Next Level University

You Have To Focus On Your Growth First (2019)

• Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

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We drift when we stop prioritizing ourselves. In this honest and encouraging episode, Kevin and Alan talk about the trap of letting personal growth take a back seat when things get busy or successful. They share their own struggles with staying consistent in journaling, stretching, and tracking progress—and how losing touch with these small habits affects everything. If you've ever felt like you’re doing “all the things” but still not feeling aligned, this is for you.

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

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Alan: https://www.facebook.com/alan.lazaros
Kevin: https://www.facebook.com/kevin.palmieri.90/

Email 💬
Kevin@nextleveluniverse.com
Alan@nextleveluniverse.com

LinkedIn ✍
Kevin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-palmieri-5b7736160/
Alan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanlazarosllc/

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Show notes:
(2:22) Sharpening the saw: Small habits matter
(5:30) The danger of skipping self-care in busy seasons
(7:03) Slipping habits and growth warnings
(9:24) Losing awareness when things are on autopilot
(11:58) Join Next Level Live: A virtual, immersive event for those committed to growth, meaningful relationships, and a life they love. https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/next-level-live/
(13:02) Helpful metaphors for staying on track
(15:04) Keeping life areas in check
(17:37) Growth needs a real plan
(20:57) Outro

Send a text to Kevin and Alan!

Kevin Palmieri:

I think I used to fall into the trap of assuming that eventually I would get to a place where maybe I would just grow by accident. And I'm realizing in real time, as we're talking about this, that I have this common pattern of getting a really good, big, aligned opportunity and then forgetting how much I had to pour into myself first in order to get that opportunity, and right now I'm working on breaking that cycle. But if you stop pouring into you, you're the thing that got the opportunity in the first place and it was probably your growth that brought it into your life.

Alan Lazaros:

One of the early personal development speakers. His name was Jim Rohn, back in the 80s. There's a speech on YouTube that I frequent and he said you've got to work harder on yourself than you do at your job. And I think that a lot of times, to Kevin's point, when you get a big opportunity and you start grinding and you start doing it, sometimes you lose sight of the fact that you're working harder on your job than you are on yourself.

Kevin Palmieri:

Welcome to Next Level University. I'm your host, kevin Palmieri, and.

Alan Lazaros:

I'm your co-host, alan Lazarus, at.

Kevin Palmieri:

NLU, we believe in a heart-driven but no BS approach to holistic self-improvement for dream chasers.

Alan Lazaros:

Our goal with every episode is to help you level up your life, love, health and wealth.

Kevin Palmieri:

We bring you a new episode every single day on topics like confidence, self-belief, self-worth, self-awareness, relationships, boundaries, consistency, habits and defining your own unique version of success.

Alan Lazaros:

Self-improvement in your pocket, every day, from anywhere, completely free. Welcome to.

Kevin Palmieri:

Next Level University anywhere, completely free. Welcome to Next Level University, next Level Nation today for episode number 2019. You have to focus on your growth first. A lot of momentum over here at NLU, a lot of opportunities, a lot of new clients, a lot of things happening, events and group coaching and all sorts of different stuff Leather bound books, many leather bound books and I have found that I tend to fall into a pattern of getting really good opportunities and then really really forgetting about the fact that I have to pour into myself first. Why are you smiling, sir?

Alan Lazaros:

Because every now and then, when we do a certain episode, I I go and grab a book from my bookshelf. What have you today? This is the very first book. So, kev, I looked this up yesterday with brandon. Yeah, I posted on march nope, march 28th of 2021. I posted a picture of me in the studio with this book, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and I said our very first Next Level Book Club session is going to be this Saturday, which was April 3rd. So on April 3rd, which is in eight days eight days, seven, eight days is going to be our fourth year of book club. That's wild, but anyways, the reason I grabbed this book is because in this book, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the principles of personal development is sharpen the saw.

Kevin Palmieri:

I believe that's the last one, right.

Alan Lazaros:

Is that the seventh habit? Let me check.

