Next Level University

#1527 - Who Is It Time To Let Go Of?

• Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

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Are the people in your life pushing you toward your goals or holding you back? Believe it or not, even the individuals who seem less enjoyable to be around can sometimes be the ones who inspire the most growth. In this episode, hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros talk about encouraging heartfelt honesty with oneself about the relationships we embody for ourselves and others. This introspection is crucial for aligning your relationships with your goals and dreams. Reflecting on the people in our lives and their impact on our personal growth allows us to identify who we may need to let go of and who we may need to reconnect with.

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Next Level Monthly Meetup - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/monthly-meetups

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Show notes:
[2:19] Hardcore questions
[4:02] Seasons and reasons
[5:14] Types of friendship
[9:23] Evaluating pros and cons
[15:07] Rebecca praises Alan's coaching and the effectiveness of the Peak Performance Tracker in keeping her consistent and moving toward her goals
[20:55] Relationship dynamics
[22:52] What type of person are you to yourself and to others?
[25:56] Outro

Send a text to Kevin and Alan!

Speaker 1:

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 enjoyed yesterday's episode, episode number 1526. What would you go back and change if you could? You heard many of Alan and I's not so intelligent Decisions from the past today yeah, yeah, seems like forever ago today, rep. So number 1527 who is it time to let go of?

Speaker 1:

So, as you know, or you may not know, alan coaches me every other week. I'm gonna put that in quotations because usually we end up just skipping it and recording episodes because we're usually behind. But on a Recent coaching call, alan said alright, where can we get more time back of yours? What are you doing? Where are you spending most of your time? What do you need to stop doing? He asks a bunch of questions and I said social media. For sure, I'm definitely spending more time on social media than I need to, so I've been scheduling out my posts. That's been helpful, awesome.

Speaker 1:

And he asked a very what could be perceived as a very hardcore question, so I want to throw that out there. First, he said who is there anybody in your life that you're spending time with that you don't think you should be spending time with, and we've had I don't know a million of these conversations, so for me that's just a regular question. I appreciate the vulnerability with asking such a challenging question and I said let me think, let me think for a question, let me think for a second. And I said, no, everybody in my life is super aligned. I'm the most aligned I've ever been with my relationships. But Maybe if somebody asked you that question, you might have someone in mind. You might say you know what I? I've really given blank a lot of chances and I know they're working on stuff and I know they're working on themselves and I know they're really trying. But I don't know if this relationship serves me at the level that it once did. I don't know if I'm getting out of this friendship or this relationship what I once was or I need to be. It might be time to Let go of that person. Potentially. Now I also want to flip the script because I don't want this just to be a negative episode. Another good question for you is who is it time for me to reconnect with? Contrast perspective often reveals oh, that person was really good for me.

Speaker 1:

In Retrospect, we had a lot of powerful conversations. We had some deep conversations. I learned a lot about myself. That person had zero ego. That person was very vulnerable. That person helped me here. They taught me here. I learned this when I was friends with them. So that's another question that you can ask yourself. But we talked about this many times.

Speaker 1:

There's seasons and reasons. People in our people are in our lives for seasons. We've had a lot of that. We've grown apart from a lot of our Old masterminds and some of the friends we had in the beginning of this. And then reasons. We've had really good mentors that We've worked with for years and then kind of drifted apart. Maybe it's team members that have been here for different seasons or reasons and we ended up drifting apart.

Speaker 1:

But Sometimes you forget how valuable a season is or how valuable a reason is, and I think that's why asking yourself questions like this is Very, very, very important. Who knows, if you haven't checked in with it in a minute you might have someone that's holding space in your life that doesn't necessarily deserve it. Or there might be someone who you're not allocating time for that actually does deserve it and it would be very beneficial for them to Be back in your life to some capacity this past weekend I was reading a listening to a audiobook Called who are you being a hero to, in other words, who are you serving in the world?

