Peak Performance, Purpose, & the Path to Health, Wealth, & Love with Alan Lazaros

What if peak performance wasn’t about doing more—but about living more intentionally?

In this powerful episode of The Daring Well Podcast, Rita Mercer sits down with Alan Lazaros to explore peak performance through purpose, and why true success requires alignment across health, wealth, and love. 

Alan shares his deeply personal journey through early loss, relentless achievement, and a near-fatal car accident that forced him to redefine what success really means.

This conversation invites listeners to rethink hustle culture, design meaningful goals, and build sustainable habits that support fulfillment—not burnout.

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Connect with Alan Lazaros

CEO & Co-Host of Next Level University Podcast

Learn more about Alan’s work, coaching programs, and free personal growth resources at:
www.nextleveluniverse.com

Transcript

00:00

Introduction

Welcome to The Daring Well Podcast with Rita Mercer.

Some people are experience driven and don't have goals. Other people have goals and the experience is a byproduct. Two guesses which one I am, obviously.

But the point is that I think the experiences we want in life are actually the byproduct of a goal.

So welcome, Alan. Thank you so much for joining The Daring Well Podcast. So glad to have you here today.

For our listeners today, Alan is a heart-driven leader. He's a business coach, and he's the CEO of the Next Level University Podcast, which is a global top 100 podcast with almost 2,200 episodes.

0:50

And on the Next Level University Podcast, Alan helps others get to the next level in their life, in their health, and in their wealth.

So I'm excited for you to share, Alan, today about how to stay consistent and have it with, I think you talked about habit tracking, so I'm excited to hear more about that, being humble, and how you can boost your self-worth, and how you can help us

to find new ways to unlock our greatest potential and to achieve greatness and success in all areas of our life. So again, welcome, Alan, so glad to have you on the podcast.

Rita, thank you for having me. I mentioned to you in our pre-chat, before we hit record here, that I am overwhelmed, but it's aligned overwhelm.

And in business, the first thing that I'll share is I'm very overwhelmed, but I'm super grateful to be here. Because in the beginning, 10 years ago, when I first got into this space, it was crickets and nobody cared. So I'm very grateful.

Seriously, I don't take it lightly. I won't waste a second of anyone's time. And thank you for that wonderful introduction, particularly the health, wealth and love and wellness piece.

What we're going to focus on.

We sweet. Awesome.

1:58

Personal Backstory

So before we jump into our conversation today, can you share a little bit more about your why? So I know your back story is just a little personal thinking about like how your dad died.

But also kind of walking through how your near death fatal accident also sparked a change in you to shift. Think about like how you redefine success. So can you share a little bit more about your why and your backstory?

Absolutely.

So my life, I'm 36 years old now. I usually playfully joke. I'm hoping to hit puberty at 37.

For those of you who aren't on camera, you might not get it. But I look very young.

And yeah, you look like you're 21.

Yeah. It's hopefully it'll be an advantage later on. But it really helps me read it in my business coaching career.

People love to learn from someone who looks 12. I'm joking.

All right.

So real talk, 36 years in three minutes, there's a ton of things that shape us. There's three main events that really, really shaped me.

The first one you mentioned, my birth father, his name was John McCorkle, passed away in 1991 when he was 28 years old when I was two. I had a sister who was six, a mom who was 31. That was a shock in every sense of the word, unexpected tragedy.

Harder for my mom and sister obviously, because they knew him better than I did because I was only two, I was a little blob. But obviously, detrimental. It was a big Irish Catholic family born and raised in Massachusetts.

It was John McCorkle, it was Jim, Joe, John, Jane, Joan, Jeanette, six kids, all beginning with J. And John, my father, passed away in a car when he was 28. I had a stepfather named Steve Lazarus.

That's why my last name is Lazarus. So my birth father's last name is McCorkle. That's the name I was born with.

And I took my stepfather's last name, I think around age seven. So from age three to 14 in my life, my stepfather and my mom were together. And this was from 1992 to like the early 2000s, .com bubble time.

Yeah. And so he worked for a company called AGFA. They did hospital computers during the.com bubble in Massachusetts.

So the US is the largest economy on planet Earth and the.com bubble was wild. And so I playfully refer to this part of my life as boats and BS. And what I mean by that is we had motorcycles and snowmobiles and boats and we lived on a lake.

