[00:00:00] Alan: And so I know a lot of engineers. They struggle with self-worth because they're competent, but socially, they get made fun of a lot. They also have a different modality of thinking, which is mathematics, which is a rare one statistically. So you feel weird. You feel like you can't be yourself. You struggle to communicate things to other people, but tasks are fairly easy for you. And so I think for me, it was self worth was the problem.
And self-belief came naturally. I think for other people, sometimes it's the opposite.
[00:00:26] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My guest this week is Alan Lazaros. At age two, his father passed away in a car accident. And then at age 26, after he got into his near-fatal car accident, he questioned everything that he was doing in life. He questioned the choices he was making and found himself filled with regrets, searching for answers.
And he found two of the brightest lights he'd ever seen. The first was Bronnie Ware's book called The Top Five Regrets of Dying. The second was a TED talk by Tony Robbins. This put him on a self-improvement journey. And he learned to believe in a heart-driven, but no-BS approach to inspiring, motivating, and educating others on what it truly means to get to the next level.
He is proud to say that his mission is to help others design fulfilling lives, maximizing their unique potential. And build businesses that they love on their terms. He leads a global team at NLU. He's given hundreds of trainings all over the world in these happily completed thousands of one on one coaching calls with clients.
I enjoyed our conversations with Alan. It was great to hear from someone at a young age who was successful by all external measures and found himself in a life-defining moment saying, I don't think this is what it is. And then just how that propelled him in a brand new direction and just how fulfilled he feels today. I enjoyed our conversation. Take a listen.
Alan, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to have you on the show.
[00:02:32] Alan: Thank you for having me. I started listening to podcasts nine years ago, and I never want to forget this. And I think to myself, at one point I was on the other side of this microphone, just listening in my car to these people who had stories and personal development is where I found podcasting. So this is a dream come true to be interviewed. So thank you for the honor.
[00:02:51] Aneta: Your bio and your story are inspiring. So tell me a little bit more about your story and maybe share with the audience your background. If there was any pivotal moment in your own life that put you on the path that you're on today?
[00:03:07] Alan: So the first thing I want to share, I always try to make sure I share this before I tell my story because back when I was listening to podcasts, I would listen to these incredible speakers who had been doing it for decades. And they seemed like they had their story. So figured out. It sounds a lot of times like they had everything figured out. And so I want to say, and quick disclaimers, I didn't understand a lot of this until my thirties. So I often joke, I say, I'm hoping to hit puberty at 36.
[00:03:32] Aneta: Late developer.
[00:03:33] Alan: Definitely. At least physically. So 35 years old, looking back, I've rewatched the movie of my life. I try to do that every year, but honestly, I do that in some ways every day. And I started doing a lot of therapy in my 30s. So I started to understand my narrative, my story. I started to finally put back the puzzle pieces that I had blacked out or blocked out.
So here goes, I was born into adversity. Didn't necessarily know that cause you don't know any different, but my father passed away when he was 28 years old, when I was two years old and he passed away in a car accident. At the time I had an older sister. She was six when he passed away. I was almost three and my mom was 31 and she was a stay-at-home, single mom.
And she got together with my stepdad. I had a stepfather. So my real last name is McCorkle. My birth father, his name's John McCorkle, and he grew up in a large Irish Catholic family in Massachusetts. It was Jim, Joe, John, Jane, Joan, and Jeanette. So six kids all with J, a super Irish Catholic family.
My mom is actually from Ireland. And so he passed away and my stepfather came into the picture. And from three to 14, I had a stepfather, my stepfather, and my mom didn't get along well, and that's the polite way to put it, to be honest. So at 14 years old, my stepfather leaves. But the thing that I need to mention before that is, and again, I didn't understand any of this till my thirties. So I took my stepfather's last name.
So his name's Steve Lazaros. I'm Alan Lazarus. My sister is Crystal Lazaros. So we took his last name because we were trying to be a family unit and because of that, whether this was conscious or not, we kind of didn't talk to my birth father's side of the family during that time. So from age three to 14, we didn't see my birth father's side of the family almost at all.
