The Never Settle Show | Dreams Require Nightmares

The Never Settle Show is for anyone ready to change their life but feeling a bit lost, stuck, or unsure where to begin. Hosted by Daniel Valencia, this podcast is your support system in audio form. Through Daniel’s own stories of sacrifice, resilience, and life lessons, you'll find the inspiration and guidance to take that first step on your own journey. No more going it alone—let's do this together.

What is The Never Settle Show ?

The Never Settle Show is for anyone ready to change their life but feeling a bit lost, stuck, or unsure where to begin. Hosted by Daniel Valencia, this podcast is your support system in audio form. Through Daniel’s own stories of sacrifice, resilience, and life lessons, you'll find the inspiration and guidance to take that first step on your own journey. No more going it alone—let's do this together.

Daniel: 00:00

Anything worthwhile is absolutely terrifying to actually go after, and this is the part of life that I'm learning. And the funny thing about that is if you take all of the things that I've been working on for the past five years separately, the different projects, the one that have done well, the ones that have failed, the things that I've gone after, you'd think that this lesson would be something that's super ingrained in me and is the expectation for every single adventure, endeavor, whatever you wanna call it that I've done. And yet, right now is probably one of the scariest times that have been in because it feels like for the first time in my life, there's actual gravity on how this will affect me. Right? Because I'm no longer this 22 year old kid that lives with his parents anymore and doesn't really have to pay for anything in the sense of if everything went to shit, my parents would for sure at least help me out in some capacity and this has happened before.

Daniel: 01:04

This is all of the responsibility falls on my shoulders and I have a team around me that supports me, but realistically there is no is no out unless I either quit and give up on everything that I've ever wanted and dreamed of or I keep trudging through this mud. And it brings to light or it brings to mind this whole idea that if your dreams are truly something that you want to go after and they're worth it, then they should absolutely terrify you when you're starting to go for them. Right? Because we all have these dreams, these aspirations that we look forward to. We say when we're a kid, oh, I want to be a doctor.

Daniel: 01:47

I want to be a singer. I want to be an actor. I want to, you know, build a business, I want to do this, that or the other. And realistically, all of those dreams are are true, right? They're facts.

Daniel: 02:00

If you go to a football field for a recruitment tournament or a skills contest or whatever, every single kid that's playing there probably has the exact same dream. They all show up to that day thinking, want to make it to the NFL. I want to become the best of the best, become a pro, but realistically, not every single one of them is going to make it. Right? Maybe a fraction of those kids in that area, and they're just a sample size of the the hundreds of thousands, if not close to millions of kids that have the exact same dream.

Daniel: 02:32

One, there's 53 spots on a roster, 32 teams, I'm not gonna do the math right here because it's more than just what am I mentally capable of at this moment, but it's a very finite amount of spots. And it's not that the dream is, oh, I wanna go play in the Canadian Football League or I just wanna play d one. Those are all separate dreams in and of itself, but the actual dream of becoming the highest version of whatever it is you want to enjoy, That's the important thing to keep in mind right now. And I'm thinking of that because for those of you that don't know, and if you don't know, then that means that I have not done a good job. Me and my buddy Sean have opened up a gym, and there's a lot of things we're learning from it, a lot of growing pains.

Daniel: 03:17

And if you thought you were good at anything, find out very quickly that you're not as good as you need to be, you're not as good as you think you are and you're very far away from the goal that you're set out to be. And as much as you want to make that finish line become shorter, the gap between where you are now and what you want to achieve involves a lot of things that requires more than what you are and who you are and what you're capable of. And so that gap only intensifies with more knowledge. Because if you say that, and I could use, let's use marketing as an example, and this is a form of marketing if we're being honest, putting a podcast, putting a reputation out there, telling you about what's going on. It's how do I relay the message that I have and what I believe in and send it to so many people that at some point they want to come and get more information, if not sign up with us.

