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
#1437 - What Are Your Biggest Strengths and Weaknesses Right Now?
What if you could strike the perfect balance between health, wealth, and love? In this episode, hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros talk about why we may sometimes lag in one area, and how understanding our habits can provide insights into why this happens. They talk about how intentional action, habit tracking, and honest conversations can help you excel in these areas of life. They discuss that striving for perfection can often lead to a life of constant frustration. They also talk about the sliding scale of effort, and how mistakes and disappointments can serve as important reminders to stay on course.
Links mentioned:
Next Level Nation - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700
Next Level U Book Club - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/next-level-book-club/
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The best way to track your habits is here! Download the app: Optimal - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/optimal/
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- Next Level Monthly Meetup: https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/monthly-meetups/
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Show notes:
[1:50] Balancing vs. juggling
[4:44] The three uncomfortable truths for Alan
[7:45] Understanding what's most important to you
[12:29] Leveraging your strength
[14:19] Austin shares his top-notch experience working with Kevin under Next Level Podcast Solutions
[15:16] Cons of focusing on the goal
[20:26] Expect failure or mistakes
[23:58] It might feel like it takes longer
[27:50] Outro
Next level nation. Welcome back to another episode of next level university, where we help you level of your life, your love, your Health and your wealth. We hope you enjoyed our latest episode, episode number 1436 how to transition More into your dreams. Alan is taking a sip of his drink off camera Because we're we're trying to improve our audio quality. Me squealing in your ear at the beginning because I was laughing so hard probably doesn't help, and Now I'm crying today. Represent number 1437 what are your biggest strengths and weaknesses right now?
Speaker 1:I was on a podcast recently and they were talking about balance and they said how do you balance business and Family and health and all that stuff? And I said I don't really. I don't consider it balance anymore because One of them is usually falling. So if I was to say that I'm trying to balance it, I'm not balancing it very well. I like to use the term juggling. How well am I juggling health, wealth and love? And I said right now I feel like I'm doing a really, really, really good job, probably the best I've ever done. But that's come from.
Speaker 1:In the beginning I Wasn't juggling my love life very well because so much of my time was going into the business. Then there was another season where I was crushing fitness but I probably wasn't doing very well when it came to wealth in the business. And then there was probably another season where my relationship was going really really well but something else wasn't going well, and now I feel like things have gone really really well in all Arenas. I've had to have a lot of honest conversations with myself, honest conversations with Alan, honest conversations with Taryn, in order to make that happen. But my question for you, to get started in this episode, is which is the weakest for you right now and which is the strongest? And this is another reason why Having some sort of habit tracking is so important, because you can look directly at your habits and you can look directly at what you've been doing and get an idea of why it's happening that way.
Speaker 1:Oh, I haven't gone to the gym, or I haven't done Uncycling, or I haven't gone for a walk, or I haven't got my 10,000 steps in the last three weeks. Hmm, yeah, that makes sense. Oh, I haven't done a date night with my partner in two weeks. Maybe that's why I feel a little bit of distance. I haven't had a sales call in a month. Maybe that's why the wealth is lagging behind everything else. So at all times, there's usually one thing at least that's lagging, and the reason it's lagging oftentimes is because we have lost sight or Intentionality of why it wasn't lagging in the first place. That's our goal, to jam in this episode.
Speaker 2:Intentionality yes that really? How intentional are you in health? How intentional are you in wealth? How intentional are you in love and how intentional are you with your kids, if you have them? How intentional are you with your pets? How intentional are you with your family? How intentional are you with your friends? Life is like 15 full-time jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah it feels so overwhelming. So the first thing I want to do, kev, is just give the permission slip of first and foremost I've been trying to. I Did a training on Saturday with the NLU team and I I said there you ever see that meme where there's a huge line out the door for Comfortable lies and then there's the booth for unpleasant truths?