Speaker 2:

and the concept is built on this idea that all of us Can help other people have a bigger, brighter future. I Also did a team training, team training number 17. This past weekend, on Saturday morning with the NLU team and I said, if anyone can ever Come to me with an honest Reason why NLU growing is not what's best for the world, I want you to call it out Because, to my understanding, when NLU grows, our listeners grow, our community grows, our clients grow, kevin and I grow and it's a win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win for Kevin and I, win for the listener, win for the community, win for the clients, win for the team, win for the world. And I believe that all businesses should be a win for everyone. And the analogy here is a cigarette company, the opposite, which is your future gets worse when my future gets better. So you pay me $20 for cigarettes, two packs or whatever, and I profit off that and your future actually gets smaller, it decreases. And so there's this concept of bigger, brighter futures versus NLU when you pay me for coaching, I'm going to help you make your future bigger and brighter. So my future gets bigger because I am profitable, and that profit gets reinvested back into NLU, so NLU gets bigger and then NLU can help more people. And so it's this positive feedback loop of bigger, brighter, better futures versus a cigarette company is profiting off of people's futures getting shorter and arguably worse, and cigarettes is a drastic extreme example. But there's companies, everything in between.

Speaker 2:

I love Swedish fish, but my future doesn't exactly get bigger when I buy them. My present definitely gets more enjoyable, but you understand the concept. So what does this have to do with the people in your life? People are the same way. Some people are Swedish fish. They're enjoyable and pleasurable to be around, but they're not making you better, they're not helping you grow into a bigger, brighter, better future.

Speaker 2:

And so I've often said this before if you have big goals and dreams and you want to achieve them and you want to live a life of purpose, contribution, impact, profitability, I'm going to be the best friend you can possibly have and friend is kind of in quotes, because I definitely won't be friend in the traditional sense. But if you don't have goals and you want to stay the same and you don't want to grow and you don't want to improve and you're not interested in anything challenging. I'm going to be just a giant pain in the ass with no benefit, and so I try really hard not to have friendships like that anymore. Because Aristotle talks about the three types of friendships. One is transactional. Transactional friendship, which is like I give Kevin 50 Swedish fish for his 10 Reese's Cups or whatever Nope, and our friendship is built on transactions. It's not a fair trade. Not a fair trade. No, it's really not.

Speaker 3:

I understand I'm out Okay. So for that, our friendship is over now, because Swedish fish Reese's Okay.

Speaker 2:

Number two is pleasure. So I used to have a lot of pleasure centered friendships where partying and having fun and alcohol was a big epicenter of where our friendship was born, and then underneath that was actually deep conversations which I'll get to in the third category. So the first one is transactional, it's like your employer or colleague or whatever. The second is pleasure, meaning we party together, we have fun together and our relationship is built on fun and partying Pleasure. And then the third one is constructive. And the third one is a constructive, mutual, reciprocal. I grow, you grow, deep, meaningful conversation, growth and contribution, friendship. And, to the point of this episode, all's I'm suggesting, all Kevin is suggesting, is try to have a little bit more of that third category and you're going to find your future get bigger and brighter over time.

Speaker 1:

Well, as your goals change or get clearer. Also, what relationships are truly serving you gets clear. I believe that at a deep level. Is it that simple? Can we make it that simple? Probably not, but if you have a goal, let's do this. Okay, let's just say you have a goal of accomplishing something specific, something meaningful, it's personal to you and it's something you believe you can actually do.

Speaker 1:

I want you to pick out the top three people that you spend time with and I want you to give me Three reasons how they'll help you get to your goal and three reasons how they'll hold you back. And if you, if it's really easy to come up with three reasons why they'll hold you back for all, for all the people in your life, I would argue that they're probably not serving you at the level that they could. On the opposite end, if you say it's really easy to come up with a three up arrows the three positive things I don't know when it comes to the three down ones, one of them might be this person wants more quality time with me. Okay, that's something we could probably work with. Right, that's a potential thing that we can work with constructively. Again, that exercise is very simple. Good, kev, let's do it with each other, okay, good.

Speaker 1:

Well, who am I saying reasons?