And we didn't talk about my dad. My birth father. And I think part of that was just not wanting to face the trauma. The other part was trying to be a sort of family unit, I think. And a lot of this is unconscious. 14 came and this was the hardest year of my life, but I didn't understand that until later.
In therapy have since reflected and realized this was a year for me. So 14 stepfathers leave. I refer to three to 14 as boats and BS snowmobiles. We had a yacht, deep-sea fishing, and ski trips. We had trucks and motorcycles. My stepdad was the hunter-fisher type of thing. And it's the late nineties, early two thousand, nineties, and everyone did very well in the U.S.
So he worked for a computer company called Agfa, and he did very well. When he left at 14, he got the apartment building and the yacht, we got the house and the dog. But he took 90 percent of the income with him. So I went from Xbox, Dreamcast, early Christmas presents, doing well financially, but behind the scenes, things aren't good because my mom and stepdad don't get along so basically, I don't know how I'm going to go to college.
I get free lunch at school now because our income is so low. I shop at Salvation Army. My mom trades in her BMW to get a Honda Civic, and that kind of thing. Big step down financially and lifestyle and all that. And on top of that, the two thousand were not nearly as lucrative in the economy as the nineties.
So for the older listeners, you'll all remember the nineties were interesting times. So stepfather leaves at 14 and everything changes. He takes his entire extended family with him. Which, I knew them all very well. Grandma Joan and Grandpa George, and the whole aunts, uncles, all that.
seen a
[00:07:05] Aneta: They were your family.
[00:07:07] Alan: They're my family, yeah. Haven't seen a single one of them since. Haven't seen my stepfather since. I have since actually talked to him a little bit on Facebook Messenger. So anyway, at that same time, my sister moves out with her older boyfriend. Understandable. At that same time, my mom and her sister got into a pretty bad fight. And she ostracizes us from my mom's side of the family. So by the time I was 14 years old, and again, I didn't understand any of this until my thirties, I pretty much lost three full families. And so it's just me and my mom in that house. And I went from, my dream was to go to WPI, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It's kind of like a mini MIT in Massachusetts, really one of the best technical colleges in the world.
And I wanted to be an engineer and I did think I would get it. I went from, I hope I get into, I don't even know if I'm gonna be able to go because we're not gonna be able to afford it. Because it was 50, 000 a year back then. And I did end up getting in. I went in 2008 for computer engineering. And so I'm 14 and at that point, it was kind of bootstrap.
I didn't know this at the time. Because I didn't even know what trauma responses were. But now I understand that my trauma response is four. So there's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. And for me, I had many escapes. Alcohol was an escape. Movies were an escape video game for sure. Friends, nonsense, that kind of stuff. Fortunately for me, my main trauma response has always been to aim higher, work harder, and get smarter.
So the type a was created and or uncovered. But anyways, so fast forward, I bootstrapped and I got straight A's all through high school.
I got what's called the President's Award. It's still behind me. And it's signed by George W. Bush. And it means you get straight A's for every report card for all four years of high school.
So I got into my dream school and I got tons of scholarships and financial aid.
And I went to WPI and became a computer engineer, and that was brutal, especially because my scholarships and financial aid were academic based. So if I was in trouble if I didn't do well, and WPI was the computer engineering program at WPI was just 1 of the hardest things I've ever done.
And I'm someone who I do feel is naturally pretty academically inclined. And so anyways, fast forward, I ended up getting my master's in business. But when I was a kid, I had two main dreams. I had dozens of dreams.
The two main ones I was going to be a lawyer, politician, president, or I was going to do engineer MBA CEO, like my hero, Steve Jobs, fortune 50 CEO of a tech company. Fast forward, I'm on my way. Computer engineering degree. I got my master's in business. 80 percent of CEOs of Fortune 50 companies back then. Fortune 500 companies and tech companies were that combination of engineering undergrad with an MBA combo. So I do it. I go into corporate and I'm on my way. So first I did inside sales engineering. I started a little inside sales engineering team and then did outside sales engineering, and I was responsible for Vermont, Connecticut, and Western Mass. That was my territory.
