255: Creating an Unstoppable Career with Former Navy Seal and CEO, Alden Mills

What makes a Navy SEAL commander leave the battlefield to create a multimillion-dollar fitness empire? Join us on the Mid-Career GPS Podcast as we sit down with Alden Mills, a three-time Navy SEAL platoon commander, successful entrepreneur, and Inc. 500 CEO, who takes us through his extraordinary journey. Alden shares his transformation from leading elite military teams to launching Perfect Fitness, and how he later pivoted to become an inspiring speaker, author, and executive coach. His journey offers a treasure trove of insights on professional growth, leadership, and the inner battles faced even amidst business success.

Have you ever wondered how balancing selfishness and selflessness can lead to unparalleled service to others? Alden and I explore this delicate balance by diving into the concept of triangulation from SEAL training. We discuss the power of recognizing and honing your unique strengths to provide the most effective and fulfilling service. Alden's emphasis on focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses boosts self-worth and polishes innate talents, making them shine brighter. This conversation is a powerful reminder for listeners to embrace their gifts and apply them where they can make the most significant impact.

Navigating a mid-career transformation can be challenging, and Alden introduces the concept of the "outcome account" to help visualize future scenarios. We discuss the internal dialogue between the "whiner" and the "winner," particularly during pivotal moments. Highlighting common mistakes new leaders make, Alden underscores the importance of self-leadership and the necessity of listening to understand rather than assuming all the answers. This episode is packed with profound insights emphasizing how effective leadership starts with leading oneself and taking responsibility for one's decisions, setting the stage for an unstoppable career.

Connect with Alden Mills
Website | LinkedIn | Be Unstoppable

Chapters

• 0:00 Building Unstoppable Careers
• 8:18 Discovering Strengths and Limiting Beliefs
• 21:21 Empowering Leadership and Self-Reflection
• 32:43 Navigating Mid-Career Success

Transcript

John Neral: 0:00

You and I have heard plenty of times about why we need to get rid of our limiting beliefs. However, that's not always easy when our brains are on fire, telling us all the things we honestly don't want to hear. Today's guest knows what it means to be unstoppable and how to build unstoppable teams. And how to build unstoppable teams. Alden Mills is a three-time Navy SEAL platoon commander, inc 500 CEO and successful entrepreneur who's here to share his experiences, to help you increase your confidence and be unstoppable in your career as you build your mid-career GPS. So let's get started. Hello, my friends, this is the Mid-Career GPS Podcast and I'm your host, John Neral. I help mid-career professionals like you find a job they love, or love the job they have, using my proven four-step formula.

John Neral: 1:08

I want to peel back the curtain on this interview with you for a moment because before I interview any guest on my show, we have a pre-call. It's a 30-minute conversation where we get to know each other and, if we believe there's a great fit, we'll discuss some talking points for the episode. This is my process. All of my guests go through it, and when I met Alden Mills for his pre-interview call, I was surprised when he told me that a lot of shows don't ask him to do this and, honestly, alden is fascinating. You're going to hear that in this interview, so why would I not want to talk to him first? But as you listen to this episode, I want to be clear that you will not hear many Navy SEAL stories. Our conversation gravitated to a much larger topic professional growth and development, what it means to be a great leader and team player and, my favorite part of our discussion how to build an outcome movie for your career. You see, alden's philosophy is that he wants to be your swim buddy, which is Navy SEAL, speak for your teammate and he's on a mission to help 100 million people succeed at accomplishing a goal. With over 40 years of success in different environments that range from sports, military, business, nonprofits and community action groups, he knows the rules for success are universal it starts with how you lead yourself and ends with how you serve others. Alden founded and grew Perfect Fitness from zero to $63 million in sales, becoming the fastest growing consumer company in America, according to Inc Magazine in 2009. Alden then continued to lead the Perfect Fitness team and grow the company even further after its acquisition. And Alden then continued to lead the Perfect Fitness team and grow the company even further after its acquisition, and Alden has created over 40 patents in the consumer sector.

John Neral: 3:13

Alden is the author of the bestselling books Be Unstoppable the Eight Essential Actions to Succeed at Anything. Unstoppable Teams the Four essential actions of high-performance leadership. And Unstoppable Mindset how to use what you have to get what you want. He is the founder of Be Unstoppable and the co-founder of the Goal Bud app. You're going to love this conversation, so let's get into it. Here is my conversation with Alden Mills. Alden Mills, welcome to the Mid-Career GPS podcast. It is an honor to have you with us today.

Alden Mills: 3:54

The honor is all mine, John. I'm thrilled to be a part of this today.

