Building Authentic Relationships Through Vulnerability with Kevin Palmieri

Kevin Palmieri: I'm going to tell you the same thing I told you behind the scenes, Mike, I'm living the dream. I would love to say thank you so much for having me. I'm grateful for the opportunity and I'm grateful to talk to the amazing community you have created.

Kevin Palmieri: So I have a podcast. We do an episode every single day. We just recorded our 1,525th episode sometime last week. I don't know. I've lost track. It's been a wild journey. We have 22 person team. We have an amazing team of individuals who are on this journey with us. They do not work for us, they work with us in the mission. I get to do this full time. I have probably 60 some odd clients I work with, podcast clients and business owners. So every day I get to work with people who are trying to have a positive impact on the world. And we've been grateful, and lucky, and privileged, and worked hard enough to create a multiple six figure business from the podcast. So seven years ago, I dreamed of what [00:02:00] we have today and quite honestly, I am living my dream. That's why I say it, but it is a very challenging, very humbling thing. So there are definitely rainy days in paradise, I promise.

Mike Forrester: Yeah, there's those challenges. It's just, what do we do? Does it become something that continues moving us forward? Or does it become the chains that keep us in place, um, living small, right?

Kevin Palmieri: Yep.

Mike Forrester: So what does life look like on the personal side for you?

Mike Forrester: That's awesome, dude. Yeah, on Saturdays you'll find me by, by my smoker, putting something on the grill and feeding my family, just, you know, uh, friends, you know, whomever comes around, just creating that community around me, so.

Kevin Palmieri: I love it.

Kevin Palmieri: Yeah. If you zoomed in to my life when I was 25, you would have seen a young man who was making really good money in his job. I was in an industry called weatherization. So we would go into large buildings, usually state buildings or government buildings, and it was our job to make them more energy efficient. So I was getting anywhere from $60 to $120 an hour, depending on where I was working. Awesome. Love that. That looks really good. I had just competed in and won a bodybuilding show. So I was quite literally in the best shape I will ever be in externally. Internally, that's a whole different conversation. Uh, my girlfriend at the time was a model, beautiful, and we had just got a new apartment together. So everything from the outside, I had a sports car, everything, everything looked amazing. If you, I had a really good social media profile. If my life was a social media profile, you [00:05:00] would have been like, you know what? This might be worth a follow. But internally, I was not a confident man. I was super insecure. I was afraid of my own shadow. I had low self worth, low self belief to the point I had so much scarcity in my life. My girlfriend at the time came to me one day and she said, I'm, I'm ambitious. I have these dreams, these goals, these aspirations. I want to move from the East coast to California and I want to chase my dreams and I wanted to support that. I did. I wanted to, I just didn't know how I was so scarce. I was so afraid I was going to get left behind. She might move out there before me. What if she meets someone better than me? What if she finds a new guy? And I just gave her every reason in the world, Mike, why she shouldn't do it. And I, unfortunately, pulled the wind out of her sails. And she left me, as she should have. And when she left me, that was my initial rock bottom. [00:06:00] Who's gonna love me? I'm broken. How am I ever gonna hold a successful relationship down? I don't even like who I am. At that point, I'm rebounding off of a bodybuilding show, so I have a mild eating disorder for sure. Work gets slow right after she leaves me. So I went from having what looked like everything to what felt like nothing. So I had what I think a lot of us, the conversation a lot of us have with ourselves. Yeah, I'm feeling all types of ways inside and I think there's something wrong, but I believe if I just focus on some external stuff, for me it was money, that'll probably fix everything. There might be a fire on the inside, but if I can make enough money, I think that'll kind of cut off the oxygen to this fire. So, the next year, I said, I'm gonna make the most money I've ever made, and I spent 10 months living on the road, because all of our contracts were out of state. I would pack my suitcase on Sunday, get in a work van, drive anywhere from 6 to 15 hours to a job site. [00:07:00] Stay there for a week. I would leave Friday and drive back. Sometimes I wouldn't get home until 2, 3, 4 in the morning on Saturday. Laundry would go from the suitcase to the washer to the dryer, back to the suitcase, and then Sunday I'd leave again. And that was my life for the entire 10 months, but I was making so much money, I didn't care. So we got to the end of that year and I opened my final pay stub and I made $100,000 at 26 with no college degree, felt really good externally, but I realized that it didn't fix any of my internal problems. I was still as unconfident, insecure, afraid of my own shadow, scarce, even though I should be so abundant. And I realized that for most of my life, I lived unconsciously. The opposite of unconscious is hyperconscious. So I started a podcast in 2017 called The Hyperconscious Podcast. I fell in love with it. Much like you're in love with yours as I can tell, and I wanted to do it more I [00:08:00] finally felt like I was doing something that actually mattered. I felt like I was impacting people. I was growing, I was contributing, but it doesn't pay the bills in the beginning, and there's not a line of people waiting to give you money. So I had to keep going to this job. And when I say I was homesick, it's not like I went to the office and came home that night. I was gone for a week at a time. I was depressed every time. I was anxious every time I packed my bag. That's actually something I had to get over. Traveling after I ended up leaving this job. So it ended up getting to the point where I was six hours away from where I lived in a hotel in New Jersey, my alarm clock went off at 5:15, I sat up, I slid to the edge of the bed, I was lacing up my work boots as I had done a thousand times before. But that morning it was like there was ten televisions on in my head at the same time, and every single one was on a different station. And, maybe you've felt this before. One was saying, you're stuck here forever, people like [00:09:00] you do not get opportunities like this, nevermind, leave them behind. If you ever worked up the courage or recklessness to leave this job, what would your friends think? You make more money than any of your friends. What would your family think? You make more money than anybody in your family ever has. You don't have a plan B. This kind of was your plan B and we got lucky to be here. Do not throw this away. And what are you going to do? You really think the podcast is going to be the thing that you do? It's such a rare thing that happens. And it was in that moment, Mike, where I thought to myself, if I just take my life, I will take all my problems with me and I won't have to deal with any of this stuff. So here I am six hours away from anybody who cares about me in a dark, crusty hotel room. And I reached out to one of my friends, who's now my business partner. And I said, Hey, Alan, you know, self improvement stuff. You're, you've studied a lot of self improvement. You're very intelligent. You seem happy, fulfilled. I don't know what's going [00:10:00] on, man. I'm having, I'm having these feelings, these thoughts, these emotions. I don't, what do I do? And he said many things in his wisdom. He's very long winded, but he said, Kev, over the last few years, your awareness has changed a ton, but your environments have remained the same. I think it's time for you to change your environment. And I ended up leaving that job three or four months later and then going full time into the podcast. So in 2018, I left corporate America, for lack of better phrasing. And then I became a very, very, very broke entrepreneur who just wanted to impact people. So you, from $100,000 to $35,000 in credit card debt faster than you would imagine.