Speaker 2:

I'm holding you back, oh geez.

Speaker 3:

No, I'm kidding. You can start with the positive if you want. I think we should lead by. I don't think you're holding me back.

Speaker 1:

The positives your. You have the ability to reverse engineer the outcomes that I desire for sure. That's one to who else am I gonna do this with if you leave this all dies to some capacity? But I want it to be you. You and I have this. We have quite a history built together, so I would never want this to be with anybody else. So that's number two and you. Number three is you have a lot of unique strengths where I don't. You are a good Yin to my yin, if you will. So those are my three positives, three negatives.

Speaker 2:

I'm surprised you didn't mention dynamite cop in middle school.

Speaker 1:

I think the audience in the community knows enough about our, our friendship. Where we played spin the bottle in your basement with the popular girls so that would be reason number four. I don't know if there are three Redown arrows, I would say I Mean you are a pain in the ass because you make me grow, mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so that three times. Most likely, I knew this would be fun. Yeah, that that three times, I can't. It's very hard to miss. Sometimes it's there's a. There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure to get better every day and be on, but again. So that's good. This is good. It's a good exercise, because really, what I wanted to accomplish with the exercise is if the things that are down arrows are actually really up arrows for your dreams. Just because the person's a pain in the ass does not mean they're bad. So it's a lot of pressure to grow, yes, emotionally and Ego wise. Sometimes, yeah, that's a pain in the butt, but that's an up arrow that's actually gonna help me get to my goals.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think an even more the important way to look at that from my perspective. Real quick, could you have the first three without the, without the the ladder three great question. Right, I mean the first three are there. I, in tandem with being a pain in the ass three times I mean how could I possibly be those first three without ever being a pain in the ass? I mean, is that even real?

Speaker 2:

Probably not that's like having a fitness coach that never pushes you. It's yeah, yeah, and I think that that's really hopefully the point that landed for everyone is pros and cons. One of them what is often best for our future usually kind of sucks a little bit in the moment and I think that's important to own, and a lot of the things that are the most fun in the moment are not what's best for our future. And I watched a Hobbit Marathon yesterday and it was awesome and I had a blast and it was for my birthday and that's what I wanted, and Emilia was with me. She fell asleep through the third movie. It was adorable, but it still was nice and I stayed up late and the Hobbit movies extended versions are three hours each, so this was like a day and that was awesome. I mean, I was in absolute short-term pleasure heaven yesterday, but I'm paying for it today, for sure, and that's life. So maybe I'll do that once a year. That'll be a tradition or something. Maybe I'll do like a movie marathon every once a year or something.

Speaker 2:

But at the end of the day, if my life was stuff like that, I'd be in so much trouble. And I think the same is with people. Some people are a lot of fun and they're really enjoyable to be around, but they're not what's best for your future. And I used to be one of those people who was really fun and really enjoyable to be around, but I wasn't what was best for everybody. If you hung out with me, we would definitely have a night, we'd party, we'd have a blast, but you'd pay for that with a bad hangover or whatever else. You didn't get done. And I do think I always and this is one through line for my life, which I always had deep, meaningful conversations heart to hearts about goals and dreams, even when we were drinking, excuse me. So I do think some people's futures got much brighter and bigger through that. But here's my point whether it's Kevin or me, Excuse me.

Speaker 1:

That would be the second negative you uncontrollably burp into the microphone.

Speaker 3:

My bad.

Speaker 2:

Carbonated beverages. So, whether it's Kevin or me or anyone else that you assess in your life, whether it's a podcast or someone you listen to on YouTube, are they making your future bigger and brighter and better? But maybe they're not super enjoyable to watch or be around, or are they super fun to do, like the Hobbit movies but you got to dial it in. And that's really what we're talking about here and unfortunately that is the way life is set up. We all know that candy is more tasty than kale, but kale is what's best for your future and that doesn't mean you can't ever eat candy. It just means you have to decide in advance what the right amount of candy is and what the right amount of kale is. And I think that's unique to all of us. And I'll answer now for Kev.