And from the outside in, we looked rich. From the inside out, my mom and stepdad did not get along. And that is a polite way to put it.

So stepdad leaves at 14. The hardest year of my life, didn't understand this at the time. I've since done a bunch of therapy and sort of rewatched the movie of my own life.

So now I'm starting to get it. But I'm a freshman in high school. Stepdad leaves, takes 90 percent of the income with him, also takes his entire extended family with him.

And to this day, I'm 36 now, I've never seen or spoken to a single one of them since. I did talk to my stepfather on Facebook Messenger a little bit, but never saw the man in person.

Same year, sister moves out with her older boyfriend, understandable. Same year, mom gets in a fight with my aunt Sandy, and we get ostracized from her side of the family.

To this day, I've only seen or spoken to two human beings from my mother's side. Didn't understand this at the time. In hindsight, it's very clear.

I lost three families by the time I was 14, because we stopped associating with the McCorkels when we were trying to beat the Lazaruses. Talk about identity crisis, abandonment issues, the whole nine.

Now that I'm 36 and I understand internal family systems and cognitive behavioral therapy and psychology and neuroscience and all these things I've studied, personal development, professional development, I now realize, okay, I had two trauma

responses. So there's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Those are the four trauma responses of human beings. Fawn is the one I didn't know about till my 30s, and fawn means you appease.

So socially, I became sort of this social chameleon coward who was just fit in, fit in, fit in, don't lose any more friends and family, don't lose any more friends and family.

But behind the scenes when I was alone, it was aim higher, work harder, get smarter, aim higher, work harder, get smarter. And I'm talking, my drive was dialed up to 11. To this day, it's insane.

And I usually used to be too much of a coward to share that. But when I was 14, I looked into the future. No dad, no trust fund, no generational wealth.

We're in some serious trouble here. I went from boats and ski trips to we don't have cable. My mom trades in her BMW for a little Honda Civic.

How do we keep the house and the family? I get free lunch at school now because our income is so low. How am I going to go to college?

Because the college I wanted to go to was $50,000 a year. It's called WPI, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It's an engineering school.

It's like a mini-MIT in Massachusetts. And I went from I hope I get in to even if I do get in, I can't go. So I bootstrapped.

So socially, chameleon, hang on to friends and family. Behind the scenes, it was drive, success, just a super achiever, prove myself kind of thing, prove my stepdad, you know. So dumb in hindsight.

But again, there are worse responses. The name higher, work harder, get smarter. And none of this was conscious at the time.

Then I'm 26 years old. At this point, I get my computer engineering. I got straight A's through high school.

I got the President's Academic Excellence Award. I got into WPI. Again, I'm condensing this.

I got my computer engineering degree with high distinction. I got my master's in business. And then I'm off to the races in corporate.

And I'm used to being broke in high school and college. So all of a sudden, I'm making all this money. I mean, iRobots and Sata Technologies, Cognex, all these different tech companies.

I eventually am an outside sales engineer for a company called Cognex. I do Vermont, Connecticut, Western Massachusetts. I'm selling automation equipment into big manufacturing facilities all across that territory.

And automation is obviously a big deal. So I did very well. I go from broke in high school and college to a global 1% earner in my early 20s.

I pay off 84 grand worth of college debt in a single year, 2014. And then I have $150,000 in a Vanguard account because I realize in hindsight, again, I didn't know this at the time.

I was so used to being broke in high school and college that I didn't need nice things. So my expenses were super low. Rent was $500 a month.

I split it with my girlfriend. I drove a 2004 Volkswagen Passat. I just no kids, no mortgage.

I just invested all my money and tech was always my thing. Built my first computer at 12, went to a tech school. We were mining for Bitcoin in 2007 in my dorm room.

So I just knew which companies would win. I know that sounds cocky, but I call it science, technology, engineering, mathematics, business, and finance. Those always came natural.

It's the inner work that didn't. So I just invested all my money and I did very well in the stock market. I'm 26 years old.

So let's fast forward to you, how that inspired you to be a personal development coach.

That's exactly where I'm getting.

So 26 years old hits. I'm up in New Hampshire with my little cousin, one of the people that came back from my mom's side, car accident. My fault.

No one was killed. Head on collision. Thank you, Volkswagen.

Luckily, that was the safest car ever. I used to call it the tank, German engineered steel trap of a car. No one was killed.

Thank you.

This is not a fender bender.

Yeah.