Speaker 2:and it's empty, just some dude sitting there alone, like Steven Glansberg, and I opened the training with that and I said these are the three uncomfortable truths that I'm accepting right now. Uncomfortable truth number one is Most people are not actually growth oriented and if they are, they're not holistic. Uncomfortable truth number two is that most people do not want to maximize their potential. And Uncomfortable truth number three is that most people, while they might say they want to have an impact, they don't really care about it as much as as they say, or or maybe not even at all. Now, if you're listening to this, you care about self-improvement. You care about holistic self-improvement. You care about health, wealth and love. Otherwise, you wouldn't be listening. If you don't care about health, wealth and love, you wouldn't be listening. If you don't care about growth, personal growth, personal development, self-improvement you wouldn't be listening.
Speaker 2:So, since you are, we got to talk about this conversation of how hard it is To be well developed in all three areas. I'm gonna define them. I have a picture of a tripod in front of me and I think of it like that health, wealth and love. Health is physical health, mental health, emotional health and spiritual health. Wealth is how you earn your money. In other words, how much do you love what you do, how much you earn and if that's increasing or decreasing, and then where you invest that money, where you spend that money. And then love is your intimate relationship, your friends, your family, your mentors, your mentees, your clients, your colleagues, your acquaintances, your kids not necessarily in that order, but it is.
Speaker 2:I was talking to you immediately the other night and I said, sweetheart, I'm so overwhelmed. We're trying to be really well developed in all three areas. And I said even think about the math of that. Let's say I'm one in a thousand in health, one in a thousand in wealth and one in a thousand in love. That's one in a billion. Right there, it's really really difficult. That's why you see so many people who are wealthy but not healthy. That's why you see so many people that are healthy but not wealthy. That's why you see some people that are healthy and wealthy but not in love, because it's really really difficult to do all three really well. And I think the point of this episode, the big idea for me, is just owning the fact that if you want to be holistically successful, you want to be healthy, wealthy and in love. It is going to feel like three full-time jobs and there's always going to be one lagging.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean that's a bad thing either. That's a belief that you and I have held and we've shared many times is I do expect life to be challenging, especially if you want to grow. If you want to grow, that requires resistance, just like the gym. If you have an easy workout every day, you're probably not growing, you're not adapting that much. And then the further conversation is I asked Alan this question today because we were doing some behind the scenes business masterminding and I said if you could be the healthiest or most athletic in the room it's funny when you go off screen to do your drinks now I feel like I'm talking to nobody. That was in the beginning. You and I were talking to pretty much nobody.
Speaker 1:If you could be in a room and you could be the most athletic health if that's what you define as health you could be the most wealthy, whatever that means to you, or you could be the most deeply in love. What would you choose? That's a really good question to ask yourself, because it's going to help create the understanding of what's the most important. Then the question is okay, why is number two number two and why is number three number three? If one of the reasons you're say you're weak in health. If one of the reasons is you have a negative relationship with your body or you have a negative relationship with fitness or whatever, it may be okay. That's something worth unconditioning. If the weakest right now is wealth and one of the reasons is you think money is bad or you've villainized people who have money in the past, that's going to be an issue.
Speaker 2:What was your answer?
Speaker 1:It's very close between wealth and love. It's very close. Probably wealth first, honestly.
Speaker 2:If I'm being honest, you owning that. It's so interesting because the first answer is I need all three. Of course, the first answer is I want all three. I intend on all three, but when you really sit with it, because I would have thought love would have been higher, but it isn't. It's health first, health, wealth or love. So let's do that with all the listeners.
Speaker 2:If you could be the healthiest in the room, the wealthiest in the room or the most in love in the room, my order surprised me. My order is health, then love, then wealth, which makes sense. But Is there a way To be the healthiest, the most in love and the wealthiest? And that's again. That's a philosophical question, but I think it's important for all of us to know which one we would choose, and the cool part about this is you don't have to Choose just one right, but you do need to know yourself well enough to understand which one is actually the unconscious priority and then there's just layers of Maybe the one that you're most focused on or the one that you would value the most right now.
Speaker 1:Maybe you wouldn't hear from today. Maybe a year from today you feel like you have it really under control and you've lost sight of how important it once was. That's a possibility too. There's a lot of. There's a lot of things that can happen when you have these Conversations with yourself and it's just self-awareness at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:I'm very focused on money. I I did a coaching call recently with a couple clients and it was just all money and sales. And I said how, how focused are you on money? When you wake up in the morning, what do you think about? And One said I think about going for a walk. And I and the other the other clients had something else and I said that's all. I'm not gonna Make that wrong. I'm not saying that's wrong, but if you want to make more money, you have to be more intentional with your thoughts around money, just like if you want to save more money, you're gonna be more intentional with that. Do I really need that coffee? Do I really need Burger King for the twat? The second time this week in my case. Occasionally it creates the yeses, it creates the nose. It just puts on your radar the things that are most important.
