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
#1517 - Practicing Gratitude For A Reason
Today, hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros talk about practicing gratitude. They discuss that when we express gratitude, we recognize the value of what we have and commit to taking care of these aspects of our lives. They emphasize the importance of appreciating what we have to avoid the regrettable path of unfulfilled ambitions. They also remind us that gratitude is something that should be practiced actively. It's about not just feeling grateful but also expressing it through our actions.
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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Website 💻 http://www.nextleveluniverse.com
The best way to track your habits is here! Download the app: Optimal - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/optimal/
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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
- Next Level U Book Club - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/next-level-book-club/
- Next Level Monthly Meetup: https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/monthly-meetups/
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Kevin: https://www.instagram.com/neverquitkid/
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Email 💬
Kevin@nextleveluniverse.com
Alan@nextleveluniverse.com
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Show notes:
[2:05] Do it constantly
[3:27] What you appreciate, appreciates
[7:04] Two sides of a coin
[11:39] Eddie expresses his satisfaction with Alan's support in his and his business' growth through the Next Level Business Solutions
[12:20] The opposite of gratitude
[17:50] Regrets: Things you didn't appreciate
[22:07] Outro
Next level nation. Welcome back to another episode of next level university, where we help you level up your life, your love, your health and your wealth. We hope you enjoy our latest episode. It was episode number 1516. Seeing is believing might be holding you back today for episode number 1517. It's called practicing gratitude. For a reason.
Speaker 1:When I am on podcasts, usually we talk about breaking life up into health, wealth and love. That's usually the theme of the episode and Oftentimes when we get to the end, the host will say what advice would you give to our audience? And nine times out of ten I will say Try to build one new habit under health, one new habit under wealth and one new habit under love. Nothing crazy, something that's super sustainable, that almost seems like it's probably not going to do anything. And then I usually give it examples. And when I talk about the loved one, I will usually say my wife and I have been playing the gratitude game for I don't even know how long years it yeah, it has to be years at this point where every night before we go to bed, we each say one thing we're grateful for about each other and we Very, very, very rarely miss like I'm. 99% of the time we do it. If we miss, usually I'll send a message the next day or in terrible response. We very, very rarely miss when we think about gratitude.
Speaker 1:I think oftentimes we assume gratitude is something that you feel, when I think gratitude is actually something that you practice. You practice gratitude constantly. One of my favorite questions this is old, hyper conscious conversation. If you woke up tomorrow with only the things that you said you were grateful for today, what would you have? You can feel grateful, and that's important, that's valuable and that's awesome, but practicing gratitude is the act of actually understanding. What does it mean to feel grateful? Practicing is telling other people that you're grateful about them. Practicing gratitude for your body is using your body, or practicing gratitude for your Incredible brain is using your brain.
Speaker 2:So that is what we're talking about today so I said a quote a long time ago, speaking of hyper conscious, way back on the podcast, of what you appreciate, appreciates, and I think that's a really powerful frame. The idea here and I've used this analogy before is when you appreciate the home you're in, you take really good care of it. You clean it, you redo the floors, you renovate it, you do the landscaping, you mow the lawn, you make sure that if you've ever seen the movie Jumanji, shout out way back, way, way, way back, probably mid 90s there's a house that gets really overgrown and, like all like, there's like a jungle in the house. If you've never seen Jumanji, it's imagine a house that's just not been taken care of for 60 years. That's what would happen to your home if you weren't grateful for it, if you weren't renovating it, if you weren't cleaning it, if you Weren't landscaping, if you weren't redoing the kitchen, if you weren't cleaning. Like I said, cleaning already.
Speaker 2:The point is is what Kevin's saying in this episode, and this is what I agree with so deeply, because I often say people say, well, I'm grateful for my health and I honestly, there have been times where I've called some people out. These are clients, so I get paid to call people out at times and I'm doing it kindly, but it's listen. If you're really grateful for your health, you'll take better care of yourself. When you're grateful for something, you take really good care of it. I have a Mazda Kevin's hand me down Mazda and Emilia has a Model Y Tesla. That's really, really, really, really nice. It's the nicest car I've ever had or been a part of. I should say it's not my car, but you know what I'm saying and I mean this is what. What are those go? I don't know what are those go for.
Speaker 1:I Honestly don't 60, 50, 60. I don't know, I'm not really sure, okay, 50 or $60,000.
Speaker 2:It's a really, really nice vehicle. I really adore this thing. It's got a big kiosk and it's awesome. But anyways, one of the things that when Emilia and I first got it, one of the things that sucked is I can't put my cup on it. I have to watch where we park. I can't hammer the door right into the, right into the, the cinder block or the the sidewalk. I'm joking, but one of the coolest parts about having crappy cars my whole life is you just don't have to take that good care of them.
