Next Level University

#1581 - What Do Your Expectations Say About You?

• Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

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Ever find yourself pleasantly surprised or unexpectedly let down by your performance? When it comes to personal development, there is often a mismatch between our self-belief and the reality of our capabilities. In today’s episode, hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros dredge into this intricate relationship, exploring the consequences of cognitive distortion on our growth and achievements.

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Next Level Dreamliner - https://a.co/d/f1FWAQA

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Alan@nextleveluniverse.com

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Show notes:
(2:08) How do you determine where you are?
(4:15) Accurate
(7:33) Aligning self-belief with reality
(9:01) The power of action
(11:10) Chad shares how Next Level Podcast Solutions transformed his podcast and provided invaluable assistance along the way.
(13:31) Dreamliner
(15:51) Self-belief to self-worth
(21:26) Outro

Send a text to Kevin and Alan!

Kevin:

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 1580, an answer we all know but hate to hear Today. For episode number 1581, what do your expectations say about you? We had a meetup recently which many of you attended Thank you so much for coming and we were talking about setting goals for 2024.

Kevin:

Anytime we talk about setting goals, we talk about self-belief and self-worth, because it's really hard to set goals effectively if you don't know where you are on the drive to five. And somebody said how do you determine where you actually are? How do you figure out if you're a one out of 10 for confidence, or a five out of 10 or a six out of 10? How do you figure it out? And Alan had a couple answers. And then I said to Alan live. I said I don't know if this is gonna land, I don't know if there'll be any truth to this, but it might be something worth exploring.

Kevin:

I have noticed that let's just use me. If we were just gonna use me as a case study, I probably should believe in myself more than I do. That was definitely the case. In the beginning. I was low on the drive to five. I had very low self-worth and I had very low self-belief. But one commonality that would happen for me is I would go do something I didn't believe I could do and then I would say these six words to Alan after. That went better than I expected, Alan, I counted them. That's why I had a positive for you.

Alan:

Nice work Six six.

Kevin:

Alan, on the other end, would often say that went way worse than I expected. Oh yeah, man. So my scientific thesis, my hippopotamus Hypothesis, yeah, but I say hippopotamus. My hippopotamus is if you often say to yourself, wow, that went so much better than I expected. You probably are lower than you should be on the drive to five, so you probably believe in yourself at a level two and it should be higher. If you do something and say, wow, that went way worse than I thought, you might have a delusional level of self-belief, not delusional from a negative perspective. Maybe you're just over. I think we're all delusional, I really do. I think delusional-ly high or delusional-ly low, 100%, and all I mean by delusional is it's just not serving us as accurately as it could.

Kevin:

I'm not making that wrong at all, because I was definitely low. So that's my thesis for this episode. I wanna have a conversation about it. Well, let's do this. So when I first met, you.

Alan:

You had delusional-ly low self-confidence. In other words, you didn't believe you were capable of very much, which obviously you were inaccurate about that. Yeah, that was wrong. So when we say delusional, we don't mean in the negative connotation, even though I think some people are excessively delusional, overly delusional on the negative end or the positive end.

Kevin:

What if we just said misaligned, misaligned, I think for me.

Alan:

I like distortion Cognitive distortion, psychology so I'll use distortion. Emilia and I have something we're playing called the Distortion Game, where anytime I think she's inaccurate I'm allowed to call it out, and vice versa, when our families say something that's inaccurate, we call it out for each other, because we're so in love with our families that sometimes they can. Their narratives will get on us. So remember the story you tell yourself and the truth are not always the same. That's what this is. If the story I've told myself is I can do a marathon without training, then I'm delusional, I'm distorted until I do it. It's just theory versus practice. In theory I believed I could do a marathon. In practice it was way harder than I expected. But the half marathon was easier than I expected. So it's just expectations meets reality. That's all this is. And expectations are based on a script.

Alan:

I was thinking about this earlier because I never bring up I don't wanna say never, I don't bring up the computer engineering thing that often, but I think there's something really cool in there. When I was in computer engineering school we would code and there's something called machine language and essentially the computer that you're on or the phone that you're on, there's a narrative. There's a script, and it's code that you compile, to do these actions. So when I hit the K button, the K button does a certain action. So if K button is hit, then pop open the screen. The point is, human beings are the same way. We all have these scripts.

