Are your dreams just ideas floating in your mind or are you ready to turn them into action? Most of us have big goals, but the real challenge is execution. How do you stay focused, avoid burnout, and actually get things done, especially when life gets messy or plans fall apart?
In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we’re joined by Joshua Kalinowski, former professional athlete, business leader, and the founder of Kalinowski Enterprises. Joshua shares what it really takes to “dream big and execute bigger”, his personal mantra that goes beyond motivation and into sustainable strategy. From building systems that support success to understanding your own rhythms and energy, Joshua talks about making smart, intentional moves even when life doesn’t go as planned. He opens up about losing his identity after baseball and how that led him to build not just businesses, but people from within.
You’ll also hear how his “PILL” framework (Painful, Intentional, Lazy, and Loving) can transform your daily habits into lasting personal wins. Whether you’re chasing growth in business, relationships, health, or simply looking to reclaim your time and energy, this conversation is a must-listen.Tune in now to learn how to build a life where your actions match your ambitions.
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How High Performers Break Through with Joshua Kalinowski
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. This year, on this podcast, we’ve been covering a lot about practical tools in which to help you get going. There’s always a period of time to dream, to plan, to figure out what you want is, but, at some point, you have to actually, as my last episode we discussed, take action, and taking action requires some practical tools. So, to talk a little bit more about some of these practical tools that you can use in order to dream big but execute bigger, I would like to invite onto the show Joshua Kalinowski, the president and visionary for Kalinowski Enterprises, which involves a lot of things so we’re going to cover that all in the episode.
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Joshua, welcome to the program.
My man, appreciate it. Man, it is so good to be here. Thanks for the intro.
Oh, yeah, wonderful. And let’s start right with this whole dream big, execute bigger. That’s kind of your motto.
It is, yes. Well, it really came, it’s just kind of, for me, it’s more of like just reminding me constantly that as much as I dream, I’ve got to take action on it so I’ve got to take action and execute on things at an even larger scale because, as we know, it takes so much more to actually get fulfillment out of that. It takes so much more to actually have these things that accomplishes so much harder so it’s just another like a mantra for me to remind myself that if I’m going to dream big, I’ve got to execute at an even bigger stage.
So, yeah, so that execute bigger part of it, and I think this is something that, obviously, we talk a lot about people who just talk up a storm and talk is cheap, anyone can say, “One day, I’m gonna write a book,” “One day, I’m gonna do the Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim,” as we kind of discussed before ––
Good example, I love it.
Yeah, so one day we’re going to do that, but most people acknowledge that you have to do something, but this whole execute bigger, do you encounter a lot of people who dream big but then execute, but their execution is not as big as it needs to be in order to make that dream a reality?
Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, you mentioned earlier, I’m the CEO and president of Kalinowski Enterprises and so I get to see a lot of entrepreneurs, and we hire a lot of people within our company so we go anywhere from real estate all the way to roofing and everything in between there. And so, yeah, you see so many people that say, “Hey, listen, I wanna be successful in this industry. I think I’m gonna be really good in this industry,” and you start to ask them, “Why do you think you’re gonna be good? Why is this industry something that’s attractive to you?” and they try to tell you a lot of like the reasons why in their mind that they’re going to be successful at it, but we see, oftentimes, those aren’t going to be the motivating factors. There’s going to be things, like it’s going to be eventually hard. You’re going to have to figure out, not everything about this industry is glamorous, and, in order to be successful, what are you willing to do in order to succeed? And like you were talking about, usually, what ends up happening is people are dreaming so large that they don’t even know how to start.
So, how does someone dream big and execute bigger without burning themselves out?
Well, you’re the expert in that, right? We should probably be talking more to you about this stuff. What I would say just complimentary to, you and I have a lot in common on literally how do we make sure that we’re performing and executing at a high level but also not burning ourselves out? How are we making sure that we are staying healthy? Both not only mentally but also physically. And so it is the staple in our company to make sure that our people are doing well emotionally as much as they are doing well in the business structure that they’re under. And so, so much of it is making sure that you’re surrounding yourself with good people, surrounding yourself with people that are positive and we have standards that we have at our company to make sure that we are all on the same page and if you don’t live by those standards, then you don’t really fit in our culture and so we really make sure and protect our culture so much. And because of our culture, because of the way that we actually are building our companies, we are attracting the right people and the people that are not that type of a person, that don’t want to actually improve, that don’t want to take action. They don’t really last too well in our environment because they don’t really enjoy the people they’re around so we kind of self-eliminate people for their sake and for our sake.
So, it sounds like what you’re saying is that being around the wrong people can be one of these kind of energy drains and these energy drains are these unnecessary contributors to burnout, like you can burn yourself out just by doing too much, doing too much all the time, but you can probably do a lot more if you eliminate some of these energy drains, such as a person that you’re perpetually in conflict with.