Speaker 2:

The positives, for Kev helps me work on my character, for sure. Keeps me super accountable on that and, yeah, that comes as a pain in the ass, for sure, sometimes, sometimes, but the best kind. Number two super hard working and keeps me working really hard for sure. Number three I want this to be more meaningful, let me, let me really think. Number three for Kev I would say actually this is interesting, but it's authentic fun you make. I was watching a podcast earlier and they were talking about how you got to make the grind fun. I don't know if I do that as much as you do I definitely don't but you've made the grind more fun. Appreciate it, and I'm gonna grind regardless, but I might as well have more fun.

Speaker 1:

I agree.

Speaker 2:

And so, yeah, that third one is really really kind of cool I appreciate that. That's a good one, of course, especially when it's really brutal. Kevin gets funnier when life is worse.

Speaker 3:

I try, I try.

Speaker 1:

Now tell me, why I suck.

Speaker 2:

He's in perspective. The three things that are pain it's not really pain in the butt. What is it? I forget the frame. The first three are why it's a positive.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you could say pain in the butt. But it's positive, why it's a negative? You could say Negative you?

Speaker 2:

well, this isn't a negative, this is a positive. Okay, you have strict logistics, being on time you're always on time. So it's annoying at times because I don't have as much permission although you've done a great job with this of putting other things first and being on time, really. So there's that. But again, another negative. That's actually a positive. It's actually a good thing If you want to improve and grow. Another negative what would be a negative? I would say, sometimes you prioritize R&R more than I do. But again, that's an up arrow too, because I need that.

Speaker 1:

I definitely would. I wouldn't say sometimes.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah yeah yeah, yeah, I'm undefeated. I've lost a lot of battles. You're good. I've never lost a battle with R&Rs.

Speaker 2:

Kev is much better at R&R than it's almost like that's your son and everything revolves around that. For me, the mission is my son and everything revolves around that, so it's a good yin to the yang thing which, again, I'm in real time realizing this the things that you like are not necessarily what's best for you. That's so true, wild. But, yeah, you're always focused on making sure you get your R&R, which helps me actually get enough R&R to be at my best. So I would say that's a pain in the butt sometimes. Number three, having to be early all the time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but again, another up arrow, that's actually constructive and we don't do you and I don't really do a lot of stuff together as much as we used to.

Speaker 2:

We used to have to be early for everything, but now that ends up number one. We end up actually on time, which is great, but at the time it's kind of like I have so much other stuff to do. What if we could squeeze this into this 10 minutes and this into this 10 minutes? But over time I've really realized that I'm just not really good with time, so I have a timer going right now. I've been getting much better with time ever since I've timed everything, so it's 59 minutes 52 seconds.

Speaker 2:

Until Kevin and I have to be off here, it's actually 49 minutes and 48 seconds. Sorry, but as I've come up on time, I've realized that I'm actually the one who wasn't optimal. And so Kevin and I are a really good example and I hope we're not just talking about us here, but I hope you're thinking about you. You're a really good example of driving to five, where whoever had the higher, whoever was more optimal, kind of stood their ground more and it got the other person closer to better, and I think that those are the relationships that end up being the most meaningful long term.

Speaker 1:

I always try, and I don't know if it lands, but anytime I want food, like, say, I want to order Taco Bell or Burger King, whatever it is, and I know it's not what I should do Like, well, you already ordered food once this week, or you're focused on saving money, or whatever you're dieting, it doesn't make any sense. I try to sell myself on the opposite. So I try to find the three down arrows. It's a 10 minute ride or it's going to cost eight bucks to get delivered with Grubhub and you're going to feel like garbage after and you already did your cardio for the day. That's kind of what we're talking about here a little bit, where if the down arrows are also up arrows, so the down arrows are actually up arrows for your goals, that's a good thing. That's a good thing. If the up arrows or down arrows, that might not be so good. So when I'm with this person, I lose track of time, like, yeah, that could be a really good thing, unless you are losing track of all your responsibilities too. When you lose track of time, maybe that's not as good, but you have to be very, very honest with yourself.