Speaker 2:The Mazda, I don't care right, hammer that door right into the? No, I'm being playful, but I put my coffee cup on the Mazda. Of course I do. Who cares? Right? Oh, you're gonna scratch the paint, I don't care, right, this whole car is worth what? Four thousand dollars, I'm kidding, okay. So here's the point, though what you appreciate, appreciates. We take better care of the model y Because the model y is more valuable, it's more important, it's more, it's worth a lot more.
Speaker 2:I Actually like the luxury of not having to take care of my car, but I also don't value cars that much. So that's, that's a me personal thing, and I like the luxury of just not having to worry about it. But our home I try to take really good care of. And so this I had a mentor once who took better care of his Porsche. Then he did his own family, and I actually couldn't continue mentoring with this person because I Just can't.
Speaker 2:I can't separate someone's knowledge with their actual gratitude, I can't separate their character. For me, a lot of people can say like oh well, you know, so-and-so is really good at golf and so-and-so is really good at business and so-and-so is really good at football. But who cares if they're a terrible person? I do. I do so, you know, trigger warning. But, like Aaron Hernandez, for example, I don't care how good you are at football. If you're an awful human being, that's what I'm gonna judge you based on, not not that you can, you know, catch a ball or whatever. So for me, I can't separate character and success. I just can't, and I won't do it. So many of my mentors who had lower character, I just eventually had to be like regardless of how wealthy you are, I don't really care. I can't learn from you unless you're holistic, and I can't learn from you unless you lead by example. Particularly when it comes to gratitude, I don't want you to take better care of your pores than your wife. That's unacceptable. I don't want you to take better, to care more about your car than your family Can't have it. And so gratitude has two sides to the coin. One side is feeling grateful to Kevin's point, and it's I am grateful for my health, I am grateful for this home, I am grateful for this community, I'm grateful for this podcast, I'm grateful for my lungs, whatever. But I think real gratitude and this is I'm so adamant about this take care of your lungs by not smoking.
Speaker 2:I Was grateful For my mind in a feeling, but I wasn't taking care of my mind when I was drinking a lot. I Regret all of the times I binge drank because that was bad for my brain. If you're grateful for your brain, you'll get good sleep. You'll not poison it with alcohol constantly. You'll take care of it you. The things we value and the things we're grateful for, we take good care of. And if you're not taking good care Of them, I think gratitude is not only a noun, it's a verb, it's showing gratitude, it's. I Don't want, I don't want Emilia to think oh, ellen's really grateful for me. I want her to know in my actions. If you looked only at my actions, then you would know that I am grateful for Emilia. She would know that I'm grateful for Emilia and I think that goes so much longer. I think walk is so much more important than talk, and that's ironic coming from a podcaster. We do a lot of talking.
Speaker 1:We do a lot of talking. The other day, taryn was having a little bit of a rough day and she ended up go shoot, went somewhere, she went to work and I Walked out of the office, I was walking down the hallway and Ace was just laying on the floor just like laying on his back looking for bellies, and I had this overwhelming moment of gratitude and I texted her and I said I'm so grateful we, I'm so grateful we have a roof over our head and I'm so grateful we have abundance and I'm so grateful that we have this Nice, amazing family. And it just was a very surreal moment for me of oh, these are, these are our cats and this is our place, and there's a lot of amazing things going on. Now, again, sometimes you have to double, triple, quadruple down on focusing on this things that you're grateful for, because you're overwhelmed. There's other stuff going on and we can lose sight of that. But again, you've heard me say this a million times.
Speaker 1:That's why I think reflection is so important. I think reflection helps you Find gratitude, because you realize the contrast, whatever the contrast is, whatever it, whatever it may be, and when you reflect, I think you can find things to be Grateful for when I look back Living with Matt. I lived with my, my best friend, for four years. Sometimes that was a pain in the butt Because we spend so much time together that we would kind of want distance away from each other. But now when I look back, I'm so grateful for that experience because now I see him once every other month. Now at this point I'm so grateful for all the time. I have so much nostalgia built into that. When I think back, it's amazing.
Speaker 1:I just I think about that to the point A little call a dude ski a little call a dude ski, other the good old days, a little call of duty and a lot of whiskey back in the day. Now, I've never claimed to be I'm. I would argue that I'm probably not as grateful as for my brain, as Alan is. So that's why my decision-making paradigm is different than Alan. Yeah it's not as much of a core value.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think it's. It's important to throw that out there, where you get to decide what you're grateful for, but when you decide what you're grateful for, also Practicing it is showing up, improving it. If we say we're grateful for you and Then we just don't do any episodes, we're not that great.
