You Have To Focus On Your Growth First (2019)

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 .

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 .

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 ?

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 .

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 .

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 .

right .

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 .

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 . 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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

Don't bother calling , don't bother texting . No , not that , but now it's . 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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .