Next Level University
Confidence, mindset, relationships, limiting beliefs, family, goals, consistency, self-worth, and success are at the core of hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros' heart-driven, no-nonsense approach to holistic self-improvement. This transformative, 7 day per week podcast is focused on helping dream chasers who have been struggling to achieve their goals and are seeking community, consistency and answers. If you've ever asked yourself "How do I get to the next level in my life", we're here for you!
Our goal at NLU is to help you uncover the habits to build unshakable confidence, cultivate a powerful mindset, nurture meaningful relationships, overcome limiting beliefs, create an amazing family life, set and achieve transformative goals, embrace consistency, recognize your self-worth, and ultimately create the fulfillment and success you desire. Let's level up your health, wealth and love!
Next Level University
#1436 - How To Transition MORE Into Your Dreams
Find a newfound appreciation for every small step you take toward your passion. Today hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros talk about success, not being a destination but a journey that requires your commitment and passion. They share insights on weighing the pros and cons of three prime options in transitioning to your dreams. They stress the importance of the vitality of financial stability before taking any significant leaps and the significance of building momentum, even if it's just an hour or two per week. It's not about the destination but the journey and the lessons you pick up along the way.
Links mentioned:
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To learn more about group coaching - https://nextleveluniverse.com/group-coaching/
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Website 💻 http://www.nextleveluniverse.com
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Any of these communities or resources are FREE to join and consume
- Next Level Nation - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700
- Next Level 5 To Thrive (free course) - ​​https://bit.ly/3xffver
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- Next Level Monthly Meetup: https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/monthly-meetups/
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Email 💬
Kevin@nextleveluniverse.com
Alan@nextleveluniverse.com
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Show notes:
[3:30] Starting the transition into your dreams
[6:35] Three options for dream chasers
[10:45] Austin shares his top-notch experience working with Kevin under Next Level Podcast Solutions
[12:32] Waiting when everything is ready
[15:58] Start with humility and reps
[19:58] Get good at the things that matter to you
[21:37] You get good with consistent practice over time
[25:02] Outro
Maybe you have your foot in the brakes.
Speaker 2:Oh, oh, what a party foul. That is my bet.
Speaker 1:Hey, get your shit together, try it. I'm just kidding. Maybe you have your foot on the brakes for some reason. My eyes just started watering. I'm crying all of a sudden and You're not going full force into your dreams yet. I was on a podcast today. We're in trouble, I'm gonna power through. I'm a I'm a GD professional.
Speaker 1:I was on a podcast today, alan, and this person said hey, what does somebody do if they're in the middle of their journey? But they're not full-time dream chasing? And I said first of all, most people are there and I don't know if there's any such thing as the middle of your journey. I know you think we're towards the end of our journey, but we have a long, long, long way to go. It just looks like we're successful because our journey is longer. So it looks like we're successful. We're not there yet. We're not nearly where we need to be.
Speaker 1:In this episode I told my story and I said I Know it sounds awesome that I quit my job and I went all in on my thing, but the truth of the matter is if my job didn't require travel as much as it did? Right for context, I spent 10 months on the road, the most successful year I had financially. If it didn't require that amount of travel and my mental health wasn't in a very, very negative place, I probably would have stayed and built the podcast while I worked. What I did was reckless. Now it worked out and that's great. But why couldn't I have done one episode a week and posted on social media every day while I was working? I could have definitely done that. So what I told this person on the show today was I think a lot of people are saying I'll do that when I have x amount of time when I have, when I have a full 40 hours a week, I'll be able to do all this other stuff. And the reality is you can start when you're working. You can start when you have two hours a week.
Speaker 1:I always use the analogy or the example of if you're a photographer and you want to grow your portfolio, monday through Friday you might go do your nine to five and you might not even have the identity of a photographer necessarily, but when Saturday or Sunday rolls around, you could book out. You could have a booking every single weekend if you wanted. You could get 52 photo shoots done a year, even while you had your nine to five. That's how you transition more into your dreams. You don't have to go all in right away. Sometimes I think that's probably better not to go all in right away, because if you have to wait until it's the only thing to go All in, wouldn't it Create momentum if you started now, even if it was an hour or two a week, and you got some experience and you met some people?
Speaker 1:That's really what I want to jam on in this episode, because I know a lot of us are waiting for the right time, or we're waiting for the right amount of money, or whatever it may be. No matter what you're aiming for, there is going to be a level of mud, and For me, the level of mud was being $35,000 in credit card debt and not being able to pay my bills. Yes, I left my job and I could do this full-time, but there was mud that came with that for you. For you, your mud might be staying at a job you aren't super passionate about for the next eight to twelve months, while you do your side hustle dream chasing on the weekends or at night, or whatever it may be. That might suit you better.