Daniel: 04:12

Right? That's really the big picture of marketing is how do I have my passion, my dreams, and my aspirations for what people can do with fitness reach to a bigger audience of people who are strangers at this point or maybe friends and family who I think it might be opportune to. And so I think that if I'm just posting stuff or I'm just talking about it, it's one thing. But realistically, it takes all of these other efforts and all of this other education and all this just sheer amount of work in order to actually market at a decent level. Right?

Daniel: 04:46

And I'm just using that as an example because you can use that in anything in life. Now, I'm about five minutes in right now and I have not introduced myself yet. Hello everybody that is possibly listening and or watching. I am Daniel Valencia. I am the owner slash co owner of H and F.

Daniel: 05:03

We are a fitness company. We are a gym and with this podcast, The Never Subtle Show, I will never run ads. I may talk about my gym, I may invite you in, but I will never sell you anything on here because the second that I start to put somebody else's brand or somebody else's thoughts or somebody else's products in what this is, that's the second that I have to dilute my message because either they respect what I say and they pay me money or they don't respect what I say and I have to deal with the repercussions of that, right? And I'd rather never have that be a thing. So whatever I make, call that be let that be the sponsor of the show because that's what's going to pay me essentially.

Daniel: 05:39

But enough said right there. I've been wanting to get back to doing these podcasts for a long time. And it's one of those things where I think about it at least once a week, if not once a day of, oh, I should record an episode, I should put something out there, I should talk about this, I should talk about that. And I never get to it because part of me feels that I am uninteresting right now, that I do not have things to talk about, that I do not have things of value, or that I have to do this giant backlog of scripting and editing and trying to get the perfect thing out, and I'm starting to lose what has worked for me so much in the past which is just being myself on here. Granted, when I talk in this podcast form, the way that I talk is for sure edited, right?

Daniel: 06:32

Because I'm trying to be more clear, I'm trying to be more precise with my words, take out the likes and ums and ahs as I talk, but it doesn't take away from the way that I feel, right? And above anything else, that's what I'm trying to talk about. And so going back to my first topic right here, which I have my notes below me on this desk right here, is the first thing I wanted to get after is like, your dreams should scare you, right? When you're going after your dreams, they should feel like a nightmare. And that makes me think of my buddy DC, because when we're going for something and we're actually trying to achieve a goal, it's it's very much like that Rocky montage, right?

Daniel: 07:09

Because we we we want that Rocky montage. We want the, oh my God, I'm putting in the work right now, and then boom, cut. Now we're at the fourteenth round and we're holding on and like we're rocky. Yeah. And that all happens within the span of maybe an hour.

Daniel: 07:22

The montage itself is like five, ten minutes and it's like all bad ass and great. But the montage takes years, if not decades. Right? It's like this time skip of events and it's just showing the snapshots of the training, snapshots of maybe the low, snapshots of highs, know, the celebrations, the pitfalls, the bad nights, the great times with friends. It shows all of those things in a cute buttoned up bow when realistically that entire sequence takes months, years, maybe even decades to achieve X result, right?

Daniel: 08:08

And so we get lost a lot in how long something should take. And I'm finding myself feeling that a lot right now, feeling this frustration of thinking that, oh, I should be way further in life or I should be way further in the business or I should already be hitting these metrics and not worrying about these things and spinning myself in circle for trying to get results for something that I have simply not done yet or maybe I just haven't earned yet or we're not in this, you know, there's so many ways to cut this, know, to skin this cat on how to explain this, but realistically, like this is the montage. Where I'm at right now is the Rocky montage And rather than being glorious and beautiful and so motivational, it it feels like shit. It feels like a nightmare. It feels like I'm dragging myself through mud.

Daniel: 08:56

Although, you know, if you're working towards something really cool, I will say that the suffering that you do during it doesn't necessarily feel as bad as the suffering you do when you're doing something you don't care about and you feel the same way. Right? So But it doesn't take away from the fact that it's it's this trudge. Like you're walking through mud and every time that you feel like you've taken 10 steps, you look back and there's only two paces behind you, right? And you realize that it took you 10 steps worth of energy to get those two steps and by going forward on the path you want, there's still an an endless amount of steps you have to take which are gonna cost even more energy but you have to be able to do it.