John Neral: 3:58

Well, I appreciate our pre-conversation and, obviously, us sitting down today to talk about your incredible life and career story and how that is directly relevant to impact the mid-career leaders and professionals who are listening today. But, alden, I know you've got a mid-career moment, that moment that kind of shaped where your career got you to today. So please share with us what was your mid-career moment.

Alden Mills: 4:24

Yeah, I will tell you as we were talking. I've had multiple mid-career moments right Leaving SEAL Team and going into the business world, leaving technology and starting a fitness products company. But my big mid-career moment was leaving a fitness company that I had created over 12 years to go onto the speaking circuit and become an executive coach. And that was a huge moment for me because at that moment I was a father of four children. We're still a father of four children and we had quite a successful fitness products company called Perfect Fitness and we made made and I say we because I really involved my wife in this made a big shift to focus on writing, speaking and coaching. And you know, at that moment in my life I was 45 and made that change.

John Neral: 5:26

You get to that place where you say to yourself, something has to change, something needs to be different. And there is no question, you've lived a life of service and you have done some incredible things in your life and in your career. Yeah, what was that moment for you when you sat there and said I am 100% certain this is the direction my career needs to go in.

Alden Mills: 6:05

You know that's a very powerful question and I will tell you, john, it didn't come overnight. It percolated over a period of time. And to appreciate this and for all the audience, we had a very successful business doing tens of millions of dollars a year selling fitness products like Perfect Push-Up and Perfect Pull-Up. And what I started to find was it almost felt like the walls were closing in and that more and more of my day was spent on something I wasn't getting a lot of joy out of. And I knew that there were some areas that when I was in front of an audience and talking about how to inspire them to go beyond what they originally thought was possible, I remember how invigorating that felt to me. And then it was back to the drudgery of, oh, how are we going to deal with more inventory management, or here's the next widget we had to produce. And that process, I would say, went on for about three years Now.

Alden Mills: 7:16

I had been moonlighting on the side. I'd written a book called Be Unstoppable. It came out while I was the CEO of Perfect Fitness and occasionally people would ask me to come in and say, hey, will you talk to us about this? And as that, as I found myself getting more and more excited about the moonlighting that I was doing and less and less excited about being in that office space. There became a tipping point. Office space there became a tipping point. Now, in my particular case, the tipping point came when we had been working for a much larger company. They bought our company back in 2011. I stayed with them for almost four years and then they sold again. And then the new owners came in and were like hey, just invent faster, do more, do more and more of the same.

Alden Mills: 8:07

And I just remember feeling like, ok, now's the time for me to expand. It was a feeling like I was feeling constricted in one place and I wanted to expand in another place. And you brought up another very important word for me, and that's service. And I was really thinking about okay, where can I be more of service? And this is a conundrum for everybody out there, because I'm always talking about being selfless. But there is a moment where you have to be selfish, and I like everyone to think of this on a continuity line right On one side is selfish, the other side is selfless, but there's this moment where you have to be selfish about what is value for you what feels good for you, and the more selfish you are and where you feel good in service to others, the more you can be selfless for those folks that you're trying to give the best of yourself. And that process took me about three years, when I finally had the tipping point, sold the business and said okay, I'm going to go all in on this.

John Neral: 9:21

See if we can't get on that speaking circuit circuit, write the second book and go be a coach when you were going through these three years of figuring out your next career move, how much of your thought process or decision making were you able to rely on your SEAL training to help you make that decision? Because part of me can imagine that not being a part of it, but that also may be my own ignorance here.

Alden Mills: 9:56

Well, I'll tell you I wouldn't say my SEAL training really helped me a lot on making a career move me a lot on making a career move. Seal training can help you a lot on driving to get the objective done, to building out that team. This was a new area here and I riffed a little bit off of seal training and I'll give you the example. When they drop you out in the woods and they do this, they'll drop you out in the woods 10 miles from nowhere and say, hey, figure out a way to get back. And here's a map and a compass. When you are using a compass you have to take three different points with that compass so you can triangulate right, get into a little triangle potential area where you are on that map. You need three different points to do that and that triangulation is what I used during that three-year period and I did it multiple times and, by the way, this isn't really a SEAL term but we did it. We had to do land nav but when people get a GPS reading you need a minimum of three satellites, so nine is even better. Right Gets you to a smaller and smaller square and I use that as a metaphor for going around to people that have had experience with me in volunteer environments working with the school, working with a local church that I get involved in, working with folks at work that weren't directly in my line, working with people that I got involved with in totally different environments to say, hey, and I would literally ask them this question. And I would literally ask him this question If I could save your life but I could only do it using it with the best skill that you think I'm best at how would I save your life? And I'm going to give you an example, for one person. They're like well, alden, you'd inspire me to save my life. And this theme of inspire kept coming back. Uh, I had another I've done this drill many times, right. And for one was a cfo. And I had that person go around and they'd be like oh well, you would analyze to help me save my life, right? Someone else would be like well, you and project manage to help save my life, right. Someone else would be like, well, you and Project Manage to help save my life.

