Unlock the power of self-leadership with the wisdom of Alden Mills, former Navy SEAL and celebrated author, in our latest Rebel HR podcast. Alden brings the firepower of his new book "Unstoppable Mindset" to the fore, providing invaluable insights on the impact of leading oneself to lead others effectively. As we explore this concept together, expect to discover how to harness an unstoppable mindset, vital for thriving in HR roles and beyond. Our conversation dives into the potent ripples self-leadership creates within team dynamics and the broader organizational culture, emphasizing the profound effect our thoughts, focus, and beliefs have on our capacity to shape not only our futures but also those of the companies we serve.
Perfection is a pursuit that can paralyze, and Alden Mills knows this all too well. With a fresh perspective that challenges the traditional approach to perfectionism, he guides us through the labyrinth of leadership beyond the boundaries of titles. Throughout this episode, we share strategies for those struggling with the pursuit of perfection, advocating progress over an unattainable ideal, and granting you the permission to embrace imperfection. By redefining perfectionism and emphasizing the need for prioritizing tasks, Alden helps lift the weight of unrealistic expectations, freeing leaders to act decisively and improve continuously.
Lastly, we tackle the transformative power of positive focus, equating the need for multiple positive affirmations to neutralize a single negative thought. This positively charged discussion underscores the importance of HR professionals as organizational leaders and the revolutionary role they play in cultivating successful mindsets and challenging outdated practices. By aligning our gut, heart, and head, Alden Mills propels us towards congruent decision-making, encouraging a leadership stance that is as bold as it is effective. Tune in for a thought-provoking session that invites you to rebel against the conventional, and instead, become an unstoppable force within your domain.
Rebel HR is a podcast for HR professionals and leaders of people who are ready to make some disruption in the world of work. Please connect to continue the conversation!
Unlock the power of self-leadership with the wisdom of Alden Mills, former Navy SEAL and celebrated author, in our latest Rebel HR podcast. Alden brings the firepower of his new book "Unstoppable Mindset" to the fore, providing invaluable insights on the impact of leading oneself to lead others effectively. As we explore this concept together, expect to discover how to harness an unstoppable mindset, vital for thriving in HR roles and beyond. Our conversation dives into the potent ripples self-leadership creates within team dynamics and the broader organizational culture, emphasizing the profound effect our thoughts, focus, and beliefs have on our capacity to shape not only our futures but also those of the companies we serve.
Perfection is a pursuit that can paralyze, and Alden Mills knows this all too well. With a fresh perspective that challenges the traditional approach to perfectionism, he guides us through the labyrinth of leadership beyond the boundaries of titles. Throughout this episode, we share strategies for those struggling with the pursuit of perfection, advocating progress over an unattainable ideal, and granting you the permission to embrace imperfection. By redefining perfectionism and emphasizing the need for prioritizing tasks, Alden helps lift the weight of unrealistic expectations, freeing leaders to act decisively and improve continuously.
Lastly, we tackle the transformative power of positive focus, equating the need for multiple positive affirmations to neutralize a single negative thought. This positively charged discussion underscores the importance of HR professionals as organizational leaders and the revolutionary role they play in cultivating successful mindsets and challenging outdated practices. By aligning our gut, heart, and head, Alden Mills propels us towards congruent decision-making, encouraging a leadership stance that is as bold as it is effective. Tune in for a thought-provoking session that invites you to rebel against the conventional, and instead, become an unstoppable force within your domain.
Rebel HR is a podcast for HR professionals and leaders of people who are ready to make some disruption in the world of work. Please connect to continue the conversation!
This is the Rebel HR podcast, the podcast about all things innovation in the people's space. I'm Kyle Rode. Let's start the show. Welcome back, rebel community. We are extremely excited to welcome back to the podcast Alden Mills, former Navy SEAL, two-time best-selling author, ceo of an Inc 500 company, speaker, and he has a new book out Unstoppable Mindset how to use what you have to get what you want. It is out now where books are sold. Welcome to the podcast, alden Kyle great to be back.
Speaker 2:
It's great to be with all the Rebels out there. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:
That's right. That's right. Well, we were reminiscing about our last conversation. It's been all the way back, episode 137. It feels like we just talked like a couple months ago, but this was like two years ago. I'm just excited and thrilled to have you back. Congratulations on the new book coming out and looking forward to digging in some of the things you're looking at.
Speaker 2:
Well, I'm really looking forward to it. I'm hoping it's going to help the Rebel cause here, because I'm very passionate about your particular audience. To me, hr does need this mindset shift change because it is such a critical component of any business. We need HR to succeed and we need them also to feel fired up daily, because business is only complicated because of people in it. Hr they've got to be the human performance factor for what we need. I'm hopeful that today's conversation is going to at least either re-energize them or give them a couple of new tools that keep the Rebel cause going.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think I'm chuckling, as you say, the challenge of business. It would be so much easier if you took the human out of the resource part of my job, but then I wouldn't have one. So the reality is people are an organization. An organization is nothing more than a collection of people working towards whatever that common goal is. But I want to take a step back and maybe understand a little bit about what prompted the book. Last time we talked a little bit about leadership. Last time this book is about having an unstoppable mindset. So what motivated you to write a book really focused on mindset?