Speaker 2:And what happens? Kev is what we focus on one of the three health, wealth or love and then it starts to flourish. Yeah, but one of the other ones, one of the other pillars, one of the other part legs of the tripod starts to fall, and and so Kevin and I talked last week about how I threw my back out, and I'll tell you what. Health has been my number one focus every day since. Just how do I get fully back to Functional, fully functional. I want to be able to play basketball, I want to play soccer, I want to be able to run, jump, I want to be in the gym. I took, I Took a week off of weight training. This is the longest I've not weight trained in eight years and I just care so deeply about weight training, so deeply I feel so unfulfilled without it. So for me, health is more focus right now Because I neglected it. That's the irony. And again, neglected is a Spectrum. It's not like I fully neglected it, but it's definitely. Business has gotten most of the focus.
Speaker 1:And then the other conversation is how do you leverage the momentum in the thing? That's your strength To pick up momentum in the weakness? There's something about crushing one of these Pillars of life. If you're crushing health right now, I'm willing to bet it would be easier for you to habit stack something on top of the fact that you're already crushing it and you're feeling good, you're building self-trust, you're building Consistent habits, you're building a routine, you're building an expectation of yourself. Then I think it's a little bit easier to say, okay, I've gone to the gym or whatever it is, whatever it is in your, in your case, whatever, is this the strongest I Know? I've been Jeff in in this and for those new listeners of the and members of the NLU family, jeffing means to screw up.
Speaker 1:I've been Jeffing, it's a nicer form of f-ing yes, I've been, jeff, in the business well, and there's no reason I couldn't, at the end of my workout, walk on the treadmill for five minutes and send a message to a potential client. I mean I could do that, or Well, I'm already. I feel like I'm making a lot of progress in health. I might have been way more mindful about my food choices. I've been Getting rid of junk food. I haven't been eating that as much. There's no reason I can't cook dinner for my partner and I this week and make it a Double stack. Well, double stack. That it's positive in health and it's positive in love. There's no reason, right, because it'll it'll be a little bit easier. I find that you do. Have you seen that with clients where one pillar starts to Speed up and then they're able to leverage that for the other two?
Speaker 2:I would say what I see more often is I had one client who was making like $4,000 a day and she was crushing it, but her health started to go and her relationship with her kids started to go. I see more and maybe this is just because in my coaching I'm focused on whatever the goal is. I help them focus on the things that are going to get the goal, and then there's always cons to that, always, and the cons are the leg that falls because this person has four children. If you don't focus on being on the motherly stuff and you focus entirely on growing your business, of course there's going to be. If you do that long enough, I think by the time we realize the plane is crashing, it's already got momentum downward, and I think that's why these assessments are so important. Even just checking in right now health, wealth or love which one's the lagger there always is Like you could answer. I can answer.
Speaker 1:That's a tough one for me. Honestly, I feel really balanced, the most balanced I ever have in terms of this.
Speaker 2:There's one that's lagging.
Speaker 1:Probably health. But from the perspective of I haven't been getting really good sleep lately that would be the biggest one, and we haven't even talked about standards, so your standards come into this.
Speaker 2:If you have level 10 standards for lack of better phrasing this is next level university. If you have a level 10 standards for the sleep, of course you're going to feel like it's lagging. I don't think you can have level 10 standards in everything. I used to think you could, but as I got older and more pessimistic.
Speaker 1:I've realized that that's not. Can't you have level 10 standards but just be very frustrated all the time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you want to live a life of frustration. Right, I don't know how healthy it is, I would say you could do like a 10, a 9, and an 8, and you have to, and then the 10,. You set a new bar for yourself once you get to the next level, and then the 9 is more than the old 9. It's a sliding scale. Do you want to explain sliding scale?