Yeah. They just did a recent study out there. You know in the classroom setting, you typically have the high achievers are usually gravitating closer towards the front of the room, so they did this test on that and what they found is that those that were sitting in the front of the room compared to those that were sitting in the back of the room, one where they were so much more focused and they understood the content and they actually were writing the content down, but they were 37 percent more successful in the areas that they were achieving than those that sat in the back of the room. It just goes to show you, you sit in front, one, for those purposes, but also now you’re surrounding yourself with other likeminded people that are high achieving people that want to actually learn, that want to get better, and then eventually want to implement as well.
So you say that in any classroom, does this apply to even something basic, like fourth grade?
It was talking about like college and actually people like post college, people that were going to seminars. So when they were like adults that were going for continuing education or adults that were going to like a seminar that was helping them improve in a certain expertise or area of business that they were in, those adults were actually seeing dramatically bigger improvements from those that actually stood closer to the actual stage.
Okay, and that could be anything, like I recently attended in Boulder, Colorado, a startup week, and startup week, we have one in Denver, they have them kind of all the country, it’s just a series of different workshops, panel discussions, presentations, all these things where you go into these different rooms and you sit there. So is that true even if something like that where, if I would look at the people who chose to sit in the back or the people who chose to sit in the front barring time constraints and all the people showing up late, that those people sitting in the front are more likely to at least get more out of that particular event?
Yep, 100 percent. Well, you think about it, they’re the most engaged. They’re the ones making eye contact with the speakers. The speakers are making eye contact with them as well too. They’re typically the ones in the rooms that are asking the questions when there’s a Q and A opportunity. So, yeah, you’re making a much deeper connection, and when you start to feel like that person as a speaker is actually looking at you, then you really are actually taking ownership of the things that are said.
So I talk a lot about these small habits and these small habit changes that whether or not that can actually have a much larger impact on your mindset over time if you implement a small change day in and day out, is sitting toward the front of the room at any kind of event, even if you’re, say, at a normal corporate job and they are bringing in people for some sort of corporate training from time to time, is getting in the habit of sitting in that front of the room something that could actually help people get more in the mindset of a high achiever?
What do you think people are going to start to say about you if you were the person that was staying in maybe in the middle of the room to the back of the room, and now, all of a sudden, they start to see you participate and actually sit at the front of the room? What do other people, what are your friends and your colleagues going to be saying about you? So their mindset is going to be shifting about you. That’s changing about you as well too, right? They’re going to be shifting. So then you, in turn, will actually start to gravitate towards that, to that shift as well. And so, as we start to convince ourselves because of the people that we surround ourselves with, we become better students, we become even more educated in that area, we become smarter in that area because we’re starting to pay attention more. So, yeah, it dramatically starts to shift.
Now, are there other kind of small, tangible tactics that people can use to develop that mindset? You talked about sitting in the front of the room, but whether it be, I don’t know, let’s say you’re doing an online thing where there’s no real front or back of the room but there’s other ways that you can participate in a better way that really kind of shows up, be more present?
Sure, yeah. Well, I mean, some very key things, especially if there is a little bit of loss of engagement because you’re not in person with people. One of the things I think that’s really important is that anytime that there’s a Q and A opportunity, is if you could be one of those people that is asking a specific question and base the specific question on something that was contextual, something that the speaker actually was talking about, all you’re doing now is enhancing your learning opportunity. You’re taking better notes. You’re actually thinking about the things that you’re writing down. You’re thinking about scenarios. Well, when you do that, your brain is engaged in that. Now, you’re committed to it. You lose the distractions. You’re not checking your phone, you’re not thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner that night. You’re super focused and intentional in that area, and so those are the ways that will help you and continuously help you grow. If you understand, like, hey, for the next 45 minutes, I’m super focused in this area and I want to make sure that I’m as intentional as I can be.
So you’re super focused, and I’m even envisioning, I know a lot of us got into those habits of, okay, say you’re listening to a meeting, you’re listening to an all-hands meeting, something that’s, I don’t know, hit or miss sometimes, and people will say, “I’m also gonna be checking my email.” Anytime you’re doing an online meeting, your web browser is right there so if you want to be reading an article while attending something, you can be, but then, obviously, you’re going to get less out of both.
Hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, you think about multitasking, it’s pretty much impossible. We can do it very average at best. There’s a great way to test for multitasking is you can easily count one to ten, one, two, three, four, five, six, you can easily do your ABCs, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but if you’re going to think about multitasking, try to go one, A, two, B, three, C, four D, how much more strain and stress does it take to do one letter and one number together coinciding throughout the entire alphabet? Well, it takes a lot. I mean, the first five to ten are easy, but once you get past ten, it’s extremely difficult.
