer, author and speaker, whose Tedx talk has garnered over 26 million views. In her voiceover, Robbins imparts the key message of her self-motivation philosophy:
‘It's very, very simple to get what you want, but it's not easy. It's your job to make yourself do the crap you don't want to do, so you can be everything that you're supposed to be. And you're so damn busy waiting ‘to feel like it’. And you’re never going to – ever. No one’s coming. No one. No one’s coming to push you; no one's coming to tell you to turn the TV off; no one’s coming to tell you to get out the door and exercise; nobody’s coming to tell you to apply for that job that you've always dreamt about; nobody’s coming to write the business plan for you. It's up to you.’
The logic and simplicity of these words is striking, in particular the fact that we are alone daily in our own inertia. On some level, we imagine that someone or something is coming to make us inclined to act on our own behalf - to study, to train, to push beyond our comfort zone. The truth is, no one is coming. The path of self-reliance is the only truly reliable one. It’s a stark, even dark message implying that, in fact, every man is an island - and yet it’s also liberating to have the illusion of a saviour stripped away.
Jorm S / Shutterstock.com
The phrase is used in author Jennifer Iannolo's 2018 book No One is Coming: An Empowerment Manifesto (NB affiliate link!), in which she outlines a methodology she calls 'Self-Directed Empowerment’. Towards a global initiative focused on empowering women, Iannolo sheds light on the confirmation bias and zero-sum game we use to frame ourselves as already having lost our power. The key realisation in taking responsibility, Iannolo offers, is that ‘no one is coming,’ and while this is ‘terrifying […] after the initial shock wears off, you can see that it’s actually the best news ever. So no, no one is coming to save you, fix it, fix you, or give you the answers.’ This means we are in control.
Jennifer Iannolo’s Cycle of Self-Directed Empowerment (2018).
Of course it’s easier said than done to take responsibility and to act. To help with this, Mel Robbins' book The 5 Second Rule (2017) (NB affiliate link!) provides a useful tool to push past moments of inertia and self-doubt. She contends there is a 5-second window - a decision-making ‘push moment’ - in between our higher-minded impulses occurring to us and our brain killing them. By simply counting backwards from 5 to 1 and then physically moving in the direction of our goal, we can shift into action. In 5—4—3—2—1—GO.