Alden Mills: 12:29

But it was this adage like fish discovered watered last, have you ever heard that term, where fish are slithering around all the time? And they're like, oh yeah, well, it's like fish discovered watered last. We're kind of the last ones to get the memo on. Hey, what are we really good at? And sometimes the best way we can feel it is internally, through our heart and our gut, and for a lot of people that's that's so, um, intangible. They can't really resonate with it because they're all stuck in their mind about no, no, society says I should go do this or do that, and so I would use triangulation and multiple forms of triangulation from people in and outside my professional walks of life to help me test what I thought. Ok, is this really a good call or is Alden just on a kind of a fad, like a kick for the moment, to go do that?

John Neral: 13:30

When you think about your strengths and you think about the strengths of the people whom you speak to and you work with, we know that we'll hear people be like, oh, I need to be working on my gaps, I need to be closing this skill gap, or everything. Why is it important to you that people really focus and lean in on their strengths to be more effective and more impactful?

Alden Mills: 14:03

Yeah, you do hear that a lot, don't you Like? Oh, but I'm terrible here and I suck at this and I got to strengthen this and this, and, first of all, just the process of going through that beats you up. It makes you feel less worthy than you really are. And here's a newsflash that I tell people all the time we are not good at everything, matter of fact, there's very few things that we're good at, and there might only be one or two things that we can be great at. And we have this short period called our life to go out there and be the best at the thing that we also happen to get a fair amount of joy from.

Alden Mills: 14:53

And what I remind people about is you know, we have this gift. Each and every one of us has got a gift, but the gift is like a diamond in the rough. You know, when you first discover a diamond, it just kind of looks like a piece of quartz. It's rough and it doesn't shine brightly and it needs that friction to polish those facets to get to a point where it can have that pure brilliance. And that is the same scenario that we're dealing with, with people going well, look at all the dirt around the diamond. I got to clean out the dirt. No, no, no. Let's work on the diamond. Let's just work on you getting better at your brilliance, because, yes, there's a whole bunch of things that you won't be good at, and that's why there are other people that have great areas that can fill in those gaps, that have great areas that can fill in those gaps.

John Neral: 15:47

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John Neral: 16:54

Now let's dive back into the episode. I am sure there are people who are listening that are resonating with and their brain is taking to this place of I can't. I'm not sure. I'm doubting myself. There's a big part of your book, unstoppable Mindset, that talks about the principle of a limiting belief. Real, quickly, how would you define a limiting belief in our lives or careers?

Alden Mills: 17:28

Okay. So let's first define and let everyone make sure they understand what a belief is. A belief is something that we have decided is true. That's all. A belief is right, it's something we've accepted as true. That's it.

Alden Mills: 17:48

Now, a limiting belief will be something that we have accepted as true. That is holding us back. I'm really not that good at public speaking, so I shouldn't even try. Or I've got to wait five more years of five more sessions of Toastmaster or whatever before I should ever step on stage, because I'm just that bad. Right, that is nothing more than fear, bridling me back, holding me back from doing something that perhaps my heart is saying go, go, try it, it doesn't matter, they'll give all you got. And that limiting belief shows up for all of us.

Alden Mills: 18:33

And beliefs come and go, and it's very important for people to understand beliefs along with thoughts. And where our focus goes are there are three controllables that when we learn how they interoperate, because beliefs lean to a thoughts, thoughts go into the focus and what I call a focus funnel. We apply energy to that thought. We take an action, we look at the action. We then give ourselves a reason to believe or not believe that we could do it again and that's what happens. Right, it's this loop beliefs to thoughts, to focus and back. We are in control of these beliefs.

Alden Mills: 19:10

Now the key thing is being self-aware enough to understand when are we facing a limiting belief? Because the challenge with a belief is that it acts like a seed a seed that sprouts into a behavior. Well, it's a limiting belief that I'm not good at public speaking. Therefore, I'm not going to take certain opportunities because I'm going to come up with excuses because I'm not ready. And then the behavior turns into a habit and, before we know it, we're doing it automatically and we're just missing our opportunities for our own mid-career change.

John Neral: 19:57

I like how you phrase that, because for the people who are listening, who are thinking, it's time for them to start looking for a new job or they're going to put themselves out there and ask for more responsibility at work.