Speaker 1:I don't fully know. I've never known how to fully explain it, it's just something I use. But yeah, I don't even know. You want me to Google it. I'm going to try real quick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll look it up while you do it. All right. Imagine health, wealth and love. Let's say my health is a 10 out of 10. My wealth is a 9 out of 10 and my love is an 8 out of 10. And I start to notice that my love life isn't as optimal, isn't as focused on as I wanted to. And let's say Emilia comes to me and says honestly, you just did next level live. The business is great, but we need some more. I don't feel as emotionally connected.
Speaker 2:Okay, now all of a sudden, I'm going to overly focus and probably over correct, for lack of better phrasing, to focus on my love life. Now the eight becomes, let's say, a nine and then a 10. And then it switches. Now all of a sudden, love is the 10. Health is the nine and wealth is the eight. And then that keeps happening, but sliding scale. This is going to be hard to explain. But now imagine I'm 35 years old, 36 years old, two years from now, my old eight could be, or my old 10 could be, my new eight, because I've become more capable. It's kind of like, let's say, you score 50 points in college basketball versus high school basketball. It's not the same 50 points, because college basketball is way harder, if that makes sense. That's a tough one to explain.
Speaker 1:What I came up with is what Google came up with for me a system in which the rate at which something is paid changes as a result of other conditions. So this would be a good example of that. If, say, you have a therapist or a counselor or a coach and they say my payment, so that the payment I take is on a sliding scale. So if you make $50,000 a year, I charge $100 an hour. If you make $75,000 a year, I charge $125 an hour. If you make $500,000 a year, I charge $250,000 an hour. That would be another example of a maybe an easier one. I don't know, but I've probably been using it wrong for the last several years every time I say it. But my intentions are good behind what I say. I just can't promise it's accurate.
Speaker 2:This is the best way I can describe a sliding scale. My Kevin and I's current walking pace is when we first started this business is our old all out sprint. So he and I, a typical week of productivity, of focus of business, of podcasting, of speaking, of coaching, of whatever. For us six years ago, when we first started, that would have been an all out sprint, whereas him and I can fairly casually get through a week, and that's probably not true. It's pretty challenging. But think of when you first started working out versus now. You versus you. It's your 10 out of 10. Effort is way different, if that makes sense. My level 10 effort in podcasting right now is a very different. Maybe that's I don't know seven episodes in one day, whereas at the beginning it was only one episode a day. So that's another way.
Speaker 1:And this is another good understanding that it's important to have when we're talking about this. You have to expect failure or mistakes or disappointment in this, because usually that's the yellow light of oh, I've been letting this slip. There's usually there has to be some sort of proof. Usually you're just Tara and I were coming home from Vermont and I was. I was driving and she was relaxing in the passenger seat and there was this on ramp that had these signs that said no U-turn, and I was thinking to myself has anybody ever gotten on the highway and then taken a U-turn? Has that ever happened? And then I thought to myself it must have happened, because that's why they have the sign yeah they doubt.
Speaker 1:They just guessed. One day, you know what. Somebody might take a U-turn, let's put up 56 signs. It was probably okay, cool On ramps, done, we're on to the next thing. And then somebody probably pulled a U-E, as they say in Massachusetts, and something happened. And then they had to put up those signs. Sometimes the pain of the mistake is what we need in order to avoid making it again in the future. I think that's how precedents are created, really Reactive.
Speaker 2:It's reactive innovation. I mean you've talked about this airports before 9-11. Different worlds, different world. Yeah, but that was reactive, it's okay. We got to take corrective action here.
Speaker 1:Seat belts, yeah. I don't think somebody one day just had an idea of what if we put seat belts in? I'm sure there was probably a lot of catastrophic accidents that happened in vehicles before then Would be my airbags? Same thing.
Speaker 2:I've been watching a lot of older movies lately. It is wild, some of these computers and stuff.
Speaker 1:I believe, it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we watched Silence of the Lambs. Have you ever seen it? A long time ago, emilia, every now and then, wants to watch a thriller. I'm not a big thriller fan myself. I'd rather watch Disney movies, of course, but it was 1981 or something, 1984 maybe.
Speaker 2:It was filmed in 1984. Dude, the computers. Oh my God, there was a library. It was fascinating.