When you’re at like, M, 13 ––
Yes. Exactly, right? So that just goes to prove the point of this idea of like multitasking and can you do it? Well, yes, we can all multitask. It’s not a matter as if we have the ability to do it, but are we efficient at that? Are we good at that? Are we really, truly retaining the information that we need to retain? Are we as productive as we should be given the situation that we’re under? So, if you want to be very productive, and that’s one thing I think most people get frustrated, burned out on, is that they have done so many things throughout the day, but they either, one, didn’t accomplish anything, or, two, they weren’t productive.
And what are these things that people commonly do of the people you encounter that are, okay, I’m checking everything off of my checklist but nothing’s actually moving the needle on anything.
Right. Yeah, well, first of all, I don’t think that they’ve identified the thing in their business that maybe makes them money. What are the one to three things that actually make money in your business? And we can all be busy throughout the day. We can all check our emails a thousand times. We can all reply to our emails a hundred times. We can all do posts and we can figure out, hey, I uploaded ten posts today. Okay, that’s fantastic. That’s great. You checked the boxes, as you say. But what were the things that were intentionally growing the business and/or helping you grow the financial part of your business today that only you can do? We avoid those, because, usually, those are the hard things to do.
We can do the easy things and there’s a million easy things to do, but the hard things we avoid, and that’s the things that you need to be more focused on. Share on XYeah. And I even see that in discussions, the challenging conversations, the conversation you have to have with someone where you’re not on the same page. There’s a common situation where someone has, say, a list of five tasks to do today and there are four really relatively easy, relatively straightforward ones but aren’t really going to go anywhere and then there’s that fifth one and that fifth one is the task of, like, I need to figure out a marketing campaign, I’m going to the most extreme, I need to figure out a marketing campaign and decide what firm I’m going to pay to execute it, which really matters a lot and that people will go to this, oh, other four tasks, such as I need to decide a new font for my email signature.
Yes, right, because it’s super important.
Is that a common situation that you find people in where they’re kind of operating where they’ve done those four tasks and then they put the big one off to last?
Yeah. I mean, of course, and especially if you look at employees, a lot of times, they’re all about getting tasks done but they don’t always tackle the most important thing that needs to be done in order to make their position even more valuable. And so there’s a couple things that I would say that are very key metrics that you should be looking at for not only your employees but also yourself. One is when is the most efficient time of your day that you should be tackling the hardest things? We know that people, some people are night owls, some people are morning people, some people love to do things before nine o’clock, some people like to do things right after lunchtime, and so I think that you have to figure out personally when is it that you’re able to carry the biggest load, the most important things? So find that time of the day that is that time for you. The other thing is making sure that you don’t give yourself too small of a time constraint. So, just like you said, I’ve got a half an hour to figure out this marketing plan. Well, that’s a two-hour project. I mean, it could be a two-day project. So, are you giving yourself adequate time in order to tackle that project? And so there’s an easy way to do is the four quartiles –– is it easy? Is it hard? Is it hard and easy? Is it hard and hard? And so as you have identified what quartile that certain project goes into, then you know how much time you need to be given, how much energy it’s going to take as well too. Maybe there’s a certain time during the week that works better for you. Maybe Mondays are crazy and if you try to do some of these things, then there’s no way, and then you’re going to feel like you’ve got an 80-pound gorilla on you so maybe it’s Wednesdays. Maybe Wednesdays are the times that you give two hours, I call it flame work, flame work is that time where like this actually excites you. This is part of your business that you know is going to help you grow. This is part of the big revenue stream for your business. Give yourself those two hours or those three hours on a Wednesday afternoon if that’s when you know that that’s when you’re going to be at your optimal best. So, if you can identify those two things, that makes it a lot easier to accomplish some pretty big rocks.
And so you talk about people, essentially circadian rhythms, some people naturally do their best work at certain times of day and others. Do you think that some of these quizzes that you see online where they give you like, okay, you’re a bear, a dolphin, an owl, or something else, you think that can be a good approximation or do you think that people need to like really dive in? Because I tend to have like kind of two spurts, one after breakfast when, especially if I did something to move my body in the morning, and then another not right after lunch but another, say, around four or five in the afternoon if I’m motivated where I can really start to dig into some stuff as well. And then we also talked about days of the week. So what does the process really look like when it comes to figuring out how someone should orient their day?
Taking quizzes is typically, let’s just say it’s a lead magnet for something else, for whatever, wherever you’re taking the quiz for. So just understand, somebody’s putting that out there because it’s a lead magnet. They either want your information or your email or they’re just trying to get you to get you to the next level of something so just understand that. I think some of them are great, they’re creative. Sometimes, it gives people a verbal word that will help them understand who they are a little bit better. Maybe just identify that for them, an identity for them a little bit. I wouldn’t put 100 percent faith into them but at least it maybe gives them a little bit of a foundation. I would say this. In order to find out exactly what your rhythm is, you talk about the circadian rhythm, in order to find your rhythm is just journal for one week. Journal for one week. You get up. How did you feel? You get up, what kind of energy did you have? What did you do? What were the things that drained you? What were the things that excited you? How did your morning go? What did you eat? When did you exercise? Just journal everything about your day, and then by the end of the week, you can reflect on it, and you can say, “oh my gosh, there’s some consistency here. I feel energized at two o’clock in the afternoon and that energy lasted for about two hours.” Then it’s personalized to you. The biggest mistake that we can make, we talk to our leadership all the time about this is that whatever excites you does not excite me, and I should not try to imitate that. I shouldn’t try to duplicate what you’re doing because that means nothing to me. It might give me some ideas and it might excite me about like, “Oh my gosh, you found your source of energy,” but I got to go out and try it personally. And so stop trying to copycat what other people are doing.