And I'm in my early twenties at this point, I'm a 1 percent global earner, global, not net worth. But global earner, I'm making almost 200, 000 a year. I'm in my early twenties. I don't have a mortgage. I don't have kids. I paid off 84, 000 worth of debt in a single year, which was awesome. That was my goal to get out of debt.
So I'm off to the races.
[00:10:35] Aneta: Yeah. You're feeling good. How are you feeling at this point? You've done all the things you've achieved these goals that you had for your life. You see yourself on the trajectory. So, were you good? Were you stressed? Were you happy?
[00:10:47] Alan: I'll give you at the time, and then I'll give you in hindsight. So at the time, it felt empty. It felt like I had all the college friends, all the high school friends, all the corporate friends. The part of the story that I haven't shared yet is Cognex's motto work hard, play hard.
I used to say work hard, play harder. And I grew up in a family. My mom and stepdad loved to party. They were partiers and that's the polite way to say it. Okay.
[00:11:11] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:11:12] Alan: And so I adopted that without knowing it. And so I was big into drinking. I would party. I had brought all my friends together. I was very much into having as much fun as humanly possible and achieving as much as I possibly could. Okay. So at the time, it felt empty. It was like, why? And most importantly, fitness was really important to me back in college for a time. And I remember being so fulfilled by that. And I let that ride. I let that go.
I was letting my health down consistently, I was also on the road in sales. So there's drinking, there's eating out all the time. I'm visiting all these manufacturing facilities. So there's that. I'm quote-unquote successful at this point. I have a beautiful girlfriend named Courtney.
I pay all my bills. I'm making way more money than I know what to do with. So I'm investing it all into the future because what else am I going to do with it? The American dream, quote unquote.
So fast forward. I'm on the road. This is not for work. I was up in New Hampshire with my little cousin playing Call of Duty, not drinking, not partying, fortunately. We go to TGI Fridays and. TGI Friday is the dark winter, 2015 big snow. The snow banks were covering the signs. It was a really bad winter and New Hampshire has a lot of snow.
And I am at a three-way intersection. I was supposed to yield and I didn't, I ended up on the wrong side of the road. And I looked up from the GPS and I saw what I thought was a Mac truck right in front of me, head-on collision, Mac truck, my computer engineering brain went, that's it, that's the end, no chance.
And I now realize that my brain thinks in probabilities. I now realize that's weird. But the probability of us living, if that was a Mac truck was zero next to zero. Fortunately, it was not, a Mack truck. It was a lift-kitted pickup truck. And I was driving a 2004 Volkswagen Passat, and I bought this car for 5, 000 cash and this car I used to call the tank, German engineered Volkswagen steel trap of a car. It was a heavy car. I love this car. This car saved my life. So I called it the tank and it lived up to its reputation. So both airbags did deploy. I usually show pictures of the car in my speeches, but here's the thing.
So my little cousin is still 17, kind of invincible tweeting about it. And I'm messed up. Now, physically, we're okay. He hurt his knee on the airbag. I hurt my face in the airbag, but he's tweeting about it already. Fine. My father died in a car crash when he was 28. I'm 26 at the time and I'm going,
[00:13:40] Aneta: Yeah. Had a big impact.
[00:13:41] Alan: This is my second chance that my dad never got. And I was filled with all the regret. I mean, you're going to get the feedback. We all talk about midlife crisis. This was my quarter-to-life crisis. I mean, talk about all the feedback at once. Who am I? What was the point? Did I achieve my dreams? Am I proud of who the man I've become? Did I make my dad proud? I healed my traumas, all this stuff.
And I didn't even know what trauma meant back then. So I flipped the script. So the best way I can describe it now, again, is in hindsight because at the time I was just massive regretting what the heck happened. I was successful from the outside in.
I was, I was an achiever and I was improvement-oriented. Snowboarding, basketball, video games, skills, sales, resume, cover letter, professional development, academics, super improvement-oriented, but I wasn't self-improvement-oriented
[00:14:40] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:14:40] Alan: And I flipped that script so hard. I decided, okay. All that matters. Sometimes we do that in life. We swing the pendulum to the other extreme. All that matters now is fulfillment and self-improvement. And I went all the way past broke. I'll tell you what started my own business. It's the two, two, seven rule that takes you two years to go into debt, two years to get out of debt, and seven years to be successful.
