Next Level University

#1543 - The Four S's of Clarity

• Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

Share episode

In this episode, hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros talk about clarity in the context of personal growth. Inspired by Brendon Burchard's acclaimed book, "High-Performance Habits," he introduces the concept of the Four S's of Clarity - Self, Social, Skills, and Service. Clarity plays a vital role in personal growth. The Four S's of Clarity offers a structured approach to envisioning our future selves, understanding how we wish to serve others, identifying the skills we need to develop, and deciding the people we want to associate with. We can create a roadmap for a successful and fulfilling future by clarifying these areas.

Links mentioned:
Next Level Nation - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700
Next Level Monthly Meetup #24: "3 Things Holding You Back From YOUR Version Of Success" on December 7th, 2023, 06:00 PM EST - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/monthly-meetups/

______________________

Website 💻  http://www.nextleveluniverse.com   

The best way to track your habits is here! Download the app: Optimal - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/optimal/   

_______________________

Any of these communities or resources are FREE to join and consume

_______________________

We love connecting with you guys! Reach out on LinkedIn, Instagram, or via email.

Instagram 📷
Kevin: https://www.instagram.com/neverquitkid/
Alan: https://www.instagram.com/alazaros88/

Show notes:
(2:13) HP6: High Performance Habits
(5:13) #1 - Self
(8:21) #2 - Service
(11:48) #3 - Skills
(12:14) Bianca, the co-founder and COO of Evolve Ventures, talks about Alan's unwavering support as her coach and the profound impact of mentorship on her life
(16:11) #4 - Social
(23:35) 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 enjoy yesterday's episode, episode number 1,542 an easy way to express your relationship needs today. For episode number 1,543 the four s's of Clarity. Clarity is something we have talked about very often in many different ways on this podcast, because Clarity is one of the most important things there is.

Speaker 1:

If you don't know where you are, you don't really know how to get to where you want to get to. If you don't know who you are, you don't really know who you're aspiring to be. So Alan came to me, as I mentioned in the previous episode, and said hey, on book club, we went through these four s's of clarity from Brennan Bershard's book high-performance habits. I think it would make for a valuable episode. And I said straight up man, I don't remember that because I read that book when you recommended to me years ago and I'm still not invited to book club. So I'm gonna have to kick it to you and you'll have to kind of go through and then hopefully I can add some sort of value off of that all right.

Speaker 2:

So Everyone's I would say most people have had the experience of being Directing somewhere with a GPS. Back in the day it was Garmin, google Maps, apple Maps, ways pick your poison and All of a sudden you lose connection and it gets all messed up and you have no idea where you're going and you don't know where you are and it needs to recalculate, recalculate, recalculate, because you lost signal in between the buildings. Whatever you enter the city or a tunnel or whatever, that's kind of what it feels like. Sometimes you have clarity and you're going along in life and then all of a sudden you're, you don't know where you are, you don't know where you've been, you don't know where you're headed. It gets all confusing. And so I opened book club. We're reading high-performance habits by Brennan Bershard, as Kevin mentioned, and it's an extraordinary book and we're reading it in book club and I opened.

Speaker 2:

The last Session this past Saturday was on seek clarity. So there's five high-performance habits he calls them the HP six, and the first of those habits is seek clarity and four specific categories of clarity. And I opened the Book club session with listen. This one's gonna be a little different and I'm gonna start it out with on zoom, I pull up the whiteboard and I drew something. If You've ever heard of an enzyme, an enzyme is something that catalyzes a Chemical reaction. So I said clarity is the enzyme and I drew the circle and I put like a little arrow with the enzyme clarity.

Speaker 2:

So what I'm trying to do in coaching and what we're trying to do on this podcast is Inject clarity. We want you to be clear about who you aspire to be. We want you to be clear about who you used to be. We want you to be clear about what your goals are, and NLU clarity is a theme we always talk about it, even if we're not talking about it, and so clarity creates certainty. Certainty creates confidence. This is what I was doing in book club. Confidence creates new action. New action creates momentum, and momentum creates massive results, and massive results Unfortunately creates complexity, confusion the opposite of clarity. Kevin and I were talking earlier about how, over the past Quarter and a half, four to five months, we've gotten to 31 new clients at next level social media or next level podcast solutions, which is awesome, but that has increased the complexity of our business by a significant margin. And so that's kind of life you you get to the next level With clarity which creates certainty, confidence, new action and consistency and momentum. But then, at the new level, all of a sudden you're like, oh my god, I've gotten lost.

Speaker 2:

And so what Brennan Bershard is trying to help us do with the HP 6, hp 1, which is which is seek clarity, is Help us identify and get clear. Get clear about four main things. So the title is the four s's of clarity here. They are their Brennan's, not mine, but I think they're really powerful. Number one is self. Self is are you clear about who you aspire to be? And, by the way, I want to make this very clear it's more future oriented. So when he's saying seek clarity, what he's directing us toward is a future version of the self. So in the last episode if you listened to yesterday's episode I joked about how well Kevin joked about time travel.