Pay attention to their rhythms and how they fill that cup again, but you have to make it unique to yourself because there’s only one you out there and so you are uniquely and wonderfully created. Share on XYeah. And sometimes it takes a good amount of experimentation, and I can give a quick example of my day because it is right around two in the afternoon here in Denver where I live and it took me a while to learn this, but, today, I had pasta for lunch but also made kale to go with it. This was a way of kind of preventing this right after lunch energy crash because if you just have carbs, and this has worked true for me, it might not be true for you. You might have a completely different thing about your day, but that’s like the level of detail it sounds like you’re talking about where you can kind of come up with these types of solutions where it’s like, “Okay, I’m gonna have pasta but I’m also going to have kale, because that balance is what makes my midafternoon not as shitty as it once was.”
Right. Well, you have to understand what season of life for you in as well too. Obviously, age makes a huge difference when it comes to energy and recovery and so we got to be paying attention to that as we’re getting into the next stage of our lives. But seasons change. We just were talking about that earlier, we’re just getting out of the winter and the spring, now we’re getting into summer. The days are longer. The sun is out so we get vitamin D, which is great. All of these things that are like energy filling to us, we should be outside more, we should be looking at getting ourselves grounded on a regular, consistent basis outside. Bike rides and morning walks, all those things. Those are different ways that we’re providing ourselves with even different kinds of energy. And so I think that, once again, recognize the season of life that you’re in, and even the season of the year that you’re in, and you’ll be able to make some great adjustments to it.
One of the reasons why I’m so passionate about people setting their own schedules is that we have this standard nine-to-five culture or eight-to five-culture, however people want to describe it, but that doesn’t always give people what they need. I mean, I don’t think there’s an accident that this mostly daylight, indoor work culture has produced a significant vitamin D deficiency in this country.
Hundred percent. Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more, yeah.
Yeah. So just the ability to even adjust and say, “Hey, now it’s May,” by the time this episode comes out it will be June but the time of recording it’s still the end of May, and we’ve come out of a period of time where you want to get out but you want to get out in, say, the middle of the afternoon, say, after lunch is the best time, but for some of us who live south of a certain line, we’re going to enter a season where you’re not going to want to go outside in the middle of the afternoon and you even want to switch your schedule to wake up in the morning and maybe do a bike ride before breakfast or bike ride somewhere to get breakfast and then come back in and get your work day in so you can get some outside, get some fresh air, get that vitamin D sunlight before it’s 95 degrees.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, going back to circadian rhythm, man, that’s exactly what you do. You got to start it right.
Yeah, 100 percent. So, tell us a little bit more about your organization. You talked a little bit about what type of businesses you work with. Do you work with certain sizes, certain industries?
Yeah, so, across our border now, we’re a holding company for multiple different types of real estate. So we have residential and commercial. We have property management, both long term and short term. We have roofing as well. So we do a lot of residential, primarily. We do do some commercial, and we do solar as well. Everything is very complimentary to each other. And over the last two years, we’ve been actually building out our –– because I’ve been getting into the health and wellness even more so, especially at this age of my life, I’ve seen the importance of it and how we need to really be very proactive in controlling our livelihood and our energy and our recovery, and so we had an opportunity to build a cold plunge here out of the Great State of Wyoming and we’ve got our Chilly Dip Ice Spas is one of our companies underneath the umbrella of Kalinowski Enterprises. So very excited about that. That is a space that I’ve appreciated being in for a number of years. My wife was an RN for a number of years as well too. And so that has been a passion of ours and we’re really excited about stepping into that because of just what it does for the longevity of our lives.
And so you work with a lot of people, with a lot of different business attributes. You talked about roofing, you talked about real estate and housing. Do you oftentimes work with entrepreneurs who are really trying to scale up their business or are you more focused on, say, building the person with the cold plunges and some of the other health and wellness institutes and saying, okay, whether you want to scale up, and I say this coming from Denver where we have a significant like tech world where everyone’s obsessed with the unicorn Ibotta and all that stuff, versus kind of, okay, whether you want to scale up, whether you want a lifestyle, whether you want to even just be more active in your community, take better care of your children, blah, blah, blah, it’s more about your health and wellness on a way larger scale than just going to the doctor whenever you get sick?