Alan:

So, kevin, if hungry, call Domino's, it's playful and it's joking, but it's true. That's your wiring, that's a belief system. So all we're really talking about here is and to this person, a client of mine, bonnie, she reached out and had this question in the monthly meetup and she wouldn't mind me sharing that publicly. But she basically said how do you know? And the answer is you check it up against reality, you theorize, you hypothesize, you hippopotamize and then you go practice. So I believe that I'm a capable speaker. Okay, go give a speech. Ooh, not as good as I thought, kev, I don't believe I'm a capable speaker. Go give a speech. Oh, all right, I can do this.

Alan:

Better than expected, that's better than expected and that's all it is. So the best way to figure out where you are on the drive to five, whether you're over or under, and everyone is over or under and it swings too. There are times when I went from over to all the way under. You know, the post marathon for me was hard because it was wait a minute. Am I less capable? Where else am I less capable than I think? You know that self-doubt gets you and it's like okay, just because you couldn't do that doesn't mean you're delusional anywhere else.

Alan:

So the whole goal, I think, is to think as accurately as possible. That's not a sexy thing, but I think it's really important because you're probably more capable than you think in most things. But I think that all of us are a little arrogant in some areas. So if you think your relationship is gonna flourish no matter what you do, you are in serious trouble and you need humility. If you think your career is gonna flourish, no matter what, you need humility. If you think you're incapable of having a great relationship, you probably need confidence because you probably can. You know it's possible, it's doable, you got this and so the right. And this is why coaching is so difficult, because if you believe in yourself too much, I'm gonna have to seemingly take wind out of your sales.

Alan:

If you believe in yourself too little, I love coaching those people because it's easy for me to help people believe in themselves more. It's very hard for me to get someone to realize they're arrogant or delusional, at least over over the draft of five. So the question for everybody is do things typically go better than you expect when you have the courage to try them, or do they typically go worse than you expect? On one end, you build confidence, you go holy crap, what else can I do? On the other end, you get humble pie and you go. Hmm, I think I need to work on my speaking abilities, or I need to maybe train some cardio, add some cardio into my regimen, and both are useful. That's the cool part about taking action is, whether you're over or under, it always undistorts your reality, and hopefully it doesn't do it so devastatingly that it actually crushes your self-esteem and self-worth and your self-belief rather than build it up. And I think that's probably the the place we could go now.

Kevin:

Well, I think the the other important thing to discuss is this is another vote for why action is the cure-all, or at least it's the opportunity to make change, because this is one of those things where you'll never really know unless you test it, and you'll never really know unless you test it. Often, every book you read changes you, but if you don't go out and test where you are, it's really hard. Remember in was this middle school or high school? Remember the Pacer test?

Alan:

Oh yeah, man.

Kevin:

The Pacer test. For those who might not know, you line up in a gymnasium and 42 push-ups, sir.

Alan:

What was it 42?

Kevin:

Yeah, those are rookie numbers.

Alan:

I don't know that. No, those are good. I was on the higher percentile, sir For middle school. Yeah Well, you weren't in my class son. What'd you get?

Kevin:

I don't remember. You think I remember that. I remember I had asthma and when it was the Pacer test time it was like, alright, let's try not to have an asthma attack here so all the Pacer test is.

Kevin:

One of the portions of it is you run back and forth in the gymnasium and the beeps, so there's a play track in it. The beeps get faster and faster and faster and if you don't make it to the end before the beep, you get kicked out. And you know whoever makes it the most rounds, whatever it was, it was never me. I never made it the most rounds. But if you did that for the first time and you said, my goodness, that went better than expected, then you went and said you know what? That went better than expected, let me, let me try running. I actually enjoyed running. I feel like I could get some pleasure out of this. Then you go run for a year but you don't go do the Pacer test again. You don't really know where you stand yeah you probably got better.