Speaker 1:

The other day, taryn made something. I don't remember what it was. I think she made crock pot chicken and I had one of those days I told you I was like I'm getting food, I don't even care. Sometimes I get in these moods where it's I don't care, I'm getting food, I'm stressed out, I need it. And Taryn sold me on not getting food and she gave me. She said, well, we have crock pot chicken, you just got food the other day. It's like, okay, you win, you have overlogic me 100% and I ended up having whatever it was chicken quesadillas or whatever. It was awesome, it was awesome. So I was although it was quote unquote pain in the butt, it ended up being the thing that was best for me in the long run. Maybe that's a hopefully that's a new or a unique or a perspective that you maybe haven't practiced recently, that we can help you practice through our examples and our our lessons. That's my next level nugget.

Speaker 2:

And then my next level nugget is what type of person are you being for yourself? And then, what type of person are you being for others? Because not only are you assessing the people in your life, but they're assessing you, and, as someone who used to throw a ton of parties back in high school and college, I used to be the person you went to when you wanted a good time, and I'm definitely not that anymore. Now I'm the person you go to when you want to achieve your goals and dreams, and I would rather be the second one than the first. But I'm saying that from a place of experience, having been the first, because, having been the first, there was a lot of benefits to that too.

Speaker 2:

I had tons of friends, I had friends of friends. I had friends of friends of friends of friends. My network was huge. Everybody knew me not everybody, but a lot of people knew me and I was invited to every party because they wanted to be invited to mine. There were a lot of benefits, and a lot of those benefits are gone now, but there's also a lot of benefits to having a bigger, brighter future and then surrounding yourself with other people that also want to have a bigger, brighter future. And so, which side of this pendulum do you want to be on and, most importantly, which side of this pendulum do you want to swing toward when it comes to the people you associate with the birds of a flutter? The birds of a flutter.

Speaker 3:

The birds of a feather that flock to flutter the birds of a feather that flock together. That's my next level nugget, If you want to improve your speaking nextleveluniversecom.

Speaker 1:

Bumble at the goal line. If you are someone who is looking for more positive people and maybe that's what this episode brought up for you please join our private Facebook group. Next Level Nation Link will be in the show notes. We've had a lot of new members, so thank you and shout out to all of those of you who have joined.

Speaker 3:

If you are a bird who wants to flock, to flutter. Join us for our next speaking seminar.

Speaker 2:

No, so we do as you know. If you're a new listener, you do not know this, but if you're a long-term listener, you definitely know this, because we've been doing this for two years. This is our 24th month in a row of doing monthly meetups. It is a private, community-based thing that we do at Next Level University so that we can all get to know each other at a deeper level. Three things holding you back from your own unique version of success. Monthly meetup number 24, it is December 7th at 6 pm Eastern Standard Time. The registration link will be in the show notes. You can participate as much as you want or you can participate not at all and just listen in.

Speaker 1:

Someone was at Jerry Inn that had a really good idea about maybe a potential giveaway. I don't know yet, but let me think on it. I love giving stuff away, so let me think on it and as we get closer, maybe we'll announce some sort of giveaway for our two-year anniversary.

Speaker 2:

As I said on the huddle, I said that I'm not the giveaway guy, but if you, I support it. We'll figure something out.

Speaker 1:

Tomorrow for episode number 1,500 in 28,. You're wasting more time with shortcuts. I don't know, alan, if you ever watched Mythbusters back in the day, but I was inspired by a realization that I had from a long time ago, mythbusters episode. Yeah, that show is awesome, it's a great show. Yeah, it's awesome, it's a great show. So we're gonna talk about that tomorrow. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you, and at NLU we don't have fans, we have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.

Speaker 2:

Talk to you soon. Next up on Nation.

Speaker 1:

I thought you were gonna say something about a feather. Hmm, classic, nothing you can do.

People on this episode

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Alan Lazaros

Host
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Kevin Palmieri

Host