So this is a head on collision, 30 miles an hour, very bad.

Fortunately, no one was permanently injured. Obviously, everyone's rattled. But no one was killed.

And if they were, that would have been my fault because I was on the wrong side of the road. I crossed the double yellows. I was supposed to yield.

I didn't. Dark winter night, the snow banks were covering the signs. But ultimately, that was my existential quarter life crisis.

That was my second chance my dad never got. So he died at 28 in a car. I've seen pictures of his car.

The pictures of my car don't look very different. And that was 10 years ago. That is when I found personal development, and self-improvement, personal growth.

And I shifted everything after that. I went from achievement at the expense of self to all-in on fulfillment and self-development. And then the success would be a byproduct.

And fortunately, it has been, even though I had to go broke for that to shift.

Wow. Wow. Thank you for sharing that personal story of just how you went through, even at such an early age, all the different changes your family went through, and then how you developed even as a young adult.

And so kind of fast-forwarding to kind of like, hey, this is a serious shift that I need to make. And so thank you for sharing that.

10:32

Lifeʼs Three Pillars

So as you think about holistically, how would you think, how, why do you think taking a holistic approach to self-improvement is helpful?

So when you think about health, when you think about wealth, when you think about love and relationships, and why is all those important instead of just focusing on just one of those things?

Going to one of the best tech colleges in the world, and then going to into tech in corporate, you see a ton of wealthy people. Engineers in the 21st century, they just do really well. I have a bunch of multi-millionaire.

All my friends from college are, not all of them, but a lot of them are multi-millionaires, and a lot of my friends from home are not. And so what's the difference? Getting good at technology.

So the future is tech, whether we like it or not. And what's my point of all this? When I was in corporate, I saw so many people who were super successful but wildly unhealthy.

And I found even more of them who are super successful, divorced and alone. And I had dozens of mentors and coaches.

And in hindsight, what I've come to realize is that some of the most successful people I met, I actually wouldn't trade places with because they've neglected their health, and they are not in love.

Sometimes it's like you don't even like each other, never mind love each other. So marriage scared the hell out of me. And I know you're, yeah, so we left because it's like, why did you two get together, right?

So at the end of the day, I think holistic personal development, I think everyone wants to be healthy, wealthy, and in love. Ever since I was a kid, my mom and stepdad were very unfulfilled, for lack of a better phrasing.

And I, as a kid, I remember thinking, there's got to be more than this, this can't be it. So of course, when we went broke after my stepdad left, I thought, okay, money is the answer.

And then once I had money, I realized, okay, money is not the only answer. Money is one third of the equation. And everything's equations for me because of my engineering brain.

And I decided, and this is the last piece I'll share on this piece, my mom and I got in a healthy argument when I was in my early 20s. And she said, Alan, why does intelligence matter so much to you? Why isn't it enough to just be nice?

And at the time I was in my early 20s, I was a very academic smart kid, quote unquote. And I remember thinking, that's a dumb question. What's the difference between a smartphone and a dumb phone?

The smartphone is more capable. So like intelligence is dolphins, primates, humans. Like intelligence is what matters.

And I still believe that. And I think a lot of people find that triggering. But if you're not intelligent, you're in some trouble.

And I said, I'm trying to figure out the formula to not end up old and miserable like everybody else. That was my 21-year-old sort of ego version of how do I end up healthy, wealthy, and in love, because most people statistically aren't.

And I see their life, and they seem so unhappy to me. They seem so miserable to me. And I don't want to live a miserable life.

And so I spent my entire adult life trying to find the answers to be healthy, wealthy, and in love. And now my company really focuses on that.

Wow. Wow. That's cool.

That's cool. So as we think about that health, wealth, and love, how does it tie into peak performance?

And why is peak performance important in both our work life, our personal self, our relationship self, like all those different versions of ourselves? So why is peak performance important?

Well, the first thing about peak performance is understanding what it is, which is there's something called an optimal stopping problem. There's a book called Algorithms to Live By, and it's a computer scientist's approach to decision-making.

It's a really, really boring book. I love it. Kevin, my business partner, is not an engineer, so he thinks it's the worst book ever.

He thinks it's really valuable, but he thinks it's boring as hell. So I think the more boring the book, the more likely it's accurate, but that's just my truth. So the point, though, is something called an optimal stopping problem.

An optimal stopping problem is the Goldilocks thing. It's too much, too little. Everything is that.