Daniel: 09:43

You have to want to be able to do it, and you have to realize that you will not know how many steps it's gonna end up taking until you reach the end of whatever the end might be for you, and that that's the path you have to commit to. Because the second that you take a 100 steps and you realize you've only moved 12, if you look back and you give up and you say, that's enough. All that energy that you've wasted taking those 100 steps become resentful and meaningless, and you can't even start to imagine the finish line because all you're worried about is the hundredth step that you've taken and start to think that was too hard. This isn't worth it if I have to take a 100 more, 200 more. And so remembering where you are, that you are on your hundredth step and that's okay.

Daniel: 10:38

That you might continue on to a thousand steps and that's okay. But the one thing that you're not going to do is just stop and die in your tracks. That's the tough part. I've been in a little bit of a lull this week. I'll I'll be honest, a little bit of a lull where I felt like I am incompetent and not doing enough and that the harder that I push, it seems like the thicker that mud gets.

Daniel: 11:09

Almost almost as if every single step I make requires 14 times the energy that a normal one does. And I might be making slow progress an inch at a time, but it's hard to visualize that, right? When we're moving at miles per hour, that inch means nothing. It doesn't look like anything. But the reality is it's like a football game where every inch matters and you have to be able to respect that.

Daniel: 11:35

And getting that perspective under control takes a lot. And now I'm going shift gears here a little bit because the word perspective made me remember something that I wanted to talk about, that I wanted to say. On the drive home was on TikTok there's this lady that is in love with her therapist or her psychiatrist or whatever and she's talking about how, oh he asked me all these questions which is his fucking job. He's so interested in my life, every time I speak he writes something down, he looks forward to the next time we're going to see, and they're all things that if you were to come to me, or if I was a psychiatrist or something like that, the way that I treat a client would be, we're going have our meetings, every time you say something that I deem is worth writing down or a necessity to figure out what's going on here, I'm going to write down and of course I'm going to schedule our next appointment because A, I need to get paid, B, we need to figure out what it is. But this lady's perspective on all this is that this psychiatrist is in love with me, he's teasing me, he's leading me on, and it's these two differing perspectives.

Daniel: 12:45

Granted, the majority of people see the perspective of the psychiatrist where it's, No, you're a patient. My job is to listen to you. My job is to understand you. My job is to figure out what's going on. Right?

Daniel: 12:56

But although the vast majority, maybe 98% of people out there are on the side of the psychiatrist of saying, It's his job. Don't fall in love with him. It's his job. The 2%, and especially this woman, are convinced that he's leading her on, that he is in love with her and this, that and the other. And all jokes aside of, you know, it's easy to say that this woman's crazy and da da da da which is a fair assessment I guess, is that perspective is is literally everything.

Daniel: 13:36

That not a single person on this earth or maybe a very select few live in what is like reality. Live in the reality of exactly every single thing that is factual that is going on is the way that they perceive the world, right? Because if everybody was like that, nobody would be an individual because we'd have the facts of life, the facts that we have in front of us presented by science, research, whatever you want to say, or the fact that this car drove into the middle of the lane during a red light and T boned another car, that is a fact, right? Or we can even use car accidents as another way to look at this. But it's like the perspective that you have is going to shape the way that you view the rest of everything, right?

Daniel: 14:21

Because to this woman, she fully believes that her psychiatrist is in love with her, and that is her reality. Everything that she sees surrounding that relationship and now her life is under the perspective that this psychiatrist is in love with her. That is going to change the way that she acts, the way that she dress, the way that she presents herself, the way that she thinks to some degree. Although I think that might be something that is already broken. But that changes everything, the way that she approaches scenario.