So my business just finally passed. It's so I'm nine years in technically we just passed the million-dollar mark, which is cool.
But thank you. That was last week, which is wild. But not a million dollars a year, a million dollars over the total of the seven years since we started the podcast, which is still great because of the compound effect.
We've got a big bright future, which I'm grateful for, but we went all the way past broke, and what I found now, is the lesson that I've realized a lot of people are super professionally developed, but they don't do a lot of inner work and then other people do a lot of inner work, but they're not that successful.
And that always bothered me because you have these amazing heart-driven driven healed, wonderful, holistic people. Who doesn't win in the economy? And then you've got these people who win in the economy. Some of the people that I've worked with are not the best people, but they just crush it in engineering and business and success.
And so in the 21st century, we do need to be ambidextrous. We do. And we've always had to, I saw these mentors, multimillion dollars, CEO of tech companies. I mean, I've had dozens of mentors and coaches, and I say this. If you want a coach, you probably need a therapist. That was me.
[00:16:19] Aneta: Why do you say that?
[00:16:20] Alan: Because the difference between coaching and therapy and from my perspective, at least in the frame of other people's consciousness is coaching is achievement-oriented. Therapy is much
[00:16:31] Aneta: Future-oriented.
[00:16:32] Alan: Exactly. Whereas therapy tends to be past-focused and inner work healing and presence. Like we did a grounding exercise before this. Fortunately, I'm very future-oriented. You know that, but if you want to coach what you need as a therapist, if you want a therapist, you probably need a coach.
And so I live in this world now where I coach 23 different people. All different countries, all different backgrounds, all different industries. And I've been coaching now for seven years. I did fitness coaching mindset coaching peak performance coaching and business coaching and business consulting. And so now I'm focused only on business coaching.
But I'm coming up on my 10, 000 hours of speaking, coaching, training, workshops, all that kind of stuff. Podcasting. And what you realize is that these are not your problems, these are human problems. And everyone's on one side of the spectrum. And so, you're either on my end of like, super academically inclined, fairly gifted but scared to share that.
Everything comes pretty easy to you, so you just don't know why other people aren't as capable. But you're not well-rounded. You are successful in your craft and your thing, but your relationships suffer or you're on the other end where you have great relationships.
You're relatable. You're emotionally intelligent and emotionally mature, but your career, you're not that disciplined. You're not that structured like you don't work out consistently. And so those amongst us who have the most trauma sometimes have the strongest willpower. And that doesn't necessarily mean that we should be influencing other people.
And so at the end of the day, you need professional development and personal development. You need coaching and therapy. And so I didn't start doing therapy till my thirties. And now I can tell when guys aren't doing it. I can tell that inner work is making a big difference. And so ironically for me, the external world always made sense.
It always felt simple and or fairly easy for me, but the internal stuff was always the hardest. And I do know that some people are the opposite. And so hopefully we can all self-identify with that and move forward.
[00:18:36] Aneta: Yeah, I don't know if I would see it as just those two choices. I think that there's definitely within us masculine and feminine energy and we can either be in a healthy realm of the masculine and the feminine and find the balance or it could be distorted. And I think when we see ourselves going into stressful situations, we kind of can either collapse in the feminine energy, which is where people maybe aren't finding the discipline to be successful or to take aligned action, or the distorted masculine, which is working so hard, achieving so much at all costs, and also sacrificing relationships and everything else in the process.
So I think it's doing the work. And whether it's therapy or it's some other form of work that you do on yourself, of course, and I'm a huge proponent of coaching. Of course, I coach people. So in really focusing on both healing and also future-oriented and aligning your choices going forward to where you want to go.
But I like this idea of making sure, I think what we both agree on is asking ourselves, if are we doing the right work having the self-awareness and the inner dialogue, and then finding the professionals who can help with whatever it is that we need to work on.
[00:19:54] Alan: I think whichever one you're more scared of if you're honest with yourself, whichever one requires more courage. I always thought I was very courageous, apply to that job, and apply to that school, and I realized that I'm not that courageous. I just was courageous incompetence.