So you put the nachos in for 3 minutes, 30 seconds, they burn, and they're gross. You put them in for only 30 seconds, the cheese didn't melt, it tastes terrible.

So everything is an optimal stopping problem, meaning when you're going to the concert, when do you park? The closer you get to the venue, the less likely there's a spot, but you have to park at some point.

So this idea of an optimal stopping problem, and if you remember from mathematics, and forgive me, everything's engineering and math for me, the y-axis and the x-axis, it's like an upside down horseshoe.

Remember the max and the min and the mean and the median and the mode, we all learned this. Okay, so the max is the optimal. So for example, even in real time, I'm trying to figure out the optimal amount of words before people shut off.

Right now. So everything you are trying to find an optimal solution, predicated on whatever your current objective is. It's like, what's the optimal chest?

What's the goal?

Yeah, what's the goal?

But you can't do it without knowing the context and the goal. And so peak performance is what most people want in life, unfortunately, is a byproduct of something way bigger or way deeper. It's a byproduct.

So health, wealth, and love is a byproduct of big goals and dreams. No one can see. Football players are...

Let me give a better example. Okay. Runners are healthy as a byproduct of running goals.

They're not actually... Their goal isn't to be healthy. Their goal is to get a certain timed mile or whatever it is.

So it's hard in life when what you aim at, you have to aim at things in life that force you to have the necessity to then get the byproduct that people want. So wealth is a byproduct of financial mastery. Health is a byproduct of healthy mastery.

Being in love is a byproduct of emotional intelligence, and vulnerability, and humility, and courage. That's why we get it wrong. Some people are experience driven and don't have goals.

Other people have goals and the experience is a byproduct. Two guesses which one I am, obviously. But the point is that I think the experiences we want in life are actually the byproduct of a goal.

So if you learn, like one of my clients, how to have a net worth of $10 million, a great life can be a byproduct of that. But you have to have the goal, and then you have to have financial mastery underneath that goal.

And so I think that's the thing is we don't know how to design our goals and our dreams so that the byproduct of those goals and dreams is a fulfilling life that is meaningful.

Yeah. Yeah. And fulfilling being like the crux of it all, you know what I mean?

It's nothing to get all the success and not have any joy with it.

Been there.

And so, yeah, so trying to like our wants, our needs, those innate desires. Yeah. So peak performance is having a target and then really zoning in on that.

It's finding the challenge skills sweet spot toward a specific long-term goal that's broken down into short-term processes.

That makes it easier to understand.

Because I think thinking about short-term processes, like I think sometimes we have so many things that we overcomplicate it. But if you chunk it down to like small short-term goals, short-term processes, I think that makes it doable.

As long as that- As long as that sense of identity. Yeah.

Well, as long as that leads to your long-term dreams though.

Because you've heard of Pareto Principle, I know you have, 20 percent of effort produces 80 percent of results. You can't leverage Pareto Principle unless you have a specific goal in the future. So people say it's the journey, not the destination.

But here's the thing, mathematically speaking, the journey is a by-product of the destination you choose in advance. If I drive from Boston to Los Angeles like I did in my 20s, that's a very different journey than driving 30 minutes south.

So people are like, well, I want a wonderful life. Well, then you better have some goals that a wonderful life is a by-product of. Right?

If I'm in great shape right now, even you and I's conversation right now is a by-product of our mutual goals.

If you didn't have any goals and dreams and I didn't have any goals and dreams, we never would have met and this conversation would never have happened.

That's what I find most with my coaching program is that people don't understand is, if your future will not be bright by default, it will be bright by design and how you design and engineer that needs to be very specific, unique to your core values,

your context, your circumstances, your country, your culture, your genetic gifts, your strengths and weaknesses. There's no one size fits all approach to anything, but there are principles that apply to every one of us.

Yeah.

19:19

Optimize for Success

So how do you teach individuals and teams and businesses how to optimize for success? What are your strategies for that or mindset strategies?

So optimal stopping problem I had already mentioned. When you say the word optimize, there's something called multidisciplinary optimization, and this is built on game theory, constraint theory, chaos theory.

These are all mathematic modalities that, I don't want to say a lot of people don't know, but I think that's true statistically.