Daniel: 14:54

And I'll go back to the car accident where when you have somebody that blatantly, they missed a red or they ran through a red light, t boned another car, or you'll say it's a four way stop sign and they ran through it, where they might say, I'm not at fault of this. I didn't I didn't do anything. The the the the there was no stop sign there. The per I didn't see the person's car, so they actually hit me because, you know, this, that, or the other. Where that person's perspective, if they say so, because this is an example, of course, is I didn't do anything wrong.

Daniel: 15:26

And they might genuinely believe that. That's the tough part. Right? Because it's so much easier to think that this person is either crazy or lying or they're out to get me or they don't, you know, value people or whatever. Right?

Daniel: 15:39

It's easy to put all of these labels onto somebody because they feel some type of way or they are doing some kind of thing when the reality is like this is the perspective that this person has. And so trying to change their mind or trying to explain to them or trying to reason with them about this, that or the other is not gonna do anything because the way that they view the world as this is what happened, therefore this is how I react, therefore this is how I respond to everything else is their truth, is their reality. And I think that's the weird part, right? When we get into some some deeper conversations about truths and how things work, is that nobody is a 100 unbiased to whatever that they they believe life is. And so when we look at our situations, and I can I can use my own with with the gym, and how I'm a little bit stressed out right now, where I can have this perspective right now of, okay, what do I need to do?

Daniel: 16:40

How do I solve these problems? How do I put out these fires? What do I need to do next? And start to have this worrisome perspective, and then let's say five years in the future everything continues to grow, it's not as fast as a pace or this, that, or the other, and I have the perspective looking back that's completely different of saying that was not a difficult time. I did not just have the information yet that I was going to learn in the next six months or so, but truly under my new perspective, understanding what I know now, that was not a difficult time, or not as bad as I thought it was, or it was not the end of the world, or this, that, or the other, right?

Daniel: 17:18

And I say that as a reach out to you, whoever's listening to this, watching this, that you can change your perspective to adjust the situation you want and try and get the results you want out of it. And I always fall back to fitness because a, I think it is a wonderful medium to start on a process of self improvement especially if you try to become intentional about it. And I use that very very intentionally, I use the word intentional, because you get out of it what you're trying to put in even if you're reluctant to do so. Right? Because a lot of people don't wanna work out, they don't wanna do things, they don't want to move their body, or they don't want to do more than what is required to survive, right?

Daniel: 18:07

And that's, I wouldn't have a job if let's say everybody was intuitively ready to just move and work out and stuff like that. Like, clearly, if everybody was, like, 100% set and it wasn't an issue, like, I wouldn't have this job. It might be a different variation of it, but at that point, we're just playing pretend. Right? And so the perspective of a person who let's just say, let's make an example right, the perspective of somebody who is slightly overweight, maybe it's not enough to like truly inconvenience them, like having a hospital visit, having a stroke, having a heart attack, something like that, but it's enough to start to get in the way of things that they used to do.

Daniel: 18:46

Right? Maybe tying your shoes for some reason gets you a little out of breath. Maybe walking up the stairs is uncomfortable now. Maybe you don't fit in the same clothes that you used to when you were 18, 19, 20, you know, first year of college. Like all those things are minor inconveniences, but the perspective that I've seen time and time again is that I don't know how this happened.

Daniel: 19:10

I didn't change anything. I just started to gain weight. And I used to be very critical of this mentality. I used to be really critical of this perspective. Right?

Daniel: 19:22

Because on my end, my subjective slash objective side of looking at things as a coach was, okay, well, no, like clearly that's not true or else we wouldn't have gained weight. So it's either we stopped moving as much, we started eating more, or something crazy is happening with our hormones. Realistically, it's one of those three things, right? And as I matured and stopped being as much of an asshole and just being like, oh, don't be a bitch about it. You know, you have to just not be a giant baby and like, you have to work hard and da da da da da da da.