So the two types of courage I've broken it into is there's competence, and courage, which apply to the job. Apply to the school. Take the test. Do the new workout regimen, whatever it is, but that's competence and courage. The other courage is social. For me, it's always been fairly easy to be behind the scenes and do my spreadsheets and apply to the job or whatever, but it was never easy for me to, and this is kind of the example that I use.
So I have a business partner, his name's Kevin, and he was the one who struggled with competence, and courage. He didn't believe in himself and his ability to externally achieve things. But he had social courage. So when we give a speech, this is kind of the analogy. We give speeches together. He's concerned he's not gonna add value. I'm concerned. Everyone's gonna hate me.
I know I'll add value I'm just so if you were to say, Alan, are you certain you can add value? I'd say 10 out of 10 of course. But if you said Alan you need everyone there to like you I would say that is genuinely impossible Exactly.
[00:21:10] Aneta: So where does worthiness fall into that? Like is worthiness a competence issue or a social issue?
[00:21:18] Alan: I think everything comes down to I'm glad you brought this up self-belief and self-worth are at the epicenter I think of all of our beings
[00:21:25] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:21:26] Alan: Self-belief I think is usually built through what's called self-efficacy in psychology, which is state. You're going to do something, go do it, and then self-assign it.
So I'm going to get straight A's. I proved to myself I can do that. And then I self-assign it. Look, I did it. And I said I was going to do it. And I did it. That was always easy for me. That was always something I had. The self-worth was never easy for me. The self-worth was the issue. Self-worth is so self-belief is I can build the castle and I know I can self-worth is I deserve the castle.
And I'm going to set boundaries and honor the castle. And I'm not going to let my friends come in and spill beer on the carpets.
[00:22:06] Aneta: Right.
[00:22:06] Alan: And so I know a lot of engineers. They struggle with self-worth because they're competent, but socially, they get made fun of a lot. They also have a different modality of thinking, which is mathematics, which is a rare one statistically. So you feel weird. You feel like you can't be yourself. You struggle to communicate things to other people, but tasks are fairly easy for you. And so I think for me, it was self worth was the problem.
And self-belief came naturally. I think for other people, sometimes it's the opposite. And then sometimes it's, you feel like you struggle with both.
[00:22:37] Aneta: Yeah. That's interesting. So you feel maybe like confidence is the confidence piece like you could be confident in your abilities to do something, but the worthiness is tied to who you are as a human.
[00:22:50] Alan: Yep. Confidence in capabilities is something that a lot of people struggle with. I never did, but I always struggled with confidence in who I am.
[00:23:00] Aneta: And what have you done to work on that?
[00:23:03] Alan: Therapy. That would be the short answer. I'll give you the main answer. So I have a therapist, her name's Carol. She does IFS. I don't want to presuppose, okay? So, you know IFS internal family systems are working with parts. So if you've read the book, no bad parts or any of that.
Internal family systems, I always say are the most powerful thing I've ever personally learned. And that is saying something because my math brain goes, dude, calculus, compounding, like, what are you talking about? But IFS has changed my world because I realized that I had an exile. An exile is a part of you that you hide from the world.
And for me, I exiled my genius. I'm scared. I'm not scared to be less than. I'm scared to be more than others because growing up was more than dangerous. Yeah. And I don't struggle with a lot of things other people struggle with. So it's not scary for me to say, I doubted myself because it's not true.
What is scary to say is I rarely doubt myself. And that is scary to say because it's easy to hate that person who says that they don't struggle with that. And even now you can hear it, my tonality, I'm scared to share these things. So all of us are scared. It's just the question of getting to the root of what that actual fear is.
And I think that I used to say, you can achieve this and become this. I don't do that anymore in my coaching. What I do instead is, let's uncover who you are. Let's uncover what is already there. Let's uncover maybe the part of you that you are scared to admit. So if you are gifted you're scared of it because it makes you different. If you're not gifted, you're also scared of it because you feel less capable than the people that you know are gifted. But you don't tell them that. So no one walks around and says Allen you're a genius. But intuitively people around me do know that and I didn't know that by the way, even being a self-proclaimed genius is scary to say.
