How to Become the Most Confident Version of Yourself & Step Into Your Power

Mel Robbins introduces Sarah Jakes Roberts as one of the most inspiring voices on healing, self-forgiveness, and reinvention, describing her as someone who can take the messiest parts of being human and transform them into wisdom. The conversation begins with Sarah inviting listeners to 'rest in the truth of who you are' — not just the achievements, but also the hard and challenging parts — and to use that full truth to propel themselves forward.

Sarah shares her personal backstory: she became pregnant at 13 and had her son at 14, while being the daughter of a prominent megachurch pastor. Rather than feeling supported by her faith community, she felt this confirmed a pre-existing sense that she didn't belong among the 'good church girls.' For the next decade, she engaged in a pattern of comparison and identity-seeking — trying on different versions of herself through relationships, jobs, and achievements — until she decided to stand 'flat-footed' in the truth of who she was, even if that truth meant isolation and not fitting anywhere.

A central theme of the conversation is Sarah's distinction between sitting with yourself as punishment versus sitting with yourself with the intention of compassion. She argues that you cannot heal while simultaneously punishing yourself, and that many people mistakenly believe self-flagellation will prevent future mistakes or protect them from rejection. True healing begins when you replace guilt with compassion and allow love to flood the dark places inside you.

Sarah introduces the powerful metaphor of 'opening the cupboard' — the idea that we all have ingredients (our experiences, mistakes, traumas, and gifts) that we keep hidden out of shame. She argues that people-pleasing and inauthenticity arise from keeping the cabinet closed, and that true transformation begins when you open it, look at everything honestly, and start using all your ingredients to cook something authentic. She ties this to her early blogging career, where she discovered that the very things she thought disqualified her — teen pregnancy, divorce, dropping out of college — were precisely what created deep connection with her audience.

Sarah also introduces the concept of 'discounting yourself,' explaining how societal standards (particularly purity culture in her case) cause people to mark down their own worth after perceived failures, leading them to accept less than they deserve in relationships and life. She argues the inverse is true: the wisdom and resilience gained from difficult experiences actually increases one's value rather than diminishing it.

The conversation explores the idea of 'looking at the whole movie' rather than replaying one painful scene on a loop. Sarah describes how she moved from cringing at her 13-year-old self to feeling compassion for her, understanding the loneliness, anger, and lack of belonging that led to her choices. She encourages listeners to contextualize their past decisions within the full circumstances of their lives.

Sarah defines power not as dominance or unbreakability, but as a fluid confluence of 100% authenticity, 100% resilience, and 100% humility. She argues that power is not a destination but a flow, and that this flow can move with you into new seasons of life. Confidence, she says (drawing on Esther Perel's definition), is the intentional owning of your existence — knowing both your gifts and your flaws and not being destabilized by either success or failure.

A key practical insight Sarah offers is to 'let it live outside of you' — to give voice to who you are becoming. She argues that speaking your evolving identity into the world creates space internally for more growth and externally for that new version of yourself to take root. She shares how she had to reclaim opportunities that were turned down on her behalf because people had a fixed idea of who she was.

The conversation also touches on the famous 'wig incident' where Sarah's wig slipped off during a sermon. Rather than fleeing the stage, she removed it and continued preaching, which she describes as an accidental but powerful demonstration of authenticity that liberated many women in the audience. She frames this as a divine message confirming that her most authentic self is what she's been called to bring to her platform.

Mel offers a powerful observation near the end: that Sarah's life story — getting pregnant within a purity culture context — was perhaps intentionally designed to create an entirely different definition of what it means to be a godly woman, offering a new path for generations of women who couldn't see themselves in the singular narrative being offered. Sarah receives this with deep reflection, connecting it to the intentionality she believes underlies all of existence.