Kevin:

So if you were to say, well, I'm gonna, hopefully I can get the same level I got last year, you're probably gonna be pleasantly surprised because you're probably gonna do better. But if you don't take that action, you don't actually get to level set yourself repeatedly. I think that's a huge, a huge reason why we have to remind ourselves that action is important regardless of outcome, because it creates lessons that we can then shift outcomes with in the future the problem is good.

Kevin:

I was gonna say where did you want to go? You said you wanted to.

Alan:

I think, whether or not it's constructive or destructive, it's okay once you get there, once you take the action and you get the humble pie or you get the positive confidence. Now what?

Kevin:

I think your, your expectations are as positive for you as your ability to do the thing after you have the expectation. So, just as an example, if you think you don't have to do it because you're so good, it's not constructive, it's destructive.

Kevin:

If you think, yeah, you can't do it because you're not good enough. It's destructive. Yeah, 2024, so 2023 was boundaries. 2024, I think, is accuracy, setting goals in an accurate manner, with the understanding that I can grow into these goals. I would rather grow into a goal than have a goal that seems too big, that crushes me, I think that's so. That is more clear to me now than it's ever been, than it's ever, ever, ever been.

Alan:

Same. I have been coming to five lately on this because I used to be in the camp of Aim for the Moonland amongst the stars way back, and now I've been understanding the self-worth detriment of that and we talked recently on an episode about how to build self-worth. So I won't reiterate. But people I think that do have really high self-belief, they end up setting higher goals and unfortunately they end up with a lot more humble pie and failure, so it kinda can hurt their self-worth. And so I'm experimenting this year with setting more achievable goals and I'll give you an example. So I was gonna talk about this later. But we have something called the Dreamliner that you can see on camera. Dreamliner, shout out to the products team.

Alan:

Lizzie is the leader of the products team shout out and we created it's achieved your dreams 90 days at a time. It's a physical. There's a hardcover, one on Amazon, and there's a softcover. I recommend the softcover because the hardcover has a three-week lead time. We'll put the link in the show notes. But really, what the Dreamliner is, rather than what it sounds like, which is a cruise, it's this idea of breaking down huge goals into simple daily habits and it takes you through a whole process. So I won't go in depth with that, but you can click the link in the show notes to get your Dreamliner and it explains exactly how to use it.

Alan:

Achieve your dreams 90 days at a time very cool. So when I was doing this earlier because I got this last night and I wanna use this every single day from now on I was setting my goals and one of my goals it's health goal, wealth goal, love goal, and my wealth goal is I have this metric called leaderboard and it's just a number that represents all my clients and all my team members, so everyone on the ILO team and everyone on my client roster. I'm considering myself a leader and I'm leading those people towards their goals and dreams. And my goal for the end of 2024, I put for 80, and right now I'm at 41,. So that means I need 39 more team members and or clients. And then, when I broke it into quarterly goals, I divided it by four. 40 divided by four is 10, and I was like, listen, it's January 12th, am I gonna get 10 new team members? Slash clients? And then there was this really cool moment for me Kev, do I even want that? Is that even what's best? And I had this moment of you know what. Nope, I went back, I set it to 60, which means 19 more, and I divide that by four, and now that means five. I could get five new clients slash team members in Q1, but the old me would have shot for 10, and then maybe even gotten it or not.

Alan:

Either you don't get it and it crushes my self-worth, or you do get it and then you can't handle it, which crushes my self-worth. And by can't handle it I mean can't handle it without burning down several times and disappointing everyone and hurting people's feelings and that kind of stuff. So I'm now understanding that self-belief can be detrimental to self-worth and they're super connected. So and the last piece I'll share is I think all of us. There's no more important thing in the world than self-belief and self-worth, in my honest opinion, and I think leadership, in a nutshell, really just comes down to helping other people build self-belief and build self-worth, and you can't do that unless you set the right size goals and take action, to the point of this episode, and then obviously, we already talked about how to build self-worth. So, but at the end of the day, if you're delusional on either end of the drive to five, you're gonna have a really hard time building self-belief and self-worth and not constantly self-sabotaging.