There's a book called The Hidden Habits of Genius and it's a Yale professor who spent 30 years teaching a course on studying all the geniuses of history and some of them are awful human beings by the way, so, that was wild. But The Hidden Habits of Genius, it's a book behind me, it talks about the 14 character traits of geniuses and when I read that book it was like, I have all 14 of those at a level like 11 out of 10.
And so you just start to realize like, I've always known it on the soul level. But I never let myself own it. And that's the self-worth thing. So whether you are good, bad, or ugly, you have to own it inside first, which is the hardest thing in the world. And then have the courage to be whatever that is. So I'm a computer engineer, and math and science are my sort of genius modality.
And I'm very numbers and very rational. I'm hyperrational. So emotionally driven people struggle with me. Because they know not to like me. And the last thing I'll share about this is there are four modalities of thinking. There's energy, there's words, there's mathematics, and there's images. So we all have all four, but we have a main one. And for me, it's math. And so I walked around my whole life thinking everyone else is illogical when in reality I'm hyperrational.
[00:26:12] Aneta: Right.
[00:26:13] Alan: And so statistically it seems like everyone else is irrational when in reality I'm just super-rational. And so maybe you're not that. Instead, everyone else is lazy. What if you're just really hardworking?
And so for people that know deep down, they're gifted. You have to face that and be able to be whatever you are and grow from that place. And if you know, deep down, you're not gifted. You also have to own that. And then the irony of the paradox is you'll end up more gifted instead of running from the truth. You'll embrace it. And then you'll make up for with work ethic and humility, what you didn't have in terms of gifting.
[00:26:50] Aneta: Yeah. So, Alan, I want to go back to when you said you had the accident, and then, We kind of, jumped forward to where you are today, but did you feel like in the moment, your life flashing in front of your eyes and suddenly you're like, I know I need to make changes. Or when did you start to identify, okay, maybe I'm not on the path that I want to be on. This does feel empty because all the external measures at a very young age were pointing out that you were doing all the right things.
[00:27:21] Alan: Yeah, thank you. So I think I had what society deems as successful. I had a lot of statuses and my status was always empty. But you have to get it to realize that. So one example is I've met famous people now. I've even coached some of them and, you just realize, my childhood heroes didn't even deserve to be my heroes. And as bad as that might sound, everyone's just a human being trying to figure it out.
But in certain circumstances, like if you see me at a speech, you might think, he's something, but I still struggle with certain things that you might not, and vice versa. So everyone's really good at like one thing. But they're very rarely holistically good at everything. So every strength comes with a weakness. So for example self-belief is a strength, but it comes with a weakness of overconfidence or arrogance. I struggled with arrogance because I believed in myself so much. Other people struggle with self-doubt But they also are naturally humble.
And so I have to work on humility. You have to work on self-confidence. So to answer your original question, it was always a whisper saying Alan you're not fulfilled. This isn't what you're meant to do. This is more other people's dream than it is your own. But I didn't listen. And the reason why is because my life was so noisy.
I had so many friends, corporate friends high school friends, and college friends. And it seems like that's great. And I had a lot of fun. I'm never going to have that midlife crisis in my 50s I wish I had partied more. That's never gonna happen for me. If anything, I look back and I go, I wish I hadn't poisoned my brain.
I wish I hadn't drunk so much. I wish I hadn't spent so much time and effort with people that I never really should have been around. And some of it was wonderful, and I learned a lot, and I became more well-rounded, I get all that, so there were pros and cons to everything, but if I'm really honest with myself deep down, and that's what matters, the truth is, I didn't belong in most of those rooms, and I knew it, but I had such low self-worth, that I didn't give myself that if it makes sense.
And so now in hindsight, it's very obvious as my self-worth increases I'm much more discerning about who I spend time with. So people place things and ideas I'm very like I said hyper-rational. Who are the person's places things and ideas that you know aren't serving you if you are still with those people, places things, and ideas probably a self-worth issue.