Daniel: 20:12

True. It's valid. It's a 100% valid. And so figuring out how to change that perspective to all of this just happened to me and I have the the faintest idea in the world how this could have happened to, oh, all of this is in my control and I just have to figure out how to change little things here and there to change it, and then all of a sudden my life turns a 180 degrees around. And the crazy part about that is that I know I'm using these fitness examples, but this goes into everything else.

Daniel: 20:45

That if you want to learn a skill, it requires a couple of things to change. Maybe study more, find friends who are smarter than you, find a teacher. Right? If you wanna learn something. If you wanna learn more about business, probably read more books, find somebody who is way better at business as you, start trying to do something or working for somebody that is doing something in the field you want.

Daniel: 21:10

Right? If it comes to fitness, and I always use this as an example, it's probably change the way you eat, move your body more, find a coach. Like the the I can almost bring everything down into three things that you can do as small steps in order to make progress in the direction you want, but the requirement is changing the perspective you have. Right? Because if the perspective you have is that nothing will work, I cannot change, this is my life and I will be like this always, then you're you're you're fucked.

Daniel: 21:39

Right? You're never going to do anything with that. Because the mentality is that the life is here and it just happens to me and because it it happens to me, it's not even my responsibility to change it, which is utterly bullshit. It is your responsibility to make the most out of your life with whatever resources you have, and if you start to make excuses saying that I can't do this because of x y z, you then defer all of that responsibility to whatever you said, and if that becomes your family, your children, your your work, your whatever, you create these enemies out of it that you start to resent over time. And so, if if you allow that to happen, you start to find out that later in life, oh, I didn't even realize that the way that I was acting was out of line towards these people, these things, whatever.

Daniel: 22:26

And you build these bad relationships subconsciously. And that's something that I'm working on a lot, right? Because it's always easy for me to blame everybody else around me for the fact that I am undisciplined in the things that I do, right? So it it requires the humility of allowing yourself to be wrong. And that's how you get a perspective shift.

Daniel: 22:52

You say, oh shit, the way that I was thinking wasn't right, so maybe I should change it up to this way because it might be helpful. It might not be night and day, it might not be 180 degrees, but even if it's a 10% difference, a fucking 1% difference, that could be the difference in a year of such a massive change that you don't allow yourself because of a mentality that is closed off. And so admitting that you are wrong is one of the greatest things you can do because you're damn sure not right about everything. I'm not right about everything. My pride is what gets in the way when I get wrong to think that, oh, but I did think of this thing or I did try to do this thing or what about this thing?

Daniel: 23:28

And it's like, No, just shut the fuck up, listen to the people around you and really have some humility and open up. Because life does not get better the more closed off you are and the more that you think that, no, this is the one way to do it. Right? That's how innovation gets stifled, creativity goes down the drain and then you lose connections with people. So be open for that perspective if someone who's also ambitious, and you can't change your perspective, you can't open up your mind to something new, and you're like me where you're naturally a lazy person of someone that just doesn't wanna do stuff ever, like that's a one way ticket to like being depressed and sad and mopey and every everything that it's the worst quality that you can do for yourself because it feeds into this self defeating cyclone of bad communication, bad self talk, bad understanding.

Daniel: 24:31

Like if there's a white board behind me with a bunch of things on there of stuff I need to do and I look at it almost every single day and I I get disappointed with myself because I'm I'm doing a fraction of what I hope to do to have a great day in my own book. Right? And so like being able to look yourself in the mirror and truly say, am I actually doing everything that I can or at least more than I have in the past six months, one year, maybe even ten years to actually make a difference for myself? If the answer is no to that, you can't look at a single person around you and say that, Oh, it's your fault that I'm not doing it. It's yours.

Daniel: 25:12

It's fucking yours. So look yourself in the mirror and have that conversation. I don't know how many times in the past ten years that I've looked myself in the mirror and just been so fucking disappointed because I set up these aspirations and these goals and then I just look at myself and I'm like, you don't care. You don't give a shit. You say all of these big things, you talk all of this shit, you say that oh my God, you can do anything but yet you turn around and you don't do a single fucking thing about it.