Kevin Palmieri:

The seventh one's my favorite. That way you have to read through the entire book. It is Nice job. The only reason I knew that is because I was literally going to suggest doing an episode on those habits and I was looking up all seven of them. Nice 15 minutes before you and I met today.

Alan Lazaros:

Habit seven sharpen the saw. In other words, what's the quote where, if I have four hours to chop down a tree, I'm going to spend the?

Kevin Palmieri:

first three and a half sharpening the saw seems a little reckless. I do think the ratio is off I I understand the concept kev would just start hammering that you're gonna sharpen you're gonna, you can. You can sharpen it too much. You know you're gonna get to it. You're gonna sharpen it down to a nub.

Alan Lazaros:

It's gonna be one of those pencils you just keep sharpening you ever do that, all the way down to the bottom, of course, all the time.

Kevin Palmieri:

My thought process with this episode was oftentimes our growth does not seem, yes, it's important, but it doesn't seem super important in the micro. So let's say I wake up tomorrow and I have a list of 15 things to do that need to get done tomorrow, quote unquote. It's easy for me to say, well, I don't have to do mobility today, or I don't have to get my 30 minutes of learning today, it's easy, I'll do it tomorrow. That is one of the traps of self-improvement is there are certain things that don't actually need to be done today. That's one. And there are certain things that don't seem like they need to be done today but they need to be done every day, and those are. So, as an example, woke up today, did my little morning routine. I haven't been stretching in the morning because now I have found the research that says stretching the way I was doing it before weight training is dangerous for your muscles, and it's like, okay, I've got to figure out a new freaking morning routine. So I'm all over the place with that. But I got back from the gym, I was in the office and a client messaged me and said, hey, when are those two YouTube videos going to be done, and I was like today I'll have them to you, today They'll be done, and I cranked out the first one.

Kevin Palmieri:

I think we should go back to the drawing board. We can use the same title, we can use the same stuff, but the story is just, we need to go in a different direction. Yeah, totally agree, kev. I was thinking the same thing. Cool, that thing that was supposed to get done today is now gone, does not exist. Okay, now I can move on to the next thing. But if you're like me and you fall into the trap of I have 50 things I need to get done today and unfortunately I'm not one of them Taking care of myself isn't one of them. I'm willing to bet that you can run that for a few days, or you can run it for a week, maybe you can run it for a month, but eventually it's going to catch up to you and you're going to start to resent that big opportunity, because that big opportunity is quite literally taking away from your self-improvement yeah, this is why you can't have too too many musts.

Alan Lazaros:

It's brutal. Let's talk a little bit about where kevin and I are fucking up I made a suggestion.

Kevin Palmieri:

I would love to do a what went wrong wednesday weekly segment where we literally just talk about what went wrong from the previous Wednesday. Don't know if it's going to happen yet, but it was an idea I had and Alan and I haven't discussed it yet, so now I'm putting him under social pressure.

Alan Lazaros:

Let's do one See how it goes. Okay, all right. So where am I effing up? Jeffing up? I haven't dreamlined the next level dreamliner right here when?

Kevin Palmieri:

when's the last time? Three weeks this is an unfortunate. Let's take a challenge. I'm going to win, unfortunately. Take a look all right.

Alan Lazaros:

The last time that I dreamlined was march 9th of 2025 yeah, you got me beat march 9th. Yeah, ooh. Now here's the thing. The Dreamliner is literally set up for your own personal development. It starts out with gratitude, it starts out with identifying your most important tasks to get done, and then there's a next level lesson in there Little journaling prompt, little question. It's perfect for working on your life as well as in your life, for working on yourself as well as in yourself.

Kevin Palmieri:

Hell yes.

Alan Lazaros:

Yeah, hell yes, hell yes. It's critical, very important, haven't been doing it. It's event season got overwhelmed and this is the problem with success. So we've had a really good Q4 of last year, a really really good q1. This is the best quarter we've ever had at nlu. So very grateful, stay grateful, stay humble, do not get cocky. But here's the thing two things that aren't happening that I'm starting to notice aren't happening because at first it's like, ah, no big deal, two, three days, you don't notice ah, no big deal no big deal, no big deal.