Speaker 2:Anyways, side tangent, back to health, wealth and love. What's your next level, nugget, son? My next level, nugget, is give yourself the permission to I don't know if I I don't want to give you the permission, or have you give yourself the permission to not want to level up in all of these. This is next level university. We want to level up in all of these and I don't want to be healthy and wealthy and not in love. I don't want to be in love and not wealthy. I want to improve holistically, and I know that our listeners feel that way as well. So I would say just understand that what you're doing is exponentially harder than what other people are doing because they they aren't focused on all three. For me, that's been helpful because if you look at the numbers, let's say you are one in a hundred in health and one in a hundred in wealth and one in a hundred in love. That is 100 times three, or 100 times 100 times 100, rather, which we'll do them math real quick, I believe it's 100,000 100 times 100 times 100.
Speaker 1:No, I think I just yeah it's one million.
Speaker 2:So you're one in a million. So if you get to the point where you're the top 1% of health, the top 1% of wealth and the top 1% of love being in love in your own unique flavor you're one in a million. That is a much harder road than someone who's like I just want to be really good at one thing.
Speaker 1:I would tag on to your next level, nugget, and say it might feel like it takes three times as long, definitely, and that's okay. It feels very similar. I know a lot of people who are in far better. I don't know a lot personally, if I'm being honest, but I know a lot of people that I follow who are in much better shape than I am, but they're not doing some of the things that we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're not podcasting you'd be far ahead of them or business they're not doing and that's okay.
Speaker 1:That's okay. That is an important belief is, if you really do value health, wealth and love which you're listening to us, why I would assume either you do or you want to more your definition of success is going to be drastically different, but that also means the journey is going to be drastically different, and there are a lot of people who are going to look, quote unquote more successful than you, especially in the short term? Yeah, maybe for the majority of it, if you think about it, that's okay. I do believe it's something important.
Speaker 2:Yes they'll look more successful than you in the one that they're good at.
Speaker 1:Yes, but that can be hard, though, If you're comparing to other people. That that would be an extra next level nugget out with throughout there is if you're comparing to other people which I know everybody says not to do, but it's human nature, it's hard, it's very hard not to do that. At least make sure you're comparing to somebody who's doing something similar. That's challenging because nobody really knows what somebody's doing behind the scenes, but if you're comparing to someone who's focused on health, wealth and love and you're focused on health, wealth and love, maybe you'll feel less lonely when you do it that way. Do you dig that? I do Anything you want to add quickly.
Speaker 2:To your point. That's a very good point. If you are a mother of four children and you run a household, don't compare to someone who is 22, has no kids and has all the time in the world to work out. It's just not a fair comparison. Make sure your comparisons are fair. We've done episodes about that in the past. It's very important because when I was doing fitness modeling, fitness coaching, fitness competitions, I'm comparing to that version of me as this business owner and it's just sucks. It sucks because I had way more time. I was working out three hours a day.
Speaker 1:The good old days. The good old days.
Speaker 2:But if we compare business to business, I was way less successful back then in a wealth sense.
Speaker 1:Next Level Nation. If you are listening to us, then you are probably into health, wealth and love. First of all, thank you for listening to this episode. Secondly, if you are looking for more growth-minded individuals, one of the biggest reasons people don't grow to the level they want is because they're not surrounded by people who are also focused on growth. Our private Facebook group, Next Level Nation, is filled with amazing humans just like you. Link will be in the show notes. Please join if you are interested.
Speaker 2:We are also reading a book and book club by Jim Quick called Limitless. It is about mindset, methods and motivation. It is about how to evolve your brain At the end of the day. Here's what he says. He says there's a lot of other animals in the animal kingdom. The thing that separates humans is your brain. We're not the strongest, we're not the fastest, we're not the best swimmers, we're not the best at anything except for innovating, except for thinking. You have a superpower, whether you know it or not. It's your brain. Join book club and let's improve our brains together.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow for episode number 1,438, a simple mindset shift to help you find more success In the title. You've seen it if you're listening to it tomorrow, but I have success in quotations, because everybody's version of success is a little bit differently. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you At NLU. We do not have fans, we have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Stay holistic. Next subination