Daniel: 25:40

And I don't say that because oh, I hate myself and I'm self defeating and I just wish that life was so much easier and it was just handed to me. It's like, yeah, do I wish things came easier? Fuck yeah, so does everybody else. But I have to say it because if I'm not real with myself and having these conversations, then there's nobody on the planet that can have that for me, Right? It's like if you have somebody that is dealing with some kind of abuse, whether it's substance, alcohol, whatever, as much as you as you try to help somebody, and I deal with this all the time too, with people that close friends and maybe with fitness, they're like, I wanna get into shape, but this, that, the other, and I just tell them, I even offer them, was like, dude, I will take care of you, you were my friend for years, I will make whatever happen, and you give them a shot, but they truly don't want to change.

Daniel: 26:32

So when the opportunity is in front of them to change your life, to have a home and a warm meal or this that or the other, and they don't choose to, right, that doesn't fall on everybody else's who's trying to help them, that falls on them. And it's difficult because you know especially when you're talking about yourself it's like at some degree you have to be able to love yourself, right? And if you're able to love yourself with compassion saying that no, I want what's best for me, I want myself to be able to feel happy or have these joyous moments. That's that's truly what I want. Then you also have to be able to love yourself in the same exact way that you would love a best friend that is going through something that you know they shouldn't have to go through but it's the decisions they're making, right?

Daniel: 27:21

Where you have that conversation, you say like, dude, I like I love you, I care about you, I care about you so much But like you're doing x y and z. And I know for a fact, I know for a fact if you weren't doing these things, you would be so much happier, so much better in life because these things are simply anchors that are holding you down in the position that you're in. And so I want to do whatever I can do to help you, right? And like that's ideally what you want from a friend, somebody that confronts you and says, like calls you out on your shit. And so if you don't have those people around you, guess what?

Daniel: 27:56

The only person that you need then is yourself. Because you're the only person that can actually have that conversation. To look yourself in the mirror and say, you are fucking up. And although I want to blame everybody else in in my proximity, everybody else that's done me dirty or has you know did me wrong or whatever, cool. Not a single fucking person is going help you but you.

Daniel: 28:19

So what are we going to do? Right? And it's a good Jaco Willink quote where he always says it's this mantra of good. When everything goes wrong, when something goes wrong, the only response you can have is good. Because talking about it, bitching about it, complaining about it, that's not going to change anything.

Daniel: 28:40

Change only happens with action and action only happens when you get off your ass and actually do something. And I'm gonna phrase this very very clearly right here because these conversations that I'm having are for nobody else but conversations I'm having for myself. I'm looking myself in the in the camera right now, I'm having this conversation because there are also conversations that I need to hear again and again and again because it does not matter how good you are in the moment, it matters how good you are overall And if you feel like you're lacking and your standards are coming lower and lower, then you have to fucking check yourself, no matter what. And it's the same reason why I don't censor myself on here. I try not to be overly flagrant but these things are passion points, right?

Daniel: 29:20

And so don't don't be paralyzed by the fact that you need to make change. Don't be paralyzed by the fact that, oh, I need to make a decision or I need to do this thing. Because the second that you stop moving, the second that you allow life to just hold you down like a a weight, is is when you start to die, Right? I'm forgetting who says this quote but it's something along the lines of some people die when they're in the ground and buried and some people die at 25 and just happen to live a life for the next fifty years. And so the choice is yours.

Daniel: 29:53

You choose when you die metaphorically of course. Do you want to die in your skin and walk around and repeat the same days? Or do you want to live your entire life until God takes you away? This is the Never Settle podcast. If anything, I want you all to leave here knowing that you are capable of good things and change.

Daniel: 30:21

So I love you guys. I appreciate you listening. Share this with somebody if you feel like it. Listen to it again if you got something out of it. Again, I'm Daniel.

Daniel: 30:31

This is the Never Subtle Show. Goodbye.