Speaker 2:In Pittsburgh. We got asked a question about this. Kev, yes, yes, and I gave a very long-winded, esoteric answer. I'm gonna try to make it more concise here. Three options for all of us. There's the reckless option, which is what Kevin already described, which is go all in, go all in on your dream, take the chance. And I want to make this very, very, very clear. The reckless option is the one that Kevin and I chose, and I don't recommend that for most people. Here's why I had a hundred and fifty thousand dollar portfolio when I quit my job and I liquidated all of those assets, all the stocks, all the I I index funds, all of it, and I eventually went past zero. Okay, kevin, you had what? 16, 18 grand, something like that.
Speaker 1:No, I don't think that much.
Speaker 2:I think I had 10 G Bose, 10 G Bose. So 10. G's for kev, 150 G's for me, and I quit my job long before.
Speaker 1:I was close before I was pretty close you 150 and 10. I was pretty I was catching up. That's that I was on my way.
Speaker 2:You were on your way and we went all in, which I do believe is a little bit reckless. If you are certainty driven, if you need a lot of certainty, you've got to be careful. Do not do that. Okay, so that's option one, but I want to make it clear we had a huge nest egg. Emilia just quit her full-time job quit and she worked for a company called Alchemy's and, and they were really good to her. She was really good to them. She managed a really great IT portfolio, she learned a lot of skills, she banked a lot of money. Awesome, awesome, awesome. She is in a financial position where she has a very long runway. She can go over a year and not make another dime and still be in the green. Okay, that's a good position to be in. So, unless you're in a position like that, I don't recommend option one, which is just reckless. All right.
Speaker 2:Option two. Option two is you do the side hustle. You run in parallel. That's what Kevin was mentioning Photographer nine to five, do your thing and then, on the weekends, be a weekend warrior for a while. That's 52 photo shoots. If you wanna work both days, maybe it's 104 photo shoots. That's a lot of momentum you can build in one year. I've done 41 photo shoots as a fitness model. I think it might be more than that. Now, I wasn't a fitness model, but you understand what I'm saying. I've probably done about 45 photo shoots in my life and I'm telling you it's way different than the first one, so you can build a lot of momentum.
Speaker 2:Option three Option three is something I want everyone to consider, which is what if your dream is actually working for a company and being a part of something special? Some people don't wanna be an entrepreneur, some people don't wanna be the business owner, some people don't want all the risk. And the one thing that I'll share briefly is that option one is reckless and, while I'll tell you there's no glass ceiling on how much money you can make and the impact that you can have, there's also no safety net whatsoever. If Kevin and I don't work, the business will eventually die Now, eventually.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of hocus pocus out there of you can have a self managing company and you can, yeah, decades in. Do not fall victim to a lot of that stuff. A lot of that stuff is for people that are decades into their journey. Option two run in parallel. That's the one I highly recommend until eventually you can make the leap Bank as much money as you possibly can. Get a good runway, make the leap. And then option three is maybe your dream is actually to be a director of marketing for a company. That's okay. That's okay. And just figure out which one you are and which one you wanna do, and make sure you're preparing accordingly.
Speaker 1:One of the reasons I've been rapping more is because that is attached to my dreams more than I realized. I'd love to be on a rap album someday or make a rap album, I don't know. We had that discussion where I said I love cars, I love rap and podcasting. Those are kind of my three fitness martial arts. But that's the thought process I had when I was thinking of this episode. Okay, I could say, well, one day when I'm not as busy, I'll rap, and that really is the case. Right, I don't have a lot of time to rap. I'm not doing martial arts because I just don't have the time right now.
Speaker 1:But what if I could just do an hour of rapping a week In that, four years from today, when I might actually have enough time to say you know what, I'm gonna block off Thursday for four hours and I'm gonna rap every week. I'll be so much better because I actually transitioned the whole time that I think we look at people who transition immediately and it's sexy and it seems very sexy. Oh, that person quit and went all in Again to Alan's point. It is what we did, but it's also very reckless and there's a lot of pressure and there's a lot of stuff that comes with that, and here's the thing we need to really hear about the people that make it.
Speaker 2:How many people do you think make it like we did for lack of better phrasing Doing what we did? I don't know. It's a great question. We're definitely in the minority of people, for sure, the minority of people.
Speaker 1:I would say that we're more of the exception and we're more of the minority of people. We're more of the exception, we're more of the minority of people. We're more of the exception, we're more of the minority of people. I'll say that we're more of the exception to the rule than the rule. I don't like the minority thing because I know that's like a that could be taken out of context.