Speaker 1:

It wasn't a joke, sir. It was very serious and it's real.

Speaker 2:

And I said, speaking of time travel, we're going to do some time traveling on tomorrow's episode, which is what we're going to do right now. So go into your own future and ask yourself a simple question, which is how clear am I on the version of myself that I want? What do I look like? What does my life feel like? Who do I aspire to be? What's my character? What are my core values? What am I like? What's my personality?

Speaker 2:

And if you have a fixed mindset, you're going well, what do you mean? I'm just going to be more of what I already am and yeah, that's true, to an extent you will be an amplified version of who you are. But if you are shy right now, you can choose. I want my future self to be less shy, and when you make that decision and you do this exercise, all of a sudden you might find yourself talking to strangers more.

Speaker 2:

Or Kevin has talked about going to the mall and looking people in the eye when they walk by him. Hopefully, I didn't creep too many people out Going to the mall with Amy back in the day which this is a story of a listener early on, who Kevin went to the mall with and they would ask hey, you know they'd go up to someone and say how much does that beanbag chair cost? Because this person was really shy and they were fear chasing. That's what we talk about at NLU for the new listeners. Okay, so the first S is self. How clear are you from zero to 10 on the self?

Speaker 2:

that you want Kevin, before I move on to the next S anything you want to add?

Speaker 1:

No, I don't think. So I'm going to see how it unfolds and kind of go from there.

Speaker 2:

Well, let me ask you, Zero to 10,. How clear are you on the future self that you want to be?

Speaker 1:

I like to think very clear. There's a part of me that says I want it to be an amplified version of me, but I want to be.

Speaker 2:

Well, what's one thing you want to aspire to be?

Speaker 1:

I think that's a great question, more organized.

Speaker 2:

Nice.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm all over the place. Mayhem over here.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, more organized More organized. Perfect example, strong work. Okay, I said that's a suck up.

Speaker 1:

I was saying that's a suck up to you. Fair, fair Well done, though I can tell.

Speaker 2:

It worked. It worked very well, but for the listeners, what's yours? So Kevin's is I want to be more organized. Maybe you want to be more kind. Maybe you want to be more honest that's a big one Honest with self, honest with others. Maybe you want to be more virtuous. Maybe you want to be more intelligent. Maybe you want to be more articulate whatever, it is, more of whatever or less. Maybe you want to be less unkind. Okay, you can go either way with it. Next S I want to be more self.

Speaker 2:

The second one is service. So and Brennan talks about this in the book, but he says that a lot of people are not clear about how they want to serve others. If you think about your career, or you think about your craft, or you think about how you make money, however you earn money, it's in the service of others. So, whether you are working at the gas station, like Kevin did early on in his job, his career, or me working as a cart kid or a bus boy at a golf course, we are at the service of the customers. So you're serving. And so Brennan says what is the service that you want to render? What is the?

Speaker 2:

For us at NLU, it's personal development, helping people build bigger, better, better futures through personal and professional development. In my case it's business coaching. In Kevin's case it's podcast coaching. That's our service. So, in the going to the future maybe a year, maybe two years, maybe five years and say what do I want to be serving, who do I want to be serving and what do I want to be serving them with? Do you want to be a general manager? Do you want to be a waiter or a bus boy? Do you want to be a podcaster? Do you want to be a coach? Do you want to be a speaker? How do you want to serve? And so, kev, what's?

Speaker 1:

I just want to add real quick Even the frame of you're not working a job, you're serving in a positive way at the gas station. For a while I enjoyed that job because I did feel like I was serving the customers and I had a lot of really good customers. I felt like I was trying to make their day a little bit better, more positive, whatever it may be. So I think even just that reframe of the service being in service of others is a positive remix of that thought. This is one where I feel super clear on it, because we've done this long enough and I don't really want anything to change. So I would say I feel super clear, like 9 out of 10 on this. But what was the question, the actual question?

Speaker 2:

What do you want to do? More service in the future. Who do you want to serve and in what way?

Speaker 1:

I would say One of the things I told you this. I don't know if I told you this I'd love to have some sort of self-defense gym for people who feel like they would find value in that people who maybe feel anxious about being taken advantage of, or people who have trauma around being physically abused, or something like that where they can build some confidence and some self-defense skills and self-worth and self-trust.

Speaker 2:

I'd love to do that Nice, very cool, yeah, well, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

It's in line with what I love doing. I'm not going to be coaching or teaching because I don't know what the hell I'm doing. But we'll have somebody who does. They're not going to be me.

Speaker 2:

I don't think that would be super helpful. Yeah, awesome, okay, well, good, good, that is the first I'm hearing of that, by the way, I said it to someone at some point.