Fortunately, they actually coincide with each other really well. I think a lot of people that come to us say, “Hey, listen, I wanna scale this certain part of my business.” We’re able to put systems in place and really help them so that they have an understanding of exactly what is needed in order to get to that next level of success. But what ends up happening is as they grow and as they continue to become a better leader, they recognize that they themselves need the most change. They themselves need the most correction and healing in the sense in certain areas of their life and so I do a lot of coaching with people to make sure that they’re capable of reaching that next level of success without a breakdown, without having major setbacks, without having a divorce in their life, making sure we have priorities, making sure that we’re continuously doing the things, like what’s the greater purpose? What’s the greater meaning for why you want to scale so much? Once we discover that, once we really figure out the root of that, it makes it so much easier, and we get to be a part of that entire journey of growing the company but also most certainly growing the individual.
And in growing the individual, and I’m thinking about this from the standpoint of someone who has a business, a relationship, family, house to maintain in some sort of capacity too, there’s all these things, does a lot of it become a discussion of what you stop doing, what you kind of offload in your life, whether it be like the stereotype of a business starts succeeding and the first thing you offload is accounting, usually, and then, soon after that, for a lot of people, it’s marketing or some form of operations and stuff like that? Yeah, how often do you say, “Okay, well, you just need to stop spending so much of your energy on X, Y and Z.”
Sure. Yeah, we actually call it we have to exercise our no muscle.
Yeah.
And we’re so used to saying yes, especially as entrepreneurs, yes to these opportunities, yes to these things and, yes, I’ll put more on my plate, and, yes, I’ll put more on my shoulders, and, yes, I’ll take responsibility for that.
And so, yeah, I would say that is a very, very good recognition of a lot of the growth that companies actually see is because they’ve exercised this idea of saying no to so many more things.
Yeah, and what I always think about that is kind of a threshold, a threshold around alignment, because I think everybody knows how to say no to that thing that you really, really don’t want to do, unless someone’s really pressuring you and that gets into a whole unhealthy relationship discussion that’s a little outside bounds, but like –– and everybody, I think, regardless if there’s the right alignment, you’re going to want to say yes, but there’s always going to be all those things kind of in the middle.
How do you say yes to multiple things that are actually really good? Well, you unfortunately do have to say no to something. And here’s the thing too is that it’s not no permanently, it’s just no for now. What are the things you can say no to for now? How do you sacrifice the moment for the future? And so that’s another thing that I think is another level of the ability to be able to say no is understanding like we’re not saying that you can’t have that in two years or five years, we’re just saying no right now and this time in your life because of what you’re trying to build, that’s not a good idea.
And then I also want to talk a little bit about your story, how you came to the mindset that you have now, the mindset that you help your clients with, and even your kind of business ideas?
Sure, yeah. I’ll give you the brief history myself. So, for many years, I had the opportunity to chase my dream of professional baseball. I thought that was my purpose, I thought that was exactly why I was created, is to go and just do this life of baseball. And at the age of 26, that dream was over. And, unfortunately, when the jersey came off, so much of who I was and what I thought I was came off. My identity got hung up with the jersey as well too. And so for 14 years after that, I really went on this internal journey of who am I? Do I have purpose? Do I have meaning? Did I ruin that? What am I supposed to do? How do I find fulfillment? And because of all of those things that I did to fix myself, I was really able to figure out the things that were going to make the next chapter of my life successful, the things that I needed to be focused on. So understanding my identity is not in the work that I do, my identity is not in the thing that I should have to show up for for nine-to-five or eight-to-five, as you kind of talked about earlier, but it’s more of like who the person that I’m developing internally, and also who do I get to help develop along the way? Who are the people that I get to do this journey with? And so to be able to prioritize and make sure that I have the people that I’m surrounding myself that I want to be surrounded by is vitally important to me. And what are we building and why are we building? What’s the purpose behind that? So, so much of our stuff is because of a just cause. So much of it is because of the mission that we put forward, and as long as I stay aligned with that, then I’ve got tremendous fulfillment as we continue to tackle very hard things, of course, on a daily basis.
Yeah, and that had to be a very big disruption. I think a lot of people out there listening probably have at some point in their lives undergone a very significant disruption in one way or another, that thing that you thought you were meant to do, the thing that you dreamed of doing, all of a sudden, you’re not able to do it for one reason or another. Maybe someone had a business of their own fail and the market kind of just changed and, all of a sudden, they had to adjust, anything like that. What was that process like for you to kind of have to regroup after baseball ended for you?