Statistically speaking, there's a YouTube video that I found where it does the entire map of mathematics, and I have it saved, and I sent it to all my clients, I sent it to my entire team, and I said, if anyone's wondering why I sound like such a

weirdo, this is why. I don't know all of these modalities at Einstein level, but I do understand how they work, and I understand math is my way of thinking. So I think there's four modalities of thinking.

There's mathematics, numbers, rationality, structure, statistics. Then there's conversations, words, and concepts. That's most people.

There's energy, intuition, and vibe. Women tend to be better at that one. That was my bad one, terrible one.

Then there's vision, images, and pictures, and that's the artists and the visionaries. So the scientists and the engineers tend to be math. The artists tend to be pictures and images.

We all tend to be words and concepts, and then women tend to have better intuition. Again, don't over-quote me on that. That said, those are the four ways.

We all have all four, but we have one really big one and one really bad one. So my really good one is math, and my really bad one was vibe.

Unfortunately, I met my beautiful girlfriend and future wife, and she helped me realize vibration, intuition, and energy because I was all calculated. I still am, but obviously she's helped me come up.

Now, that said, optimizing for success, there's something called multidisciplinary optimization that basically means, how do you optimize for health, wealth, and love simultaneously?

Because what you focus on determines what you say, think, do, feel, and believe. This is very different than if you were watching Kim Kardashian right now. Your whole life will be different listening to this versus watching nonsense.

So, optimization is what are you optimizing for right now? So right now, I am optimizing for teaching optimization. You are optimizing for a great experience for your listeners.

Our listeners hopefully are optimizing for a bigger, better, brighter future and for wellness, which is why they're listening to this show.

You cannot optimize without goals, but if you choose the wrong goals, like I did in the past, you'll optimize and the byproducts will be an unfulfilling life.

I wanted to be an engineer because I was good at math and engineers make a lot of money and my stepdad left and we had no money. That is not a good enough reason to go for an engineer. I'm glad that I did it.

However, when I ended up doing engineering, designing circuits alone by myself for a summer at a company called Tyco Safety Products, I realized I have made a mistake here. This is not playing to all my strengths, and it's certainly not meaningful.

When you are optimizing your life, you have to identify clear goals under what I think those three categories health, wealth, and love, and then you have to shift your focus. It's like a tripod. I think health, wealth, and love is like a tripod.

You can unhook one of them and increase the size of the leg, but you can't do all three simultaneously. And if one of the leg falls, your whole life falls. So I think fulfillment is on the top.

And then there's a tripod with health, wealth, and love. Health is physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Wealth is how you earn your money.

Is it increasing or decreasing based on where the future economy is headed and where do you invest it? And then love is your intimate relationship, immediate family, pets in the home, and then it ripples outwards.

So it's friends, mentors, mentees, clients, colleagues, all that, extended family. But here's the problem.

If you are healthy, wealthy, and in love, and you're top 1% in each, which means you're top 1 out of 100 in each, you're actually 1 in a million. 1 over 100 times 1 over 100 times 1 over 100 is 1 in a million.

And that means if you want to be healthy, wealthy, and in love, top 1%, you are 1 in a million. Now, there's 5.65 billion people on the internet. There's 8 billion people on the globe.

It is possible to be 1 in a million, but you better expect that to be alarmingly challenging every single day because most people are really good at 1 of them, maybe 2 of them. Almost no one I've ever met is good at all 3.

And that's what I'm hopefully trying to help people with, is to be good at all 3.

Yeah. Yeah. And so shifting your focus, having clear goals, and just that being the leading to fulfillment.

I mean, not oversimplifying, of course.

It's important. It's important with me. I appreciate the yin and the yang that we're doing.

So sweet.

So sweet. So how do you, as we start to wrap up, how do you stay in alignment with overwhelm?

Okay. So overwhelm is a tricky one. We all have a trauma window, also known as a challenge skill sweet spot.

So if I were to play tennis tomorrow with Serena Williams, I would get smoked and it would be way too far outside my comfort zone. I wouldn't get in the flow, I'd just be like, what am I even doing here?

But if I played with a four year old, I would stomp them every time and it wouldn't be exciting. So you need to find your sort of, you got to get outside your comfort zone, but you can't get so far outside of it that the rubber band snaps.

So you want to stretch but not snap at all times. What is the right amount of feedback? We've all had those moments.

That car accident, too much feedback in too short a time, that's called trauma. But, you can't baby everybody all the time either. So there is such thing as too little feedback, which creates big fish, small pond.