Either you don't believe in your capability to quit drinking, that wasn't me, I believed I could quit anytime I wanted, I think it was more of a self-worth issue of I'm gonna lose all my friends and I'm gonna be alone.
[00:29:59] Aneta: Because you're worried about people liking you, right? You mentioned that.
[00:30:03] Alan: Which, that's the core wound, is unlovable. I call it an unlovable little genius. And once I got a hold of Unlovable Little Genius, I realized, I was trying to compensate for that rather than be who I am. And so I've been saying this to my team lately. I'll be brief about this. But I, so I have a 21-person team and I audited everybody. I said, big announcement. I'm going to be who I am. I've been hiding a little bit.
And I'm going to start being me. And when I say me, just picture a computer engineer who is hyper-rational, everything is numbered and I'm still going to be me that you know, but I'm not going to be as emotionally driven because I've never been super emotionally driven.
I think my little unlovable genius has when it comes to people liking me and not villainizing me and that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, I am hyper-rational and I'm just going to start leaning into that unique flavor of me and it's been working so super well so far. But my fear, my fear was is my whole team going to hate and villainize me because I'm not emotional like they are because I have this amazing holistic heart driven emotionally driven team And we had an event a couple weeks ago and I realized I'm not like them in that regard at all.
I'm very different. And that's okay. Last thing leadership is so ironic. You're super different. So that's why you're the leader, but that's the biggest weakness of you leading people.
[00:31:30] Aneta: What do you mean weakness?
[00:31:31] Alan: I am so different from that. It makes me competent to be a leader. But My being so different creates massive blind spots when it comes to leading other people.
[00:31:42] Aneta: Right. Now, well, it's important to build a team around that, so you have other people who maybe see things you don't see or
[00:31:51] Alan: That's finally where I'm at.
[00:31:53] Aneta: But it does require you to self-identify that there might be some gaps that you don't have all the answers and that we don't use our bias of hiring people just like us, that we can identify and recognize other people's strengths that could be completely different than our own.
[00:32:13] Alan: A hundred percent. Core competencies can be different. Core values need to be the same. And that's a leadership conversation. I love leadership. So if you want to talk leadership, just let me know.
[00:32:23] Aneta: Of course. That's fantastic. So I know that you have been on this journey for some time now and you came to it like you said sooner and earlier than other people we say midlife crisis, or I call it an awakening or like a reprioritization but what is next for you in terms of where you see yourself taking your life, your business and in the next several decades, you've got plenty of runways left if you choose to continue down this path
[00:32:53] Alan: I Appreciate the question so much. So, we just celebrated our million listen and million dollar mark. My math brain is blown away that we passed those in the same week, maybe even the same day, which is weird.
[00:33:05] Aneta: And tell the audience the name of your podcast too.
[00:33:08] Alan: Okay, so the name of our podcast is called Next Level University And the whole thing is built on exactly what it sounds like, which is how to learn, how to get to the next level, no matter how hard your past has been, you have a bigger, better, brighter future if you choose and let's rock and roll.
So it's about self-improvement. It's about success and fulfillment. Ultimately health, wealth, and love, holistic self-improvement. But anyway, in terms of what's coming in the future, we just celebrated our million listens, million downloads mark, which was cool because that has been a long time coming seven years and Kevin is celebrating and he's my business partner and he is beyond where he ever thought he'd get.
And that's awesome. And I celebrate him. I applaud him and it is amazing, and on the other side of that coin, he's the, I'm going to celebrate the fact that we got here. I'm the, we're just getting started.
[00:33:55] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:33:56] Alan: And so I think, okay, nice. So, I've researched a lot about Walmart and whether you like Walmart or Sam Walton, is irrelevant to the research that I was doing, but seven years in, this is the best analogy that I could give that my team would grasp. Seven years into Walmart, Sam Walton bought his second store. So he started at 44, he was 51 and he got his second store. And I said to everybody. I said, congratulations. Awesome. This is good, but we still have work to do. And this is still the very beginning. And we just got our second store. And then I asked the team, like how many stores do you think there are now? I always get pumped about that. And they say, whatever, thousand, 500, whatever. And there's 11, 000 now. And so I said, just imagine NLU Next Level University. we just got our second store.