Speaker 1:

I just I got a lot of ideas floating around in this head of mine.

Speaker 2:

We'll do it, make it happen.

Speaker 2:

I love that We'll make it happen, make the dreams come true, maybe not tomorrow, but in the future. Okay, the third. So again back to service, zero to 10. How clear are you on what you want to serve, who you want to serve and what you want to do in service? And then ask yourself that question what do you want to be serving more of? And if, whatever you're doing to serve now, you don't want an amplified version of that, that's something to check in on. Okay, third one is skills. This is my favorite one ever of all time. Love it, love it. What skills does your future self have? What skills do you want your future self to have? So in Kevin's case, it would obviously be more martial arts, or running a gym or a dojo or whatever. I don't know.

Speaker 1:

More business.

Speaker 2:

More business.

Speaker 1:

Okay, more business.

Speaker 2:

So a lot of people don't think a lot about this and this is Brandon's words as well as mine, because I wrote a blog about this as well is, a lot of times, why we don't achieve our goals or our dreams is because we lack self-belief and we lack self-worth and we lack clarity 100%. But a lot of times it's a skills gap. I mean, if you want to be a podcaster and you want to serve through a podcast and you want to serve others by being a motivational speaker, but you're not good at speaking, there's a skills issue there. And so what skills do you want to develop? And I think the ones that I came up with in book club, because in book club we answered all these.

Speaker 2:

I think mine was emotional intelligence was number one, leadership, and then business, and I think I put effective communication in there as well. And so speaking clearly, authentically, articulately I don't even know if that's a word, so there goes that, but at the end of the day, that's what I'm focused on. And so the future version of me is going to be more articulate for sure, more effective at communicating points, those kinds of things, and now I can be more intentional in that process. I can read more books on communication. I can rate myself more on communication. I have a little communication score. I can ask Kevin for feedback after each episode. We just did group coaching and I asked Amy and him for feedback on what did or didn't land, based on the money stuff that we taught. So Kev 0 to 10, how clear are you on the skills that you want to develop? And then what are those skills?

Speaker 1:

I don't know. This one's probably lower, just because I don't really know what skills I usually develop the skills that I need to develop, not necessarily the skills that I want to. Well, what skills do you want to develop? More martial arts, for sure. I want to be more. I want to be able to have challenging conversations better, not just in general.

Speaker 2:

You see that, jesus, would you say, that is Courage more courage.

Speaker 1:

Emotional intelligence, courage More, courage More what's the word when you're just direct Hander, more candor, Love that word. What's the definition? You know the definition. I'm going to look it up.

Speaker 2:

I would say yeah, please.

Speaker 1:

I know it's something important, I just don't know.

Speaker 2:

Being very direct and honest is what my guess would be, but I'm not sure. Hander Courage and candor. I don't think you can have candor without courage.

Speaker 1:

Well, now we know that candor is unreserved, honest or sincere expression.

Speaker 2:

Fourth, sincere greatness.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, unreserved, honest or sincere expression.

Speaker 2:

Love that word so much, as a matter of fact, we do in group coaching. Did we get rid of the 10 C's in group coaching? I think we used to teach candor as one of our 10.

Speaker 2:

C's of next level university. Okay, so that was so far. We've done Self, we've done service and we've done skills. The last one is social and to Brennan's point in the book, it's in your future self, in your future, who do you want to be around? What do you want your social circles to be? So for Kev, obviously you want to be around more martial arts. Definitely you want to be around more growth oriented people. You want to be around more business people, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2:

So everyone, go into their futures, 0 to 10, how clear are you on what you want your circles to be? And then, who do you want to spend your time with? Who do you want to be around? And for me, people with bigger, better, brighter futures, people who are growth oriented and, most importantly, humble. I've realized that I do not get along well with people who are not humble and I'm just kind of opting out of relationships where there isn't a lot of humility, because those people tend to really dislike me anyway and we just don't get along well and they often think I'm arrogant, and I think at times there's truth to that, but I think a lot of times it's them projecting.

Speaker 1:

So what are the four? Can you summarize again, just to make sure?

Speaker 2:

Yep self, so future self. Then there's service, how you're going to serve in the future. Then there is skills, the skills you want to develop. And then the last one is social. So social circles. So for you, what do you got for social?

Speaker 1:

I think you already said it more business owners, martial artists. I'd love to get around more musicians in the future. I just feel like that's something that I really, really value. You know how sometimes you talk about something and you want to go a layer deeper, but you know you can't with a certain person just because it's they don't necessarily understand the next layer, yep, just because they don't necessarily value it as much that I'd love to be able to jam on music and rap. Really, if I look at martial arts the podcasting, speaking thing, the business thing, obviously, and then rap those are really the things. Those are kind of the passions.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, cars, those are the passions, cars That'll be in the future as well. I had a moment. It's a very interesting moment for me and if their energy is different in this episode, it's just because Alan and I are Pasco. This is, it's currently 926, and it's just been a long, long, long day. So I promise everything's good. Alan and I are good, all as well. We're here and we're happy to be here. We're just very, very tired.