Mike Forrester: Yeah. Like driving a Ferrari, uh, down the financial freeway, right?

Kevin Palmieri: Pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much. Unfortunately, I didn't know that at the beginning, but I learned pretty quick.

Kevin Palmieri: Yeah, I think one of the the hardest ones to admit, but the easiest ones to recognize is, you find yourself saying, I will feel better inside when. I will feel better inside because I had that. I'll feel better inside when I get a new partner, [00:12:00] right? I just got out of a negative relationship. The next one's gonna be better. It was, I had a good relationship. Sure, but it didn't fix it. If you are looking outside of yourself to fix yourself for lack of better phrasing internally, I would say you're probably going down a potentially dangerous road. Because here's what happens, you find a key, you put it in the door, it doesn't open it. You find another key, doesn't open it. And eventually you get to what you believe is the last key, which for me was that six figure mark, and it doesn't open it. And it kind of breaks your spirit where you say, Now what? I have no idea what to do. I have no idea where to go next. I don't know what key to go find. I don't know what lever to pull. I don't know what to do. So I think that's a really big one. A lot of us, unfortunately, we put off things because the necessity just doesn't seem high enough. That's a big one. And I would argue, it's not as much of a sign as it [00:13:00] is maybe a noise in the car you're ignoring. But understanding that the level of self awareness that you have is one of the biggest keys to success and fulfillment. Success, because it's gonna help you understand what you're really good at, what you're not good at, where your blind spots, and where's your ego holding you back. That's all huge there. But if you really want to be fulfilled, you want to be doing something for something greater than yourself. You want to be growing, contributing, at the spiritual level. We have to understand who we are, and most of that is what has happened to us in the past. So a lot of the unconditioning I've done over the last seven years, it wasn't necessarily I'm working through what I'm dealing with in the present. It's I'm working through what is manifesting in the present that was created in the past. So maybe the question would be, how well do I know my vehicle? I'm cruising down the highway and everything seems, I don't know, it's maybe a little bumpy, or maybe the brakes are [00:14:00] rubbing, gas mileage isn't as good as it once was. What could that be? The self awareness of the vehicle, which is us, we are the only thing we have for this lifetime. I would say that's another potential sign to look at. Just like we do maintenance on our cars, even if it's fine, I think we should do maintenance on our self awareness as well. So I would say those are probably the, the big two.