Alan Lazaros:

And then, all of a first, it's like, ah, no big deal, two, three days, you don't notice? Ah, no big deal, no big deal, no big deal. And then all of a sudden it's hmm, feeling a little all over the place, feeling a little less aligned. This is the best metaphor. The train is on the tracks and it's going, and then you're like you know what? Dreamliner? Nah, all good, two, three, four days. Okay, two, three weeks. All of a sudden it's like, oh shit, right, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So the two things I'm jeffing Dreamliner, which is journaling, daily journaling, critical you don't know the value of something until you don't do it for three weeks. And then the next one is mobility. I was doing legs the other day.

Kevin Palmieri:

Oh no, doing a little leg extension, throw out the trick hip, not the hip.

Alan Lazaros:

Hip's fine Left knee, ooh, not great, no warm-up. Dumb, dumb man, just dumb, not smart. Unintelligent choices lead to bad outcomes, that is it.

Kevin Palmieri:

It's hard, though, because it doesn't seem that necessary.

Alan Lazaros:

Until you blow your knee out. Well, until you blow your knee out.

Kevin Palmieri:

But I think the sad thing not really, but the sad thing is most of us don't ever get to the place where we blow our knee out. It doesn't. It just is a degradation. It just isn't that noticeable. Like I don't notice that I haven't journaled very honestly, like I don't, I don't, I don't emilia said to me recently.

Alan Lazaros:

She said have you been dreamlining? Because she can tell. She can tell when I'm, when when the the train is like, and again I'm my. Again I want to make this very clear. It's not like I'm running amok. Yeah, yeah, right, but at the end of the day, there's 10 out of 10 aligned allen and there's 9 of the day, there's 10 out of 10 aligned to Alan and there's 9 out of 10, and there's 8 out of 10, and there's 7 out of 10, and it's going in the wrong direction, that's for sure, as we get more overwhelmed.

Kevin Palmieri:

Same, same and Alan and I have been talking about. After the event and after, I think, of April, we will have a rebuild where we will redesign things, because it's been a minute since we've redesigned things. Nlu 8.0, rebrand, redesign inside and out, the whole business is going to be redesigned and realigned, but we all need that.

Kevin Palmieri:

We all need that to some degree. I mean, I think it's really easy to just run on autopilot, especially if certain things are going really well. My fitness is going really well, the business is going really well. There are some things that are going really well that are just kind of on autopilot. But you lose a lot of the awareness, situational awareness, and the environmental awareness and the self-awareness when that happens. So I don't want to beat the success makes things harder horse to death. Is that what it is? Beat a dead horse.

Alan Lazaros:

Whatever it is.

Kevin Palmieri:

I love animals. I'm not beating any animals to death. I promise Just an analogy or whatever it is, but I think that this is something I'm super guilty of and it's getting better. I recognize it sooner, but I had a moment today where I was like I gotta start putting me first again. Yeah, Again, not nobody. You can't get ahold of me until noon. Don't bother calling, don't bother texting. No, not that, but now it's.

Kevin Palmieri:

It's very much reactive and, again, 20 minutes goes a long way. You're gonna have 20 minutes of time to yourself to do a couple of things that I mean. Mean the Dreamliner takes five minutes from me. That five-minute investment is well worth it. And, honestly, what else am I going to get done? If we really thought about it, what else is a better use of five minutes than that? Yeah, I can do some client work in five minutes. I'm not going gonna get that much done. Next Level Nation. We are very, very excited to announce that we are doing our first purely virtual Next Level Live. On April 5th 2025, from 10 am to 4 pm Eastern Standard Time, alan and myself will be live streaming from Worcester Massachusetts.

Alan Lazaros:

Next Level, live 2025. Be there, it's only $47 for a full day of personal development, self-improvement, holistic health, wealth, life and love.

Kevin Palmieri:

We have a global audience. Obviously, if you live somewhere else in the world, it's hard to come across the country or across the world for a one-day event, so we wanted to make sure it was accessible to everyone you're not going to get to the next level of your life by default.