So we're still at the very beginning and it took Walmart. 18 more years to get 36 stores. And so the compound effect is very powerful. And so when you say I have a large runway, I appreciate it. I've always been preparing for the long game. I think that's probably pretty clear to everyone who's hearing me.
And if I triggered anyone in this, I apologize, but hopefully, there's something in it for you. As for what's to come at NLU, I'm just going to be more me. So the short of it is I'm going to be much more computer engineer, Alan, and much less fluffy, feel-good, Alan. I always say this to my clients in the beginning, it was anyone I could coach.
I just love helping people achieve their goals and dreams. But now it's, if you're not ridiculously humble and want to achieve big goals, please don't coach with me because I'm just going to be the pain in the butt. If you don't want accountability, you're just not going to like me and we're not going to get along.
And that is what it is. So I'm growing my business coaching practice, which is awesome. Because when I was a kid, I wanted to be a math teacher. And I remember saying they don't make enough money. So I'm going to do the lawyer, politician, president thing, or the CEO engineer MBA CEO thing because math is my favorite. But math teachers don't make enough money. So now I teach math to business owners.
[00:36:02] Aneta: It comes, it just comes full circle. Alan well, I just wish you continued success, and tell us where people can find you. What is the best way that they can find you? I know Next Level Universities on all platforms. And if they want to work with you to learn more about your coaching in particular what's the best way that they can do that?
[00:36:22] Alan: So if you want to grow and scale, start grow scale monetize a business. So my youngest client is 18 and has a YouTube channel. My oldest is 63. I have 23 on my roster right now, but I've over the years, it's been probably dozens if not hundreds at this point. If you do want to start growing the monetized scale of business online. My whole business is virtual.
In the 21st century, some people might not like this. I want to go fully virtual. I don't want to headquarters. I don't want a building. I do believe, and I know that's not true for everyone. I know some people have to show up and put in physical labor work. I get that, but for anyone out there who wants an online business, a fully virtual online business, who's struggling to lead a team of diverse people with different backgrounds from different countries and different time differences.
So we've got Spain. We worked with someone in Italy for a long time, Australia, Philippines, that's 12 hour time difference. So it's been a hell of a journey. It's been pretty brutal, to be honest, to learn how to lead a rich, dynamic, different age group, millennial, Gen X group of people from all over the world, all other time zones toward common goals.
So if you want help with that and you feel like you're in the business and not on the business, I will hold you accountable. I'll help you track your revenue. I'll help you understand where the money's going and why optimizing everything, and harmonizing everything into the right direction towards your goals and dreams.
And last thing I'll also help you make sure it's fulfilling. And the business that you want to do work in the world. Because a lot of times what happens is you start a business based on a fad that the fad goes away and your passion goes away. And I'd rather you take your passion, turn it into a purpose, and then make a profit, then focus on profit and realize that that's not really what you wanted.
[00:38:07] Aneta: Excellent. And Ellen, the final question that I ask everyone is, what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:38:15] Alan: I think doing all you can with all you have, and that looks different for everyone, whatever calling you have, whatever intuition you have, whatever whispers are coming to you, I do believe that who we are, we get a bunch of mud in our glass through conditioning and society and cultures and racism and sexism, and all this junk gets thrown in our glass.
And if you can clear the glass by self-reflecting and figuring out what feels optimal for you, while knowing you're going to have to sacrifice along the way, I think living the width of your life is doing all you can with all you have toward meaningful goals. Because if the goal isn't meaningful, trust me, there's no point.
The point of goals is to grow and to contribute. And if you can maximize your unique potential, unique. If you can maximize your greatest level of contribution and have a magnificent quality of life, what else is there? So that's what that means to me. And that's a journey that never ends. It's an infinite game that never ends. And even beyond your own life, you'll have an impact. So we all do.
[00:39:29] Aneta: Absolutely. Thank you, Ellen. Thanks so much for joining me today and wish you continued luck I do not doubt that you will continue to open many more stores.
[00:39:40] Alan: Thank you very much. Thank you. This has been an honor. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:39:44] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones, or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.