Speaker 1:Yeah or being grateful for this opportunity, for this privilege that we have now. Yes, we've worked extremely hard over the last seven years to get to where we are, but I also understand wearing sweatpants, in a sweatshirt, in a hat and showing up from my office whenever I want is a wonderful thing to have. But I want to remain grateful for that, because when you, when you lose gratitude, you gain entitlement, and when you gain entitlement, you lose all the things you were grateful for in the first place. Unfortunately, that's kind of the way it works.
Speaker 2:When you lose. I actually think that the opposite of gratitude. You don't understand something until you understand the opposite. So I'm always doing this in my mind of okay, what is a core value? Okay, what's the opposite of value? I'm always trying to understand the opposites of things. I'm a little weird with that Gratitude. I remember we talked about this years ago on the Hyper Conscious podcast. I think the opposite of gratitude is entitlement, meaning you think you deserve it by default, so you're entitled to your health. So, whatever, I'll share this story and it fires me up, so just keep that in mind. I'm going to get probably fired up.
Speaker 2:I remember I was around the campfire back in the day when I used to frequent bond fires. I grew up in the sticks and I love me some bond fires and there was one of my. This was a young man who I looked up to as a kid for sure. He was one of my close friends, older brothers, and I never understood back then how little other people care about their health, even though they'd say they care about it. And I remember I said hey, man, why do you smoke so many packs a day? Why do you smoke so much? Just genuinely curious. And obviously this person is insecure about it. They felt attacked. They're like, well, I'm going to fucking die someday anyways, so who cares? And I remember thinking that's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And again at the time I just, oh, you know okay. And then I thought to myself like that is the worst logic I think I've ever heard in my life. It's like, well, what if I die tomorrow? What if you don't? What if you live to the statistical average of 78 years old, which is, by the way, the most likely case? Not if you keep smoking, obviously. And I remember I was really adamant. I was 12 years old and my mom used to smoke and she eventually quit because I just could not stop nagging her about it, because I was grateful, I valued my mom, I love my mom, I don't want to see her die. I was so adamant about her quitting smoking. She said I never would have quit if it wasn't for you. And I just can't settle on this idea of oh well, I'm going to die one day anyway, so I'm just going to smoke like a chimney. Okay, if you want to smoke, don't rationalize it with idiocy. Just say honestly it's worth it to me.
Speaker 2:I don't really value my health very much. That's the truth. You don't value your health very much, that's okay. I, kevin and I, were joking about how in high school we've smoked cloves and we thought we were cool and I drank a bunch, right, but I wasn't lying to myself saying, oh, I value my health at 10 out of 10 and I'm still going to binge drink on the regular. I think that we lie to ourselves and we lie to each other and the truth is you're not being grateful for your health and maybe you're not. Maybe that's a choice. Maybe that's a conscious choice. Maybe you aren't that grateful for your health. Maybe you don't really care that much about your life.
Speaker 2:I tell this story about how, when I was at my most miserable at least fulfilled, I would say I was at a girlfriend named Courtney at the time and she had graduated nursing school from the UMass School of Pharmacy. It's a really awesome nursing school and we went to celebrate her and all her classmates was like 30 of us. So we went to this place called Gillions, which is like for those of you who don't know I don't know if Gillions is global, but it's like an arcade bar and you have pool tables and ping pong and every arcade game. It's actually pretty awesome. And I remember I did nips in the car nips or little bottles of alcohol. I remember I put a couple of nips down right in the car right before I got in and I acted like I did. I acted like my life was awesome and at the time I made a ton of money and I did have the dream that I think everyone thought was a dream, and, as far as misery goes, I think I was still living in a free country and I still had a roof over my head and I had a lot of money coming in. So I think there were some benefits.
Speaker 2:But at the end of the day, I was deeply unfulfilled and I was pretending that I was happy, when the truth was if I had just been vulnerable and honest with myself. The truth is I'm unhappy. I don't really want to go and show my face in this bar and pretend to be happy. I do want to celebrate Courtney and her achievement, but I don't know if I'm capable of that right now because I don't feel good about me. And so what I did was I drank some alcohol and I went and pretended to have a blast.
Speaker 2:I think my intentions were pure to try to celebrate her, but at the end of the day, I think a lot of us are full of it. I wasn't grateful for my health and I wasn't showing it in my actions, and so what you appreciate appreciates. Check in. This is NLU, right, we're not here to just talk about fun stuff all the time. Check in what aren't you appreciating that you might regret.
Speaker 2:I regret poisoning my brain. I regret a lot of the choices I've made and fortunately I've felt those regrets. I've faced the mirror of what I didn't appreciate and I'm sure there's still things that I'm not appreciating enough now that I'll regret later. But I think that's life and I think that if you look in the mirror and go, what do I appreciate most? What am I showing in my actions that I appreciate most, and will your future self thank you for that? Or will you, a future self, go? Wow, wow.