Speaker 1:

I had a moment when we were talking where I recognized huge growth in the fact that if we were doing this episode like four years ago, I would have been so insecure that you were leading the dance. It's so insecure that I pretty much haven't said much. It just it's so insecure that I didn't have all the answers. So just a reminder, a subtle reminder for all of the amazing NLU family members who are listening right now. Sometimes it takes years before you recognize a certain piece of growth, or maybe it's just a contextual thing, or you need a certain amount of contrast. But I remember going through that phase where I thought I had to know everything. I thought I had to say the last thing. I thought I had to, that I thought I had to be the host. It was just a very highlighting feeling to have that and say, oh yeah, this is completely the opposite of the way I used to feel, insecure around stuff like this, so I thought I would share it with you and everybody watching and listening.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate that, man, and I think that in many ways that helps me feel secure to just be me, you know, because when other people get insecure, sometimes I get insecure about their insecurity. It's a whole thing. So it's been nice, it's been really nice, to feel energetically freed up to just, you know, riff on this stuff. I ask myself questions like this all the time and in book club I know that this is a heavy book for people and high performance habits is my jam and I'm never not thinking about what skills I want to develop. You know that's. But I also never once thought about certain emotional intelligence stuff. So everybody has their own stuff and unfortunately, your genius zone tends to make other people insecure. But that, hopefully, that you can spend time with people who want to see you fly, and it's awesome that you're in a place where I don't think you ever took wind out of my sails with stuff like this, but I do think that your insecurity I could probably feel and it's just different now. It's nice, we've hit a new level 1500,.

Speaker 1:

You know, only took 1540 episodes.

Speaker 2:

Not bad.

Speaker 1:

You're saying there's a chance. What's your next level nugget before we go, sir?

Speaker 2:

Clarity on who you aspire to be is going to help you be more intentional, and when you're intentional, you're going to feel better about where you're headed. I just think that a lot of people are directionless and lost, and if you just the best way to get found for lack of better phrasing is to admit you're lost. And just when you admit you're lost and ask these questions, even if you're uncertain of your answers, you're going to have more certainty after asking and I think that you know that's very empowering.

Speaker 1:

My next level nugget would be kind of what I just said you. Sometimes the biggest shifts are not external and nobody else is going to see them, but you'll feel them and they might recognize because of that, and when you do something for a long enough period of time, you are going to change and if it's a positive thing, you'll probably change for the better, whatever that means to you. You'll grow and evolve into a new version of you. So even if we were to go back four years ago let's just say five years ago we'll say five. This is a simple number. If you said Kev in the future, what skill do you want to create? What skill do you want to be good at? What skill do you want to have proficiency in? It might be not having to be the center of attention on the podcast. That might have been the skill, hypothetically. And here we are five years later and that skill has been learned not mastered, but learned. That would be my next level nugget.

Speaker 2:

It's fireman it's wild.

Speaker 1:

You dig it, I dig it. Next Level Nation. If you have not yet joined our private Facebook group appropriately named Next Level Nation, please do so. We would love to have you in there. If you're looking for a group of positive people who are into self-improvement, who are into growth, who are into being the authentic versions of themselves, a place where you can be vulnerable, a place where you can be you, Next Level Nation is. The jam Link will be in the show notes, as always.

Speaker 2:

Also, we do monthly meetups every single month for our new listeners that don't know about that. This is our 24th meetup in a row, so we're celebrating two years. Three things holding you back from your own unique version of success. Success is unique to each of us. The future you want is unique to everything you just talked about on this episode, or thought about, I should say we talked. You thought. Three things holding you back from your version of success, that future that you envisioned in this episode. These are the three things that are gonna hold you back and we want you to be aware of them. The link to register will be in the show notes. It's December 7th 2023 at 6 pm Tonight. Tonight it's tonight.

Speaker 1:

It's tonight.

Speaker 2:

It's tonight at 6 pm Eastern Standard Time. Please register. The link will be in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

We run a pretty tight ship over here, you know.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:

Tomorrow, episode number 1544,. What does your inner child need to hear? I had one of the, if not the most powerful interviews I've ever been on, or ever been interviewed on, last week, and it was heavy in the best ways, and I took a lot of lessons from that that I hope to share with you all. So that's what we're gonna talk about tomorrow. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you, and an NLU. We run out of fans. We have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.

Speaker 2:

Keep getting clearer and clearer. Next episode nation.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Alan Lazaros

Host
Head Shot

Kevin Palmieri

Host