Sure, yeah. Well, once again, a lot of it is just so much internal within myself. What I recognized was, one, is that I really wasn’t on an island all by myself. Most of us feel like we’re the only ones going through that emotion, only ones going through that devastation. And what I recognized was that just because my setback or my, quote/unquote, “failure” happened to be baseball, there were other people that had gone through tragedies as well too. So, you talk about divorce, talk about the loss of a loved one, you talk about people that are in the military and then now they are now in civilian life, changing careers, no longer able to do that one career that they were doing, because certain things happen. There became more of a community, other people that were going through the challenges that I had been going through as well too. So that work started to really kind of manifest in myself. The other thing is just kind of forgiveness. I had to have forgiveness in me, personally, of I always look back and there’s always regret. There’s always things you wish you could have done differently or even better. But I had to like –– I had to recognize that that was a part of my journey. Those are things that I needed to go through in order to become the person I am today and so I can either use that to the betterment of my story or I can use that to the detriment of my story and I wanted to use it as the betterment of my story. And I would say the most impactful thing is that this idea of purpose. I think so many of us get lost in this idea of purpose. And don’t get me wrong, there are a few people out there that do know their purpose. They really, truly do, and that, I think, is amazing. For myself and for a lot of other people that have had hardships in life that have kind of maybe derailed them or taken them on a different path, purpose is one of those things that they just can never grasp and it’s always like this emptiness that they have inside their life. So I really believe that purpose is felt when you get older, when you’ve gone into that next chapter of your life where you now get to review and look in the rearview mirror and say, “Oh, that makes sense.” I can see exactly why I had to go through that struggle. I can see why I went through that failure. I can see why I did that. Oh, my gosh. I can see the fruits of all of the things that have happened in my life. Now I recognize the purpose for that. Now, in this moment, in these times, in this season of life, it’s all about potential. What is your potential in this moment? What is your potential in this chapter of life, this season that you’re in? And as long as I keep chasing my potential in this moment, it keeps me focused now. I don’t have to look two years, five years, ten years down the road. I get to be present now. I get to enjoy the moments. I get to enjoy the kids, my kids at the age that they’re in, my wife, the age that she’s in, and the marriage that we have right now, because I see the potential in the moment, not the purpose of the greater scheme of things, that, to be honest with you, can change. It can change.
What did you encounter as a bigger issue for most of the people you work with, looking forward or looking backward? Because there are also people who are as much as some people are looking to the future, being like what’s the purpose? What are we creating? What’s 2035 going to look like? There are also people who are sometimes more ruminated on the past and being like, “Oh, I wish it was like when I was in high school,” or something.
Yeah. Dan Sullivan has a great book out there called 10x Is Easier Than 2x and he’s also got another book called The Gap and the Gain and I would say that most people live in the gap. The gap is exactly where you don’t want to be. You’re not in the past but you do reflect on it, of course, but you’re looking into the future and you see how far you’ve still yet to go and you don’t appreciate the fact that you’ve gotten as far as you have. So I think so many people look at where they’re at and they feel like they’re not as accomplished as they should be. They don’t feel like life is where it should be. They don’t feel like their finances is where it should be. And so they just live in this gap of uncertainty and they don’t give themselves enough credit for how much they’ve grown and how far they’ve actually gone. So I think most of us, myself included, at times, can live in the gap, for sure.
Yeah, and I have a great analogy from cycling, one of my favorite outdoor activities, where you’re going up a big climb, and usually there’s switchbacks, at least in the part of the country we live in, and when you’re cycling up switchbacks, you’re definitely kind of looking forward and looking at the switchbacks ahead but if you stop, if you just take off your bike and you look over the mountain and you see, every once in a while I do this, I look back over the mountain and I see the switchbacks that represents the climbing that I’ve already done, the 1,200 feet of elevation I’ve already gained versus the 1,200 I have to go, and it can put things into a way more satisfying perspective, especially looking at how beautiful some of the area is. But, yeah, I’m guessing a lot of people, they just don’t do that until you have some sort of reason for thinking about, okay, who was I five years ago?
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we don’t appreciate the hard work that we’ve actually committed and have actually done.
Yeah. And the weird thing is that, in this era of particularly social media but digital media in general, there’s always that person to compare yourself to as well. There’s always that person who achieved more younger or achieved more quicker or somehow just hit a lucky streak.
Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah. Comparison is the root of all the stealing of joy, man. So, yeah,
Yeah. With your clients, do you also share with them a bit about how to appreciate the growth they’ve already had? Is that something that you brought into the program itself?
Sometimes you have to have borrowed confidence, and so I think one of the jobs as a mentor and somebody that is going along the journey of you, like when you have a mentor, your mentor should be giving you that confidence, because you might not necessarily have proven to yourself that you can do it yet, maybe you don’t have credibility within yourself. So that’s, once again, why it’s so important to be surrounding yourself with really good people. So, borrowed confidence is really key at the beginning stages. People that say, “Hey, listen, you’ve got this. I’m gonna be alongside of you,” “Hey, you’re fully capable of doing it,” and with that confidence, what it does is it actually brings in accountability, because you don’t want to let that other person down. They have confidence in you. They believe in you. You can let yourself down, you’ve let yourself down for years, potentially, but you don’t want to let that person down.