So that's what I would say about overwhelmed. Make sure that you are in enough overwhelmed to grow, but not enough to snap.

That's powerful. That's powerful. And that is the essence of being in the flow state.

Yes.

So yeah, really tapping in.

Really tapping in. Sweet.

Well, Alan, as we start to wrap up, what are some action steps that people can take to get a quick win if they're looking for growth and peak performance in their personal life or their business life or their social life, their financial life?

What other ways can somebody get a quick win?

Quick win would be one habit under health, one habit under wealth, one habit under love. I always joke and I say, I studied Michael Phelps' career.

He was very open about his mental health challenges, but when he was 13, he decided to do something that's never been done and he did it. He has 28 Olympic medals, 23 gold, and he had a documentary called The Weight of Gold.

He talks about the mental health challenges underneath what it's like to be bat dialed in. I always playfully joke and I say, okay, not everyone needs to be Michael Phelps, not everyone's going to be Michael Phelps.

I treat myself like an Olympian, you don't need to do that. But you're going to have to do something. Let's figure out where you are on that spectrum.

What I would say is I track habits and metrics every day. All my clients do, all of my team do. You and I talked about habit tracking a little bit.

The best habit I think is habit tracking. So pick one habit under health, one habit under wealth, one habit under love. The playful joke that I mentioned earlier is, imagine if Michael Phelps' coach just said, yeah, man, just jump in, swim around.

I honestly, I'm not trying to be unkind, but I got to be honest, I think a lot of us are winging it. And I think it's bringing us, it's like shooting an arrow up in the air, hoping it lands someplace nice. That is not going to happen.

A lot of, not everything, but a lot of our future problems can be solved if we take control of the controllables, which is what you say, think, do, feel, and believe what you pay attention to, what you work on.

There are so many things out of our control. I understand that. Okay, who is president is very little in our control, a little bit of influence with your vote.

What's going on in the global economy, AI, all that stuff. A lot of that's out of our control.

I get that.

But I think you got to stick to the controllables and focus on the things you can control. You can control what you aim at, which is your goals.

You can control what you measure, which is your metrics, and you can control what you do, which is your habits.

And if you control those controllables, you will become someone who is resilient and strong enough to handle the circumstances that get thrown at you. It wasn't my fault my stepdad left. It wasn't my fault my dad died.

But it was my responsibility to figure out how to make a meaningful life out of that. And luckily, I took responsibility. And while that was wildly challenging and unbelievably painful and suffering at times, I am glad that I did.

And to me, life is about doing all you can with all you have. And even if you have very little, you can do a lot with it. It's been done, and I just hope that you're doing all you can with all you have.

And very few of us can look in the mirror and say we are doing all we can with all we have. I used to, when I got in that car accident at 26, I could not say that. I was resting on talent.

I wasn't giving it everything I had. And now I live every day trying to give it all I've got.

That's wild. I love it. I love it.

I love it. Yeah. And so not like a victim mentality of just like things are happening to me.

Like life will always happen. But how do you choose to respond? So you look in to see what things cannot control.

That's powerful.

So and being intentional about like your your habit stacking and habit tracking, both of those.

Habit stacking is what you're doing already. So I'm already on my commute. So why not stack another habit, healthy habit onto that since I'm doing my commute.

I'm already getting up and getting dressed. Why not stack another healthy habit on top of that while I'm getting dressed, while I'm getting my day started, like all the things while I'm walking, like all the things that's powerful.

So many different ways that you can infuse into your everyday life to achieve peak performance. Yeah.

I got to say the habit stacking and habit tracking, I'm going to have to use that. Thank you for that.

You're welcome.

That's the first time I've ever heard that said that way.

Yeah. I totally believe in it. I mean, as I said it about walking, then I thought for a half a second, I'm like, well, I think sometimes you need to just walk and not have an agenda, not have a podcast going, not have all the things going.

So do a little, dial in a little, but also give yourself permission to lean back. So yeah. Sweet.

Well, Alan, thank you so much for sharing about peak performance. Thanks so much for sharing about ways that we can grow in health, wealth, and love. Thank you for sharing your personal stories.

I think that's really helpful to just better understand how we can just be human. I think that's, I feel like we're just trying to be perfect on Instagram, perfect on socials, but not just like, this is my everyday life, like I got to live.

So how can I really be authentic and show up as my true self? So thank you for sharing all of that. So thank you.