Alan Lazaros:

You're going to get there by design. Join us design that next level. This is the drift. This is what happens. There's a couple metaphors I love with this is. One of them is the pit stop in nascar. Imagine a car that just keeps hammering. No pit stop. Tires fly right off that thing. They could things could happen.

Alan Lazaros:

The other one is you're on a lake, an inner tube and you fall asleep for 10 minutes and all of a sudden you're halfway down the beach or in yeah, insert metaphor here but that's what happens to all of us. We all drift. That's why I love tracking. I was on with a client earlier and I said I need you tracking. That tracking keeps you on track. I need you to track.

Kevin Palmieri:

Got to do it. How intentional have you been with tracking Normal?

Alan Lazaros:

Yeah, pretty good on the spreadsheet. But my dreamliner not so well.

Kevin Palmieri:

I'm talking today I was in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're are you really going through? I'm in there every day as well, but a lot of this is drag and drop.

Alan Lazaros:

I've been pretty intentional lately. I've been doing the same shit pretty yeah. I've been really quite intentional with my tracker. I've not been intentional with mobility, with my personal development in the morning and with my dreamliner, but my tracker is the best it's ever been actually. Yeah, really good. I have three self-esteem trackers. I have, I think, nine metrics and I think I have 18 habits and the fact that I even know that, dude, when I don't track, I don't have the certainty necessary to succeed. That's why I texted you earlier. I said because there are certain things I track that require Kevin to track. I'm like, hey man, what's this number? Is this accurate? But why do I track? Tracking creates certainty. Certainty creates confidence. Confidence creates action. Action creates momentum. Momentum creates results. But but honestly, even having this conversation right now, right now, I can tell I'm tracking too many things. So after some of the event and all the stuff that we got going on, I'm gonna have to redesign, re-essentialize, reprioritize, re-essentialize whatever word you want to use. But but we're winning really well. We're doing a very good job in business. Growing, the business has been tremendous. We're doing a great job.

Alan Lazaros:

Fitness pretty good for me. I'm in a cut now. I'm definitely hungry. It sucks, but I'm okay and my relationship is probably lagging. So my relationship right now is a seven, my fitness is a eight and the business is a nine. The mission is a nine, seven, seven. My fitness is an eight and the business is a nine. The mission is a nine, seven, eight, nine. Doing pretty well in those three things but, quite frankly, everything else is not great. I mean, emilia has been doing the food every day. She's been ordering all the groceries. I mean she's doing everything. She's doing the kitty litter, she's doing the pets, she's I mean she's just doing everything. So I can't keep this up for long. It's going to. I need a redesign desperately and I think it's good for us to talk about this, because I don't want to be a podcaster who pretends that everything's fine all the time.

Kevin Palmieri:

Well, that's why I want to do the what Went Wrong Wednesday. That's like my thought process behind that was every week there's a time penciled in where we have to talk about what's going wrong. I like that. I think it's important to talk about Now again, do we have to do it every week? We're weird like that, where if we're going to do it, if it's not on a cadence, it's just not going to get done. That's the way it works.

Alan Lazaros:

It's just the way it works.

Kevin Palmieri:

Can we do?

Alan Lazaros:

what went right and what went wrong. And what went right and what went wrong.

Kevin Palmieri:

We always talk about what went right, do we?

Alan Lazaros:

I feel like we're negative Nellies over here talking about where we suck all the time.

Kevin Palmieri:

I don't know, we'll figure it out. I would like to do something like that, though just from your perspective. Let's do it, man. If we hate it, we'll, can it? Yeah, yeah.

Alan Lazaros:

Right Listeners, let us know Instagram DM.

Kevin Palmieri:

Looking at the last eight years, that's the best place dm on instagram. I think it's great.

Alan Lazaros:

Hit us up the everything, everything's in the show notes, always every episode. Please reach out, please. We love that as overwhelmed as we are I. I really. I just talked to someone yesterday who I used to coach three years ago. It's just awesome to catch up. So, dm listeners, please dm us, let us know what's going on let us know what episodes you like let us know know if you think Kevin sucks.