Speaker 1:So I would say, yeah, we're more of the exception than the rule. Out of all the podcasters I've ever met, I could probably count on one hand how many of them built a business from a podcast the way we have a profitable business that you and I can actually do for a living. It's very, very small. It's a very, very small amount of human beings. But here's the thing not everybody wants to do that. A lot of people's dream is not doing seven episodes a week and doing the things that we have. So we created it the way that we wanted it to be to a degree. But I that's the way I think of it. The problem is, if you wait until you think everything is ready, you might not feel like you're good enough to actually do it. I made a mistake. I actually was. I had some entitlement. A few years ago we had Justin Freeman on the show. Remember Justin Freeman, an amazing rapper. I messaged him and asked him to rap with him. In retrospect, that was a very entitled thing to do. He is way ahead of me and he should never rap with someone like me. He has earned being able to rap with people who are way ahead of me. He would be going backwards. That would be a favor. If he was willing to do me a favor, I'd appreciate that. I haven't transitioned enough into rapper Kev to get that opportunity. This is what could happen If I said to you all right now, 15 years from today, we're going to be very financially free, we'll have a very successful business and I might have access to people that I don't have access to now. I might know rappers. Then I'll reach out to them and say, hey, I'd love to do a track with you. I'm going to pay for everything, but will you come on with me? That sounds really good. The problem is, if I don't practice this for the next 15 years, I'm not going to be good enough to even do it. They might still say no, they might say Kev, you're not a rapper. I know this is like a dream of yours, but you're not good enough. If I don't train martial arts for the next 15 years, when we get to have and again, I don't know if we're ever going to have guests again, but imagine we have one of my favorite fighters on and we're in the gym with them again, like we were with Julian Nguyen I'm not going to be able to train with them. I'm not going to be able to hit pads because I haven't done it in 15 years. I want to be the guy saying, oh, I used to do this. Yeah, no, let me knock off some of the rust. I used to do this. I know what's up. Give me a minute. I'm going to be 15 years from today. I'm going to be 49 year old, kev. If I'm not practicing all aspects of my dreams, if I do get presented the opportunity, I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 1:If you're waiting to be a speaker and you go to a speaking event, you go to an event and somebody says anybody here, I want to do this at some point. Anybody here, have a presentation ready. I'm going to give you 15 minutes on stage. It's got to be about self-improvement. That's the only rule. Anybody have a presentation in their mind ready. You could raise your hand if that could be the shot that propels you to some success. But if you don't do it, I'd be the guy speaking before you. So you probably would be good. You'd probably win the audience over. But that could be it. That could be it for you. But if you don't identify as it long before you are it, you're not going to get the opportunities or you're not going to say yes to the opportunities.
Speaker 2:Well, this comes down to the fundamental. I can't talk. This comes down to the fundamental I'll never forget as long as I live. We're in impact fitness, we're working out, we finish our workout hour and a half crushed it a lot more time back in those days and she stops deadener tracks in the top steps on the way out of the gym and I turn around and I'm like what's going on? You good, she was just super sad, you know. You good, she's like I'm such a sucky speaker, I'm the worst speaker. Can you help me become a better speaker? And I still coach Bianca to this day.
Speaker 2:And back then I was just mentoring her and I said, yeah, of course, like, of course, got you. Now she's got a podcast, she speaks, she goes on other podcasts. She's actually a very strong speaker, so much, in fact, that at our relationship talks event I actually paused Emilia for a moment and let Bianca talk because she explained CBT cognitive behavioral therapy. She's a cognitive behavioral therapist but I knew Bianca could explain it better than I could and as a speaker with thousands of reps, podcasting, speaking, training, workshops, whatever it's very rare that I'm like oh, can you please explain this for me, because I know you can explain it better than I can and she crushed it. This is an opportunity for Bianca, but it all had to do with humility that no one saw.
Speaker 2:Six years prior to that. She started going on our Instagram stories. Then she started eventually doing Instagram lives, then eventually started a podcast with Emilia. Then eventually she started doing out of the mud events, virtual events Every month. They've never missed, I'm telling you, those reps add up and eventually you get really really good.
Speaker 2:And you get good almost out of nowhere. It's like oh wow. And for me sometimes it's like, wait, are they bad? Oh no, I'm really good, okay, cool. Because when you're always comparing to the top of the mountain, sometimes it's hard to realize that you're good when you're still shooting upward. But at the end of the day, it's the stuff behind the scenes, the practice behind the scenes, the reps behind the scenes, the work behind the scenes that no one sees, that is going to make or break your dream. Preparation meets opportunity. We've all heard that thing of luck, quote, unquote. Good luck is preparation meeting opportunity and I honestly believe that opportunities around us all the time. I really do. We just aren't prepared for it. You know, you had that kid come up one of our speeches and you had a kid. Anyone here want to be a motivational speaker?