Thank you for having me.

The last thing I'll share is I coach 21 individuals right now, and I'm telling you right now, don't fall for comparing someone else's social media to your real life.

There is not a single person I coach, including me, who doesn't struggle with something. Some people are really good at fitness and really bad at finance.

Some people are really good at finance and really bad at fitness, and some people are good at finance and fitness, but wildly unfulfilled in their relationship.

Very few people have all three, go for all three, but understand you're playing a infinite game that continues to get higher as you climb.

Yeah.

31:25

Next Level Living

Well, how can people connect with you if they're wanting to take things to the next level in their health, in their wealth, and in love?

The three subjects I do now have evolved a lot over the years, is fitness, personal development, and business.

I think every business owner needs to, and it took me too long to do this, needs to find their absolutely people and they're absolutely not people.

Not everyone is for everyone, and I am not for everyone, it turns out, which is probably obvious to you, Rita, but it wasn't obvious to me. I just wanted to be friends with everybody. It's a terrible idea.

All right, so, absolutely people.

You write yourself too thin when you do that. 100%.

I had high school friends and college friends and corporate friends, and I brought my high school friends to college and my college friends to corporate, and it was just that I realize I'm not for everybody.

Okay, so my absolutely people, I've got it boiled down to they have a bet on themselves, they have high humility, inward humility, inside.

Outside, maybe not, but inside, they read the books, they do the work, and most importantly, they have high work ethic. If you do not have high work ethic, you are not going to like me. That is just across the board.

If you don't have high work ethic, I just won't like you, you won't like me. I am an ultimate tryhard, always striving, never arriving. That's okay.

Just understand that before you come into my life. If that's you, and you want to reach your full potential, we're going to get along great. High work ethic, want to reach your full potential, absolutely, let's rock and roll.

If there's two types of people I do not get along with at all. The first one is what I call a spoiled brat syndrome, which means you are entitled and you want huge rewards with minimal effort. I'm not interested, please do not reach out.

The second is bullies. If you tear other people down to try to feel bigger, you can kindly F off. So if you're in the first category, please reach out.

If you're in the second category, under no circumstances are you to look me up or reach out.

I love it. I love your directness.

I did not have that until my mid-30s. I learned it the hard way.

I think that's when we get it. That's when we get it. 20s, we're still trying to be like everybody else.

We don't have our own identity, but 30s and 40s and moving forward, it's just I got to be true to me, and I got to show up as my full self, and I got to attract the things that are like-minded and aligned.

And so, yeah, if it's not aligned, I'm not wasting my time.

Yeah, good for you and same. So I understand everyone's in different phases. I want to see everyone win, and that was actually a problem for me.

So now I know who my people are, I know who my absolutely not people are, and that's okay. And I think that everyone at some point is going to have to pay that by birth.

How do people reach out to you? So you've identified your ideal person that you work with. So how do people reach out to you?

So we have a website called nextleveluniverse.com.

That's all things Next Level. We got a group coaching program, we got a free book club, we do free trainings every month, we got all kinds of free stuff, we got some paid stuff, we get a group coaching program. I think I said that twice.

If you want to get a little better each day, Next Level University Podcast is the best place. It's literally success and personal development in your pocket from anywhere on the planet, completely free. Kevin and I do an episode every single day.

We're coming up on 2200 episodes, and we're trying to be the male role models that we needed growing up, because he grew up without a dad as well. We just want to lead by example, and it's not going to talk from some mountaintop.

We're on the growth journey. We have conversations about principles, and we often have little healthy discords back and forth to give both sides of the coin.

I think our listeners get to come on a journey with us, assuming you have high work ethic, because trust me, if you don't have high work ethic, you're going to hate our podcast.

Got you. Well, awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your resources.

Thank you so much for sharing your heart, and thank you so much for sharing some tips and tricks and mindset strategies. So awesome. So grateful.

Thank you for having me, Rita.

Keep doing what you're doing and I will come back anytime.

Awesome. Well, thank you. The door is always open.

Let's do it.

You're busy, so let me know.

Awesome. Well, again, thank you, Alan. Thank you so much for joining The Daring Well Podcast.

For listeners, don't forget to like, share, and subscribe wherever you're hearing this episode, and wishing you a fabulous day. Until next time, keep living, keep loving, and keep daring well. Take care, guys.

God bless. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of The Daring Well Podcast.

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