Episode 29: Alexi Panos

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Alexi Panos is a motivational speaker, author, and self-proclaimed truth junkie. Her mission is to “make personal development mainstream by synthesizing big ideas into fun, bite sized nuggets of goodness that spread throughout the world and create a ripple effect of positivity and love.” She achieves this through “speaking and facilitating workshops around the globe, dishing insights from my personal quest for truth in my books + blogs, inspiring viewers as host of History Channel’s OPERATION BUILD and knocking people’s socks off with my energetic new YouTube Series.”

She is the co-founder of The Bridge Method and The Bridge Experience. The Bridge Experience is “a fully immersive and high octane human potential training that yields incredible results.”

She founded her non-profit, E.P.I.C (Everyday People Initiating Change), about ten years ago and it has been drilling clean water wells in South Africa ever since – among other things.

 

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

00:42 – Introducing our guest for today, Alexi Panos: founder of the epic, non-profit movement – Everyday People Initiating Change – and co-creator of the Bridge Method. She first read Tony Robbins at age 8.

01:44 – Alexi herself tells us her story; since she was young, she was passionate and committed to making a difference. She admits that she’s always had that hint or feeling that she was meant to do something big, but she didn’t know what it was. Due to her mother being a talent agent, Alexi started acting and modelling and earning money at a very young age. Her parents taught her that if she wanted anything, she had to work for it – a lesson that has stuck with her up until now. A few years later, she moved to New York City, got into the music industry on a dare, and travelled the world for two years with a major recording artist.

02:49 – Her turning point happened on a trip to Africa. Having travelled the world with top-of-the-billboard-charts musicians earning millions of dollars, Alexi travelled in style and luxury, living the rockstar lifestyle and partying every night. One night, as they’re leaving a nightclub, she sees a little shanty village just as she’s about to board their million-dollar tour bus. The juxtaposition of those two worlds served as her wake-up call. “Wait a second,” she says. “Like, whose life am I living? What am I doing? What happened to that girl who wanted to give back and contribute and make a difference?” That led her to start her non-profit about ten years ago, and they’ve been drilling clean water wells in South Africa ever since.

03:42 – Currently, aside from her non-profit, Alexi helps people uncover their best life. The best part of that, she shares, is that she doesn’t necessarily feel like she’s teaching people something they don’t already know. She believe people are born with the intrinsic knowledge they need – what she’s doing, she says, is simply helping them remember.

05:23 – Alexi goes into a bit more detail about her turning point. Then 19 years of age, she thought was experiencing freedom: she was travelling the world, she had financial abundance, and she was living this incredible career. Despite this – she felt trapped. She felt like she was a prisoner to something that she had created, and she wasn’t living her true, authentic life. The life she was living at that time wasn’t in alignment with what she truly wanted. She describes her soul as unhappy at that time. So she took the biggest risk she ever had to take: leave everything she worked for, built, created … and start over.

09:56 – To the person listening, the person who knows that the life he or she is currently living is not the life they want in fifty or sixty years … Alexi has some advice on stepping out of the life you know and taking the plunge to a better, more fulfilled life. First, you have to know what you want. “Find something that you’re so passionate about,” Alexi says. “That you’re so electrified about, that you’re so on fire about, that you’ll get up every single day and do it for free. Because for the first two years? You’re going to.” Second, bootstrap. Learn to moonlight. Stick to what you’re currently doing to earn money, but work on your new project on the side. If you have a 9-to-5, Alexi says, you’d better have a 5-to-9.

12:06 – “You’re going to sacrifice a lot. You’ve gotta give up to go up.”

12:25 – Third; you’re going to attract people who think like you do. People who get your work-ethic and your passion.

12:46 – “Find out what you want and then just take action. And be willing to sacrifice, period. Most people want it come easy and overnight, but it takes work.”

13:21 – Alexi explains what she means by “a higher self” – by using an Oak tree seed to illustrate her point

14:22 – “When we’re in fear, when we’re in scarcity, when we’re in doubt, when we’re in hesitation and procrastination – all those things that keep us so far away from the life that we wanna live? It’s all ego.”

16:01 – For the people who want to make a change but don’t want to let go of the past – for whatever reason – Alexi shares some advice. It’s different for everyone, but she shares two things. First, whatever you worry about – money, scarcity, etc. – will haunt you and will continue to haunt you until you stop focusing on what you don’t have and start focusing on what you do. For the people who don’t want to let go of the careers they’ve spent so long building up … you don’t have to.

16:34 – “Whatever you say, is. So whatever you’re constantly putting out into the universe, the universe is constantly giving you more of.”

16:56 – Alexi shares why taking action is just. So. Important. Small, incremental steps towards your goal make all the difference.

18:26 – Time Travel Moment, Part 1: If you could go back in time ten, twenty years, what advice would you give your younger self? Stop worrying so much about what everyone else thinks. They’re not thinking about you.

19:57 – Time Travel Moment, Part 2: If you were starting over from scratch today, with nothing but your experience, what would be your first steps to recreating what you built? Alexi answers that she would just start. Just take action. Nothing more, nothing less.

22:55 – Alexi and Preston Smiles have a gift for the iisteners! For everyone in New Zealand and Australia, a whopping 70% off tickets to their 2-Day Tour; The Bridge Experience.

26:37 – Start of the QuickFire Questions: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

26:53 – What’s one personal habit that you believe massively contributes to your success?

27:05 – What book would you recommend? Conversations with God, Neil Donald Walsch

27:19 – Who is your hero?

28:31 – Alexi leaves the audience with this last bit of advice: be true to who you are, because those who have it all choose to have it all.

Alexi is “insanely committed to empowering ONE BILLION people to harness their unique gifts in order to create a Compound Inspiration Effect that truly changes our world.” To find out more about her and her non-profit, visit http://www.alexipanos.com/