For anyone out there listening, what would be the type of people that they should be looking for or is that going to vary, be different from person to person?
I think there’s five areas of life that you should always be constantly working on and evaluating in your life, so you should be constantly looking at your faith, so the internal faith, so I’m a believer but I think a lot of people not only need some type of substance in that thing, which is an external, but you need the internal thing. Belief in yourself. I have a belief in a higher being so I think faith is super important. I think family is super important. So whether it’s yourself or those that you’ve surrounded yourself with, family is super important. So faith and family, fitness, finance, and your future. Those are five areas of life that are super important. If you don’t have your fitness, if you don’t have your health, man, there’s that great saying, it’s like if you have your health, you have a thousand wishes. If you don’t have your health, you have one wish. And so what are you doing to make sure that you’re structuring those five foundations solidly? And so when it comes to surrounding yourself with people, identify the person. Identify the person that financially has the success that you’d like to have.
You will bear the same fruits as those that you surround yourself with. And so if you want to be financially successful, find people that are financially successful, and you’ll start to bear those same fruits. Share on XIf you have people that are very good husbands or mothers or daughters or whatever it is that you want to be great at, find people in that family aspect. And so I would just say, you have five areas of life that you could be focused on and not one person is typically going to be able to do all five of those but you can most certainly find somebody that’s really good at one of them.
Yeah. And then as far as the family aspect, unfortunately, there are some people out there who haven’t had their best family experiences, for one reason or another. Is that something people can find anywhere? Because there’s blood relatives and then I know there’s a lot of people who find other groups of people that they consider like family, being the people that you agree to share a significant aspect of your life with.
Well, family is community. Who is in your community? I’ll give you a great example of what we’re talking about is that my folks, they left the state of Wyoming, left all of their family there, went out to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then they moved to Casper, Wyoming, which there was nobody there. They didn’t know anybody. No family was there, no aunts and uncles. We didn’t grow up with aunts and uncles. We didn’t grow up with cousins. We grew up with community. So, friends of my parents became our moms and dads and stepdads and our aunts and our uncles and their children became our cousins and nieces and nephews, all these things. And so that’s the way we grew up. And so when I say family, I’m talking about community. Who’s people in your community? They say blood is thicker than water and I would say that’s not necessarily accurate, because some of my closest friends that I would consider family are not related to me at all.
Yeah. And it also sounds like you’re saying that that should be somewhat of a conscious choice of who you want to be that community, that’s, okay, like you probably see a bunch of communities in whatever town or city you live in, and you’ll decide, is this one for me? Is this one taking me where I want to go?
Hundred percent, yep.
And then if anyone out there is also struggling through a season similar to the one you struggled with where, okay, your first plan for life or even your most recent plan for life just fell apart, and in the spot where I feel shaken, I feel beaten up, and need to kind of come up with a new plan, I need to figure out my new purpose, what do you suggest that they do to kind of start that process?
Yeah, there’s two things that I think were vitally important in my growth and my discovery is, one is I think a daily brain dump, especially in those seasons, is so important. A daily brain dump is literally just opening up a notebook, getting a pen, and then just writing your thoughts out, writing the words that come to mind.
Fear has no place on paper. A lot of the things that we fear, when you write them out, they actually seem they’re able to be overcome or they’re achievable. Share on XAnd so I would say, you want to get this frustration out. You can’t bottle that. You need to get that out. So, a daily thing of that is probably very much needed in a season of distress and the million thoughts that are going on in your mind every day. The other thing is, and this is an acronym that I use because I would go through seasons where I just felt like I wasn’t doing anything, like I wasn’t accomplishing anything and the days just became kind of worthless and that’s really not a healthy place to be so you got to figure out daily wins, small wins. When you have major setbacks in life, nothing seems like a win. And so the daily win for me became this idea of a PILL. So every day I would take this pill, and the pill is an acronym that stood for painful, intentional, lazy, and loving. So every single day, I would do something painfully uncomfortable, something I just didn’t want to do. So we talked about like maybe it’s that hard conversation you needed to have. For me, it was cold showers. I needed to take a cold shower every single day because I didn’t like the cold. I hated the cold. The cold was the enemy, and it was the one thing that I could control. I could actually put my body through voluntary stress. I was already stressed enough as it was. And the funny thing about the body, the amazing thing about the body is that you can voluntarily put yourself through stress and then, eventually, your capacity for stress is so much greater. So doing something painful that you really don’t want to do every single day is really vital to your growth. Intentional is extremely important too, because a lot of the times, we’ll just go through the day and there’s nothing intentional about it. So the intentionality behind that day is, “Hey, do I need to send that letter? Do I need to make that phone call? Do I need to send an email? Is there somebody I need to pour in? What’s the intentional thing that I can do today?” Lazy, of course, is something like we all are lazy, taking out the trash, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, whatever it is, just do something lazy and I guarantee you’ll find something that you’ll have accomplished every single day. And the last thing is love. We do not treat ourselves right. The conversations in our heads, the things that we say to ourselves, they’re horrible. We’d never say them to anybody else. So we got to treat ourselves better. So what can you do on a daily basis that you absolutely love to do? Now, this doesn’t have to be two hours. It could be 15 minutes. Do you need to go to the gym? Is that good? Do you want to go on a run? On a bike ride? What is the things that you actually enjoy doing that you are not allowing yourself to do? And so if you can just simply take that acronym, the PILL, on a daily basis, you do that for one week, I promise you, you look back on it and you’re like, “Oh my gosh. Every day something good happened. Every day something got accomplished. I feel like I actually had some wins.” Journal it for sure. Make sure that you journal it. And it is amazing how you start to stack that and you’ll eventually start to see, you’ll start to get better and you’ll start to make movement going forward. It’s a sense of accomplishment.