Mike Forrester: Gotcha. So you said it was three months after you talked to Alan, right? You're on the edge of the bed, ready to just call quits. What did Alan like gift you with, you know, equip you with that helped you get through that three month stint from where you're on that edge of the bed to where you exited that job and said, I'm all in? Like what, what got you through that?

Mike Forrester: Yeah. [00:18:00] Having, having somebody that walks through it, is a, is a absolute game changer. Um, I, and I think it's, it's almost like our goals, right? We've heard that we'll make bigger goals in the short term and annual basis that are out of reach. And then, um, like long term, we're making smaller goals and we can actually accomplish. Our perspective around relationships isn't actually accurate because just like you've talked about Alan, man, he, he gave you like the map and not just the map, but you're driving through fog and he gives you the ability to see the road clearly. Even when you're kind of going, I can't make this out.

Mike Forrester: Yeah. I don't think we hear it enough. It's almost like that band of brothers, right? You know, somebody who's got your back, they've got your side. They know you on a [00:21:00] level that few others will. And it's something that's so rare that it's become like an abnormal perspective when it should be something like expected. Like how are the men around me? Um, wanted to kind of go back. You had talked about your, your perspective was I have value when I hit $100,000. You then three months later jumped off and it's like, like you said, you're at $35,000 in credit card debt, right? How did you process it to say, No, I'm okay. I can stay on this path, even though what you're looking at to provide that validation, you're going in the opposite direction. How did you keep your eyes going in the way that you felt like you were supposed to go and being guided by Alan?

Mike Forrester: I think that makes a big difference because one, you're seeing his character, you know, his passion, his dreams. And it's so, so different than a lot of the people, you know, if we're at work around the water cooler, we're having Thanksgiving or whatever holiday with our family. The messages that you receive from somebody like Alan are like 180 degrees. Um, It almost mirrors, in fact, what you can get from your family and friends can mirror that internal negative self talk that's like play small because I'm feeling small. So stay with me and, uh, dude, and Alan is like the nitrous oxide that just gets you [00:27:00] going. So as you're going along, right, you're feeling this fulfillment in your kitchen. You're like going, wow, this is, this is very, very contrary to what I experienced before. Did things just run smooth or were there other things where it's like, you're still fighting to like, hold onto the new Kevin and that identity, that purpose, the drive? I mean, like, you know, did you, did you just kind of drive off into the sunset or was it, was it still work and kind of back, forward, back, forward kind of thing?

Mike Forrester: So when you're in those moments, [00:33:00] how do you know what to lean into and learn from? I mean, it's not just, Hey, I'm learning, but it can also be like your, your focus in learning, like, what are you learning from? What's, you know, like the, uh, specificity of it, right? Just going business, I mean, you could go anywhere and it could be totally vague. How do you determine, Okay, this is actually what I need to learn within this area of my life where I feel like I'm deficient, I'm still lacking, but I want to improve? Just like you did that day. How is it that you get that clarity to, to jump off in that direction?

Mike Forrester: Gotcha. That makes absolute sense. How are you, like, collecting and, and holding onto those things to look and see, like, Hey, Kevin, you've made it this far in this amount of time, uh, you know, almost like, uh, like what Alan did. Alan gifted you the reflection to say, Hey man, your environment's not changed, but you've changed. How do you keep that? Because dude, I know when I'm in like that spot of like, woe is me, you know, things are going rough. It is often hard to change my perspective. It's like a very intentional thing at this time. It's easier to flex that muscle, right? But It can become a challenge to go. Oh yeah, hey. And recognize those wins, those milestones that I've crossed. How are you going about doing that?

Mike Forrester: Yeah. It's hard to often give ourselves credit and grace. Um, you know, like you and I, I would give you grace in your struggle and encourage you more than what I would have, you know, for myself before. So well, last question, then we're going to jump into, uh, you know, how can, how can men reach out to you? What are, as you look back [00:41:00] and you've focused on learning, like what are two to three books that have really kind of been the foundational ones that have said, um, you can look and say, this is what helped me to develop personally and to not just, you know, know that you belong in the room, but also be present fully in that room?

Mike Forrester: Yeah, because we need simple. We overcomplicate things too quickly.

Kevin Palmieri: Yeah, of course. Simple is simple is the way I'm a simple creature. I like simplicity for sure.

Mike Forrester: Agreed. 100%. Well, Kevin, how can men reach out and connect with you outside of the podcast here?

Mike Forrester: Fantastic. Kevin, I so appreciate it. Thank you very much, brother.

Kevin Palmieri: It was my pleasure, Mike. Thank you for having me.