John Neral: 20:06

There's a chapter in your book Unstoppable Mindset around mind-setting. I wanna say it's chapter three, if I remember correctly, but there's a part in that chapter where you talk about and you reference a part of your SEAL training and you talk about the conversation and you define it as quote the internal struggle between believing we can or cannot achieve something, and I thought that was such a brilliant parallel in terms of how we talk to ourselves and we talk ourselves in or out of doing something based upon a series of circumstances, events and thoughts that we have circumstances, events and thoughts that we have you go on to talk about. There's this fear of staying put and a fear of moving forward, and I'm wondering if you can talk with us a little bit about where a mid-career job seeker might have to manage their brain or their thoughts a little bit differently as they work through their fear of staying put as well as their fear of moving forward.

Alden Mills: 21:15

First of all, I'm so glad you read that Outstanding, and you're exactly correct. We all have this conversation. This conversation is constant, right? I name out a couple of different voices. One is the whiner, and the whiner is the one that's very loud and obnoxious, like why do you think you can do this right? And interject you with doubt and the fear of failure and embarrassment, looking stupid and not thinking you're good enough. And then the other one is the winner. The winner whispers, it's much quieter and says things like try again, keep going, get up, you can do this. And you will always have this conversation.

Alden Mills: 21:58

And this conversation will definitely show up when you're going through a mid-career change, a dramatic. Maybe it's a right turn, maybe it's just 10 degrees right from where you're at, but you're starting to wonder am I really good enough to do that? And when you get in that scenario, I encourage you to go through what I call the two basic fears. The first one is the fear of staying put and the other one is the fear of moving forward. The important thing to understand about these two basic fears is that until the fear of staying put is greater than the fear of moving forward, we'll stay put.

Alden Mills: 22:39

So here's the wonderful thing we can all do, because we have this capability of envisioning a future outcome, and in the book I offer up something called an outcome account and you literally can build out hey, this is what it will look like if I try and succeed doing this new thing in my mid-career change. This is the outcome, this is who it will impact and this is how it will make me feel. On the other side of the ledger is, this is what happens if I stay in this job for the next five years. This is who it will impact and this is how it will make me feel. I call that the outcome account, from which you then build an outcome movie, a movie of a future state, of allowing your limiting belief of fear to stay put.

Alden Mills: 23:31

Stay in the career you're in and, ok, what's that look like in five years? How does that make you feel? Who in your life that you love does that impact? Maybe they're married, maybe they have kids. Maybe they won't be able to go to a school, maybe they. Maybe. You just come home more and more upset every day versus, oh, this is what could happen, and all the positive things. When folks do that, it helps with the tipping point between staying put and the fear of moving forward.

John Neral: 24:05

So what I'm hearing you talk about, then, is that the onus is on us to dig deep and really spend time on building out that outcome movie to whatever it is we want to create or do in our lives or careers oh, it isn't just on us, and this is a really important concept for everybody to grasp, and somewhere along the way we all miss it.

Alden Mills: 24:36

It is your single most important leadership decision. Yes, you, me, everybody listening is a leader. Now, how many people may follow you, that's a different conversation, but it is actually correlated with how you lead yourself and the more I want everybody here listening to us to embrace the fact that you are a leader. You have to lead yourself to tune in to listen to this podcast. You have to lead yourself to show up at work. You have to lead yourself to do all kinds of things throughout the day. There is no greater leadership responsibility than leading yourself to decide what you can or cannot do. That's on you, each and every one of you. Please embrace the leadership responsibility of owning what you can or can't do.

John Neral: 25:40

That's up to you to decide. What do you believe is the biggest mistake new leaders make when they're in a leadership role for the first time, and they could just simply either do it better or do it more effectively. But what do you think is the biggest leadership mistake people make when they're first starting out?

Alden Mills: 26:16

The single biggest one is they don't listen to understand. Tell me more. We get into this moment and we're like now I have the leadership brains and ego kicks in which, by the way, we all have ego. And, by the way, I want to be very clear with everybody. I've made every single one of these mistakes that I'm talking to everybody about. Ok, I am not Mr Perfect. I have failed way more than I've succeeded. But we get into leadership brains. Ego goes.

Alden Mills: 26:41

Well, you're the leader now. You must have all the answers. You must know you have to tell everybody what needs to get done. You must know, you have to tell everybody what needs to get done. The best leadership advice I've ever gotten was the moment you get in that leadership position, you go around and listen to understand each and every person that is reporting directly to you. You have a leadership obligation to learn from everybody on your team. Do not assume that just because you're in that position, you're going to have all the right answers. As a matter of fact, most of the time you won't. And the more you learn to listen to understand, we can go. We could spend the next hour talking about the three different ways to listen Listen to win, listen to fix and then listen to understand. And learning to listen, understand to other points of view and watch how quickly everyone will then lean in to helping you.