Speaker 2:I really, really didn't appreciate that enough. I didn't understand what I had when I had it and, yeah, I think it's really important that we all do that in advance. I think we call it reverse engineering, regret and I think all my regrets in life. This will be the last thing I say I promise this is my next little nugget. All the things I regret in life are things I didn't appreciate Makes sense, yeah, things that I didn't appreciate. When my dog died, right, I was so upset that I wasn't I didn't spend a lot of time with him that day. Just, you know that that all of my regrets come down to me not appreciating things enough and me getting entitled for sure. So you know, I think if we just look at that, I think our future will be much better.
Speaker 1:I said that on a previous episode, that I think about Fudge and Ace dying all the time. An unhealthy amount. But no, I don't think so. I think from the outside perspective you might say that's dark and that's unhealthy, but every time I try to do this, every time I walk by them and one of them rolls over for bellies, I stop, even if I'm in the middle of something, even if I'm busy. It takes five not even five minutes, it takes two minutes that I sometimes Ace sleeps with me. He sleeps in between my legs and it's kind of I sleep really well now, but sometimes it's a pain in the butt but it's like, honestly, I don't really care, whatever, so I don't get as good asleep. I'm going to remember this forever. This is my favorite thing in the world. I love this.
Speaker 2:Worth it to you. It's worth it to me, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I've had those. I know I've talked a lot about jujitsu lately, but jujitsu is bad for your body. I will get injured fairly frequently with jujitsu. I don't care, it is what it is. I'm grateful for a strong, capable body and I'm grateful for the opportunity to do it, so I'm it's worth the risk to me. It's very self-aware of you.
Speaker 2:That's the thing, right. There's a big difference between oh jujitsu is not bad for your body. It is honestly it is and it's still worth it to me. You see the difference versus that guy who's like, oh well, I'm going to die one day anyway, it was all ego, yeah, yeah, it was all ego. Versus honestly it's worth it to me right now and I need the cigarette. That's vulnerable versus just all ego.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is. It's a question about is it worth it and, to the best of your current awareness, do you think you'll regret it? Yeah, do you think you'll regret it? That's my next level nugget. If you have not yet joined our private Facebook group hashtag next level nation, please do so. There's always conversations going on, very similar to the ones we have on the podcast, obviously, and it is a community of heart-driven humans like you who want to get to the next level in life love, health and wealth. As always, the link will be in the show notes, and I'm pretty sure the link is always in the show notes, so it'll always be there. You can always find it. Please join if you have not yet but you want to.
Speaker 2:So every Saturday, 12, 30 PM, Eastern Standard Time for coming up on 140 weeks in a row we have done. Book Club, the next level book club, next level books with next level people. We are currently finishing up Jim Quicks book limit list and we will be putting a poll in next level nation, which Kevin just plugged. So if you want to join next level nation, there will be a poll this week. When's this dropping?
Speaker 1:Saturday.
Speaker 2:Yes, there will be a poll this week for the next book. Five different books to pick from. High Performance Habits by Brendan Burchard is my go-to favorite. I have been swaying the vote in that direction, so please vote for that book. I'm kidding, but also that is the one that I'm going to vote for.
Speaker 2:So just saying but at the end of the day, we don't read just books just to read. We're in there to discuss things that matter with people who care for a reason, and that reason is to improve your life. Book Club, all the members of Book Club we've got some long-term members now they would attest to. Book Club has helped me improve my life. That's what I care about most.
Speaker 2:A book is just a book. It's what you do with that book that's going to improve your life and therefore inspire others to improve their lives, and that's how we change the world. One person at a time, one book at a time, one podcast episode at a time, one new habit at a time, because at the end of the day, people need to see people that inspire them and motivate them and challenge them to become more, and Book Club is that. So every Saturday, 12.30 pm, eastern Standard Time, the registration link will be in the show notes. I actually think it's a link to the landing page. You put your name and email. It emails me. Awesome, I will register for you and please reach out.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow for episode number 1,518, start planning your holiday boundaries now. So, at least in the US. We are a global show. Obviously, we have many listeners all over the world, but the majority of our audience is in the US, at least North America, if you are coming into holiday time, which we are, thanksgiving is coming up. Christmas is coming up for those who celebrate that. This is one of the reasons family is so challenging in the holidays, because you're connecting with people you haven't talked to maybe in a year since last holiday, and there's a lot of weird stuff that happens around the holidays with boundaries and family. So we're going to talk about that tomorrow for episode number 1,518. As always, we love you, we appreciate you. Grateful, Grateful, grateful, grateful for each and every one of you and NLU. We do not have fans, we have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Stay grateful. See you next time.