Speaker 1:Hey, you wanted to be a speaker, so I said all right, come on up, Come on up, let's do it.
Speaker 2:I'm going to switch for me because I didn't prepare. I'm kidding, that was not Kevin's finest moment, but at the end of the day, everyone wants to jump on a moving train. Some of the best advice I can ever give don't lose momentum. You should be. If you want to be a professional, anything you need to be practicing forever.
Speaker 1:Forever the circle. The story comes full circle. That kid I told him. I said this is my Instagram handle. Reach out to me and I will help you become a better speaker than you ever did. He could have. I still might be mentoring him to this day if he did. Who knows? And look it, we've been paid thousands of dollars to speak. We're 1400. But maybe he didn't identify as a speaker yet. I was thinking of this episode last night. I was thinking I'm always trying to think of, okay, tomorrow's episodes are this what can I bring in terms of value?
Speaker 1:Most of us have to do something part time long before we do it full time, and sometimes it's going to be while you're doing something else full time. Imagine that right now you're doing full time, real job, whatever that means. Just say even that phrasing I know could be limiting to you, but just say it's the job that pays the bills. Currently, full time, part time passion. Eventually you might be doing full time passion in part time paying the bills, because the full time passion isn't paying the bills yet. That's okay.
Speaker 1:Everybody's journey is a little bit different. Everybody's results are going to be a little bit different. The way you get to those results are going to be different. So my next level nugget is that don't be afraid to do something part time while you do something else full time, because most likely you're going to have to do something full time while you do your thing. You're gonna have to do something part-time while you do your thing full-time, and that's okay, and eventually you'll be able to do your thing full-time if you do it right and you do it long enough and you focus on mastery and you get really good at the things that matter for you specifically. That's my next little nugget.
Speaker 2:My next level, nugget, would be don't underestimate the amount of time I Played basketball as a little kid and I played pick up basketball all through high school and then I played pick up basketball and intramural basketball in college. And then I played basketball when I lived in LA for a few months with some really, really, really good players and Emilia and I, when we first got together, we started playing ball together and she had never played and it was like oh, oh, wow, you don't, it was just weird, it was. You don't know what a how to dribble, you don't know what a rebound is, and it's nothing against her. You just don't realize how good you get over time. I never considered myself Super good at basketball, but when I played against a beginner it was, it mean I could do whatever I wanted. It's not even. It's not even a real. This isn't a competition, this is nothing. It's not about me, it's not about Emilia, it's not about Cav time, that there is nothing.
Speaker 2:Everyone underestimates what a decade will do. I'm convinced of it. If you want to play guitar for a half an hour a day or a half an hour a week, even for a decade, you're gonna get better than me. You're gonna be good. You're gonna be really good time if you practice over time. There is not a single person that I know who isn't better than me at something, and that's because they've just been doing whatever that thing is so much longer than me. You get human beings get really good at things that they consistently practice. They get really really good. And Are you leveraging that? That would be my next level nugget.
Speaker 1:I know this would never happen because it doesn't resonate with you. But imagine ten years from today, if you hadn't played basketball in ten years you would never be on the celebrity basketball team. Say. You and I were like actual celebrities that you know Musicians or whatever. You know how they have celebrity games all the time. You'd never be on it if you weren't playing, if people didn't know you liked basketball and you hadn't been practicing. That would be so awesome. There you go. So you better get on you better get on the streets, son.
Speaker 2:I mean.
Speaker 1:I beat you at horse. I'm not a horse at knockout.
Speaker 2:Two out of ten times brother.
Speaker 1:I'm a beginner, five foot four, haven't played basketball in years, that's I mean. Come on, you know what I mean. Everybody gets lucky two times out of ten.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, that's, that's an anomaly. It's eight to two, my friend you think you could.
Speaker 1:You think you could beat me two times out of ten and grappling.
Speaker 2:Probably not.
Speaker 1:I don't know no. So maybe I'm a little bit, maybe I'm, maybe I got some skills.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that could be it.
Speaker 1:I was sore for several weeks after. After that my legs were sore in places that I didn't even know were attached to my legs.
Speaker 2:So yeah, If you don't use it.
Speaker 1:You do, you will lose it. You will lose it Next up a nation. If you are looking to transition more into your dreams, if you are looking to set more effective boundaries, if you are looking to Get to the next level of your confidence and community, please join our private Facebook group, next level nation. The link is always in the show notes but I know a lot of us feel lonely and this growth thing and Dream chasing thing can get very lonely. So if you're looking for people, there are 700 and some odd of them in next level nation and they are all amazing you.
Speaker 2:You can't very there you.