John Neral: 27:42

I love how you phrase that. That is so important, especially from the standpoint of we just simply can't know everything. It is our job to listen, to understand. Yeah, yeah, so so good. Well, alden, there's so much more. You're absolutely right. We could dig into so much more and this episode we're going to bring this to a close, but I will tell you it'd be great to have you back on the podcast at some point down the road. But I will tell you it'd be great to have you back on the podcast at some point down the road.

Alden Mills: 28:12

And I will tell you I'd be happy to come back. John, I love what you do and how you inspire people and you know people are lucky to tune in and listen to what you're doing, because your advice is solid. Your heart's in the right place.

John Neral: 28:27

Thank you, your heart's in the right place, thank you. I'm honored to say we share that primary belief of service and how we can help people through this podcast and other things that we get to do. But what advice would you give someone who's listening to help them build their mid-career GPS? And it can be something we talked about today, you want to reiterate, or something you didn't get a chance to talk about. What's your advice to talk about?

Alden Mills: 28:50

What's your advice to them today. It's something we talked about earlier, but we'll go a little deeper. I want them to think about taking time at the very beginning of the day and at the very end of their day where there's no electronics around, where it's quiet. Sometimes the very beginning of the day is in that state between oh, your eyes just cracked open for the first time, but your arm hasn't gone off for 10 minutes and think about gee, what would be the best way to serve somebody? What would be the thing that I would love to do that could help this certain person, or multiple people? Where could I be of greater service and what would I love to serve?

Alden Mills: 29:34

What we talked about earlier was, I told everybody hey, you have this gift, you have this skill set, you have something that, with work, could be exceptional. And I promise you, when you take this time at the beginning of the day, in the end of your day, thinking about, hey, what would be something I would love to do that would be of service to others, and think about what that action is, I want you to daydream about it. I want you to then envision it and create a movie around. What would it feel like to go do this thing that I could be great at and help other people. That's the space I want you playing in when you're thinking about your mid-career GPS move.

John Neral: 30:26

I love that. Thank you for that. Ah, I love that. Thank you for that. Well, alden, if people want to find you, get your book Unstoppable Mindset, connect with you. I'm gonna turn the mic over to you. Please share with us all of the great ways people can connect with you.

Alden Mills: 30:41

Well, the easiest way is come to my website. I have a newsletter that comes out monthly. They can sign up for that. It's a free newsletter on all things leadership. I talk about these three levels of leadership. You can come learn about it there, but it's all at my website. Alden-millscom and Unsolvable Mindset. The book, along with my other books, is available at Amazon, Barnes, Noble, all your local bookshops and certainly we'd love to have a conversation with you, yeah.

John Neral: 31:14

I will make sure all of that is in the show notes. Your book is not only an enjoyable read, it is a thought-provoking and, I'm going to say, an easy read, not in the sense of the content, but it's just. It flows very nicely, it's got a very nice cadence to the book and how you share your story and your principles and beliefs and everything. So I really enjoyed reading it. Thank you so much. I hope my listeners go out and get it. But, alden Mills, thank you so much for sharing your story and being a wonderful guest on the Mid-Career GPS podcast.

Alden Mills: 31:49

Thank you.

John Neral: 31:49

John Keep inspiring.

John Neral: 31:58

I promise will do so. My friends, if there's one big takeaway from my conversation with Alden Mills today, it's this If now is the time for you to expand, how do you want to do it? How do you expand in a way that allows you to serve more, make a greater impact, improve your life and your career in some way? If now is the time for you to expand, how are you going to go about doing it? That is your challenge for this episode Build the screenplay for that movie that Alden talked about. And until next time, my friends, remember this You'll build your mid-career GPS one mile or one step at a time, and how you show up matters. Make it a great rest of your day.

John Neral: 32:43

Thank you for listening to the Mid-Career GPS Podcast. Make sure to follow on your favorite listening platform and, if you have a moment, I'd love to hear your commentsCareer GPS Podcast. Make sure to follow on your favorite listening platform and, if you have a moment, I'd love to hear your comments on Apple Podcasts. Visit johnnerrellcom for more information about how I can help you build your mid-career GPS or how I can help you and your organization with your next workshop or public speaking event. Don't forget to connect with me on LinkedIn and follow me on social at John Darrell Coaching. I look forward to being back with you next week. Until then, take care and remember how we show up matters. Thank, you.