Speaker 2:
I think of it as the first level of leadership. Let me explain to everybody when I think about these levels of leadership. There's three levels of leadership. The best analogy I can offer up is imagine for a moment you're standing in front of a dead, calm reflection pond it's totally glass, perfect calm, and you take a pebble and you drop the pebble in the middle of that reflection pond and you see these perfectly radiated out three concentric circles. The first circle, first of all, that pebble represents you, it's the action that you take. And that first circle is your influence on how you lead yourself, which directly ripples into the second circle, which is the team. And then the third level is the culture. And my point of this little analogy is that how you lead yourself directly impacts how you lead a team, and how teams consistently take their actions become the culture of the organization.
Speaker 2:
Now I know we're not going to talk a lot about culture today, but I do want to stress to everybody there's always two cultures to every organization. There is the aspirational culture. You know that one, the one we walk into the lobby and see the beautiful Carrera, marvel and the cost of core values or manifestos or pre-dos. That's aspirational, of what the culture hopes to be. Then there's the actual one, and, as a leader, it's everyone's job to be a culture caretaker of closing the gap between aspirational and actual.
Speaker 2:
Now, how do we do? That Brings us all the way back to the pebble in our first level of leadership, and that's leading ourselves. And if you think about leading ourselves, the most critical component of leading ourselves comes to our mindset. Now this book is really a leadership book. It's a leadership book on helping you lead the three most important things that you, we, can control, and they are our thoughts, our focus and our beliefs. And when we start to take ownership of that, we start to take ownership of the direction of our future, our career, our organization, the teams we're in.
Speaker 1:
Thank you, Thank you Absolutely. I love the thought process that leadership isn't just about leading others. I think a lot of times you read the leadership books, you read the management books, you go to a management class. It talks about how to influence other people's behavior, right, or get things done, get objectives done in a way that you want to get them done. But there's not a whole lot of focus on self-leadership, right, unless you go into an actual self-leadership course. But I don't think it's as prevalent in management curriculum as maybe it should be.
Speaker 1:
But I think one of the things that kind of struck me as I was listening to you there was the fact that it really gets you out of this victimization mindset where it's like, oh, nobody's listening to me or things are getting done to me or I don't. I just kind of just allowing the winds of change to impact your life. And you're really talking about kind of being the hero in your own story a little bit right. So I'm curious you talked a little bit about thoughts having a focus and then having beliefs. To me it's a little bit of kind of like the chicken or the egg, right. So do you get your thoughts correct and then you let that kind of ripple into your life. Do you start with having the right beliefs, or like vision, and then you like, like. How should we be thinking about this as it relates to building out this mindset? That is truly unstoppable.
Speaker 2:
I'd like everyone first to realize a couple of fundamental truths, and it's very important that you embrace it, because if you don't embrace it, then everything else we talk about you're going to discount and say, well, that only works for them because they're leaders. I'm not a leader. The first fundamental truth is everyone is a leader. You got to wake up in the morning, put your clothes on, go to the bathroom, show up for work. You're leading yourself to get somewhere, to do something. Okay, it may not be the fancy leadership term of standing in front of a tank as a general and leading 10,000 people in the battle, but not generally get there overnight, nor did that CEO. It started by a series of small micro leadership decisions of leading yourself to take care of your body and leading yourself deciding what to say, what to believe, where to put your energy in, day in and day out, to consistently make a series of actions. I want to impress on everyone who's listening you are a leader, except that you're a leader. Number two of the fundamental truths you're imperfect, you're flawed, you cannot do it all. You will make mistakes, you will fail, and it's okay, because that's the way we're built. We need each other and the more we can come to understand the third fundamental truth that you've got a gift. You got something. It's raw, it's unpolished, but there's a talent inside of you and inside of others that, as you meet adversity, it will help get polished if you are willing to step up and work at it. But you have to work at it. We don't come out of the womb as superwoman or Superman saying here we go, I'm the greatest gift to the world and I'm gonna solve everything. We need the adversity, we need the struggle to take that gift of raw talent and turn it into something that can help others.
Speaker 2:
If you take a look at those three things that are going to your question, hey, where does it start? Does it start at thoughts? Does it start at focus? Do you start at beliefs? Think of the three of them as a trinity and they're connected. I call it the mindset loop. We enter in at any one of those. I just need you to enter in and own it. Sometimes it's very important for us to start with a limiting belief. No, I can't do that, I can't, I can't, I can't and we've got to start with the fundamental of the belief and then we will then take our thoughts and our focus and they all work together. I'm not so wrapped around the axle about where you start. It's much more about where you finish, when you start getting the three of them to work together Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so it's, you know.