And one of the things that sounds like that does over time is also kind of recalibrate your thoughts. I remember reading somewhere that for the average person, 80 percent of their thoughts are negative. And I worked hard to get my thoughts to where they’re kind of near parity. I’m trying to decide if 50/50 is the right amount or if I want to try to make it more like 80/20 in the other direction but even like everything you said in this PILL acronym is going to gradually take someone who maybe in a really bad place, there’s probably people out there who have 90, 95 percent negative thoughts or even worse, start to move that in a better direction.
Well, I think if I can just kind of compliment what you’re saying there, I think one of the things in order to get out of that mindset is that you got to stop listening to yourself and you got to start talking to yourself. When we talk to ourselves, we can control the narrative. When we listen to ourselves, we’re oftentimes not controlling the narrative. And so what are the things that you can say to yourself intentionally, on purpose? Write it down. Have a mantra that you say every single day to yourself. I actually still have this on my window when I was going through those challenging seasons of life is I would have a mantra that was talking about that I am a good father, that I am a good husband, that I am a good leader, that I am a good listener. All of these things that I wanted to embody that I didn’t feel like I was embodying, I would repeat it to myself, I would say it to myself, and, eventually, I started convincing myself that I was a good husband and I was a good father and I was a good leader and I was a good listener and all these things, and that became and embodied me, right? So I would say start talking to yourself more, especially if you find yourself in a season where you’re just going to have a little bit more despair than normal.
You can create a better narrative for yourself, then whatever it is, because, on this podcast, we don’t necessarily advocate a certain specific course of action in the sense that maybe you want to start your own business, maybe you don’t, maybe you just want to reorient your life in some other kind of way, maybe you just want to have a better community in your neighborhood, maybe you just want to find those people or maybe you just want a little bit more fun, a little more creativity, a little more silliness in your life. But regardless of what that is that you want, being able to believe in yourself a bit more, you’ll be able to create it, and, hopefully, be able to execute bigger on the dreams that you have.
I like it. You brought it all full circle, my man.
That’s what I was trying to do. Joshua, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us a little bit about what we can do in these moments of –– well, first of all, in the moments of despair we all have. We all are going to have that at some point in our life, if you haven’t already, but also what we can do kind of normally on a day-to-day basis to execute better in life so even if you’re in like a more neutral or even more positive phase, there’s still things you can off board, there’s still things you can do to preserve your energy better, there’s still saying yes to the right things and no to things that are not going to serve you well, that anyone could kind of benefit from.
Amen to that, man. Yep, I agree.
That’s wonderful. And then I’d also like to thank everybody out there for listening today. Hopefully, this is going to help you get to the place you want to be. Hopefully, it’ll help you dream and, hopefully, you also praise yourself for choosing to listen to this type of message as opposed to anything that could be considered brain rot or even stuff that’s going to make you feel more fearful, more disempowered and more paranoid.
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About Joshua Kalinowski
Josh Kalinowski, affectionately known as JK, is the husband to Kate, his rockstar wife, father to 4 active and amazing children, and a driven entrepreneur. As President and visionary for Kalinowski Enterprises, a holding company for CB The Legacy Group, CBC Cornerstone, Legacy Property Management, STR, MC Roofing, MC Sun Solar, and Chilly Dip Ice Spas. Josh’s mission is to help others create lives of exceptional impact, influence, and faith. All while building their legacy.
With over 20 years of real estate and business experience, Josh has built businesses, led teams, and developed people across numerous markets. His expertise is as diverse as his companies, making him a key figure in multiple industries. Before real estate, he was a professional athlete within the Colorado Rockies and Boston Redsox organizations, where he learned the value of discipline, resilience, and high-level performance—lessons he applies to his business.
Josh speaks life into entrepreneurs who feel stuck, burned out, and overwhelmed. By providing them clear strategies and the right tools, Josh shows firsthand how to grow, make more money, and regain control. His approach is straightforward and results-driven, designed for those ready to take action.
His philosophy is simple: Dream Big. Execute Bigger.