Kevin:

This would be my next level. Nugget, be very careful with the words I'll say this. Be very careful with the adjectives that you internalize. And here's an example, just a real quick example. You and I were talking about this the other day. I said, yeah, I saw an ad for something, or I saw a post that was supposed to be inspirational and motivational, and it said something along the lines of making $100,000 a year is not hard. All you need to do is make $273.90 per day. So let's say you have a course that's $27.39, just gotta sell 10 of them a day. That sounds very empowering like 10 a day. Okay, I mean, you know that's reasonable 10 a day.

Kevin:

But then when you 10 a month is hard you internalize that all you have to do or it's easy to sell no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Alan:

There are pizza shops that don't sell 10 pizzas a day.

Kevin:

Yes, so I am trying to be way more conscious of the way I give advice, because one episode a week to us is easy, but it's not for everyone, and if you try that out of the gate, just like if we did, you will destroy your self-worth. No, no one episode a week, one a week.

Alan:

Oh, okay, one a week.

Kevin:

One a week for us would be very, very easy at this point oh okay, okay, I thought you said one a day.

Alan:

Yeah, if you try one a day, my bad. If you try one a day out of the gate, you're gonna destroy your self-belief and self-worth.

Kevin:

Yeah, I don't think anybody should. Unless you have the same goals we do, I do not advise this for anyone. It's a whole thing. But I also don't wanna say you should be able to do one episode a week easily, because that lessens something that might be a challenge to you, and if that changes your expectations, it is a whole wonky thing.

Alan:

I'm not saying.

Kevin:

I appreciate it. I'm not saying you can't make $100,000 as an entrepreneur, as a dream chaser. Of course you can, you definitely can. It most likely won't be as easy as certain people are telling you, because that helps them make their $100,000. So it is a very, very fine line and you know I get fired up about that stuff. So that would be my next level. Nugget, be very careful with the adjectives you choose to internalize, because they're probably affecting you more than you realize.

Alan:

Last thing my next level, nugget Kev, gets really fired up when people are being lied to. Definitely, I've always loved that about you. I can't stand it, I know yeah.

Kevin:

I can't stand it.

Alan:

I love it, man. Honestly, I get fired up about bullies. Kevin gets fired up when people are being lied to and like hoodwinked. It's my favorite.

Kevin:

So it bothers me to my core. I was following a guy. He's an exercise scientist and he was talking about something and he said you know how I know this is BS. This person said nobody, he has 100% happiness rate. Nobody has ever had a bad thing to say about his product and it works for everyone. He said we have helped hundreds of thousands of people, but we also haven't helped everybody, so it just doesn't work for everybody. Some people are upset, they want the money back, and I gained a new respect for that person because yeah, it's truthful.

Kevin:

It's truthful. So that's a little tangent. If you are looking for other human beings who are into growth, who want to talk about ego, who want to talk about vulnerability, you just want to find your community. You want to find the place where you feel like you fit in. Please join our private Facebook group. Next Elvenation Link will be in the show notes, as always.

Alan:

I already mentioned this the Dreamliner. The link will be in the show notes as well. The soft cover version is what I recommend, because it's only three days. So you'll have your Dreamliner in three days and it will break down your big dreams into small, simple, achievable goals and habits, where it will not crush your self-belief and self-worth. That is how this was designed. That is why this was designed that way because I was sick and tired of watching people's self-belief and self-worth get crushed, in large part because on social media, everyone's making everything look easier than it really is, and in the real world it actually takes consistency and improvement and Dreamlining. It takes Dreamlining essentially, and no, it is not a cruise that we are taking you on.

Kevin:

It is. It's a cruise on your way to your own unique version of success, son. Yeah, fair, fair, that's what it is.

Alan:

It's awesome. I'm super pumped. I'm gonna use it every single day. I hope you do too seriously and yeah, that's it.

Kevin:

I gotta check. I gotta check to see if I got mine All right tomorrow for episode number 1582, one of the most important things to know about yourself. Alan wanted to do this episode, so it will be an Alan Heavy episode tomorrow. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you, and at NLU, we do not have fans, we have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.

Alan:

Keep seeing yourself accurately. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.

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Alan Lazaros

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Kevin Palmieri

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