Kevin Palmieri:

I mean whatever, I can't imagine many of those coming my way. But if you have, yeah, feel free to send them over.

Alan Lazaros:

It will wreck my day.

Kevin Palmieri:

Just know that it will wreck my day.

Kevin Palmieri:

Then I'll probably pretend I didn't see it. All right, what's your next level lesson? Because I know we have a few minutes left here. This is a shorter episode because Alan and I are we're both having lots of breakthroughs, slash hinging on breakdowns, so every time we meet we talk a lot about like, hey, what are you going through, what are the lessons you're learning, and that eats up a lot of our recording time. There's again to Alan's point. We're running a very unsustainable train right now, so things will evolve as they always evolve.

Alan Lazaros:

Keep it on the rails.

Alan Lazaros:

We're trying my next level lesson is your own personal development, working on yourself. Sometimes it feels like it can't be put first and I know there are seasons when it can't. I understand that. I remember when we first moved into this new house it definitely couldn't be me first. When we first got a new pet, tiger Lily. It couldn't be me first that kind of thing when we first started growing the team 18-person team, blah, blah, blah. But you can only get away with not putting your own personal development first for so long before things start to go off the rails.

Kevin Palmieri:

Mine would be have a plan for it. Have a plan where, when I get overwhelmed, or when I get a new opportunity, or when I'm going off the rails, I have an off the rails plan, because that's better than no plan. Even to your point, alan, I still have a morning routine. It's just not as good as it was a few months ago. I still wake up, I still go to the gym, I still drink enough water, I'm getting more sleep than I've ever gotten. There are things that are going really well, but there are certain things that I just am noticing that need a little bit of extra work. And again, this is a pattern that I've had in the past, for sure. So now I just catch it quicker and I'm not coming to Alan saying I don't know, man, I'm super unfulfilled, I don't know what the hell's going on. Now it's like, oh okay, my morning routine and my self-improvement and my own personal development were locked in. Now they're kind of secondary. It's okay for them to be secondary for a little bit, but that cannot be the normal, because the second that becomes the normal, everything gets all jiffed. Agreed. You dig Very much, yeah, cool beans. All right, next Level Nation If you are looking to grow as a person, as a podcaster and as a business owner.

Kevin Palmieri:

Our next round of group coaching, which Alan is calling the podcast what is it? Next level podcast accelerator pretty sexy, pretty sexy is starting April 15th. So the first. We changed it up a lot, so it used to be six calls with alan, myself and amy, and then on the off weeks of those six calls there would be six calls with amy I was on a bunch of them last time, the off week calls and alan was too, so you might end up getting 12 calls. I don't know what's happening, but I can assure you, as with anything and everything NLU, this is well worth the money. We didn't start this saying how do we make as much money as possible. It was how do we add as much value as possible? So if you're a podcaster who wants to grow yourself so you can grow your podcast and then grow your business or figure out how to start a business, we'll have the link in the show notes for that. We would love to have you join.

Alan Lazaros:

For the listeners of this show. Use promo code NLULISTENER spelled just like it sounds at checkout. You will get 30% off. If you add up all 12 sessions, it comes to less than $25 per session. It is the most affordable group coaching program that I've ever personally seen, so we hope that you join us. It's awesome and we work on it. We never present the same thing, so we've iterated and improved for 18, about to be 18 groups, so we hope to see you there. A hundred percent.

Kevin Palmieri:

As always. We love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you. Nlu, we don't have fans, we have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.

Alan Lazaros:

Keep it Next Level, next Level Nation.

Kevin Palmieri:

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Next Level University. We love connecting with the Next Level family.

Alan Lazaros:

We mean it when we say family. If you ever need anything, please reach out to us directly. Everything you need to get a hold of us is in the show notes.

Kevin Palmieri:

Thank you again and we will talk to you tomorrow.

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Alan Lazaros

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Kevin Palmieri

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