Speaker 1:
I think it's really important to get aligned around those, those truths, and I have I have had this conversation with a number of people, at least within my, the organizations I've worked at which is, you know, whether you lead people or not, you are leading right, you're leading the people, you're leading the people, you are leading right, and in some cases, some of the most impactful leadership occurs in people who are not formal leaders right, they are, but they lead the, they lead a culture, right, or they lead a sentiment, or you know, they have a bad day, and everybody else does too.
Speaker 1:
And there's some of these truths that I think are really important. I love the one that you know, and I think many leaders, many leaders, need to hear this like you're gonna screw up, and that's okay, right, cause I think that's the other thing, too, where you know, a lot of times we will, we will get people to think, hey, you gotta be perfect, but what that actually does is that, like that breeds an action and fear, and this thinking that, hey, I can't make a decision, cause if I make the wrong one, we might you know it might we might screw up, and then this might happen and it's, it's this, this mindset. So, for those of us that have kind of come up with a school of thought that you know we can't screw up and you know we have to be as close to perfect as possible, what type of advice would you give to these leaders that are really struggling with with with this perfectionism issue?
Speaker 1:
Hmm you know it's interesting.
Speaker 2:
Most of my line of work today is I'm either doing keynote speaking around the world or I'm doing executive coaching, and I'm having the opportunity right now to coach a C level HR individual and to self-proclaim perfectionist. I've run into a couple of different CEOs that I've coached who are also self-proclaimed perfectionists, and here's the number one challenge with being a perfectionist that I've encountered Once we're a perfectionist, we don't stop until we get to what we think is perfection. The rub with perfectionist there's no such thing. It doesn't exist. Now, that's kind of funny coming from a guy that created the perfect pushup in a company called Perfect Fitness. But I knew right from the beginning it was more the alliteration we were after, because there's about five to 10 different ways I can improve the perfect pushup from what we originally did.
Speaker 2:
But the idea you know, what happens in a perfectionist mindset is okay, I'm at 92%, but I really need to get to 100%. The extra effort to go from 92% to 100% becomes so consuming that we have all these other open loops of different tasks that are sitting at 50%, that would love to be at 80%, but now, all of a sudden, our 92% task, which is way beyond good enough, is giving all of our time to that perfectionist, when instead, hey, that's 92%, that is beyond good enough. I gotta go work on all these other things and reprioritize. The things are at 50% and get them into 75 or 80%, and one of the things I would offer up to people is like hey, perfectionism, god bless you. You have a wonderful attention to detail. That is a gift, by the way, that I don't have. I'm terrible at that, me either.
Speaker 2:
But find a swim buddy, a mentor, somebody that you can rely on to say hey, listen, I'm gonna ask you to make a list of every open loop and what I mean by open loop a task that you don't feel is complete yet, and bounce those tasks. And maybe it's the CEO that you report to, maybe it's your a senior mentor you have, maybe it's the chairman of the board and saying you know what, sally, that task, that task, that task, that task, that task, that task, that is beyond good enough. Take them off your plate. I wanna redirect your focus to these four tasks that are subpar, and let's go perfect those two. Good enough, and we're changing the focus of what perfection means to perfection. Is that 90% is plenty good enough? Now let's go perfect the things that aren't and keep the funnel going of renewing the new things that you wanna go and perfect. So we're doing a slight pivot change. You understand that direction?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it's interesting, and I'm even reflecting on your title how to use what you have to get what you want. If what you want is, quote, perfect, you're gonna be miserable. You're never gonna be happy because it's an achievable want. You'll never actually get there. You have to be honest. I do that. We haven't really done ourselves any favors, because I think that used to be a badge of honor. It reminds me of the interview question what's your biggest weakness? I'm too much of a perfectionist that was the thing, but I almost. I think there's been a little bit of pushback lately and I think it's really important to maybe call that out, and at a certain point you just I don't know at least my experience was I just got too busy to even be able to try to do anything perfect. They had to be like slightly good enough was. Is it incrementally better? Okay, cool, let's keep going.
Speaker 2:
I think it's really important to give people permission. I'm not expecting a perfectionist the next day to go oh I'm cured, Hallelujah Right, it's not gonna happen like that In the world. In SEAL team we would talk about two different kinds of shooters. There's the sniper, and a sniper takes all this time to set up this perfect shot and ballistics and humidity and wind and different temperatures to deal with, and then they make the shot and they miss. Depending on how far that shot is, you might be hard to know where you missed. And there's the machine gunner. The machine gunner knows he or she is gonna miss the target, but that's okay, because they shoot in front of the target and they walk the bullets in online.
Speaker 2:
That's what we're after here. That's what leader is all about. You know we're gonna do our very best. It might not be good enough the first time around, but we're gonna aim for the target right before it and we're gonna keep walking our way into it. The same thing with a perfectionist hey, what got you here? Might not get you to the next level perfectionist, because you're getting too bogged down. Let's try this and back it out. Have somebody review your open loops, Tell them, give you permission to say it's okay, you don't need to work on those anymore, let's go work on these that aren't good enough and go add your perfectionist skills to doing those yeah that's a great point.
Speaker 1:
I mean, I think you know one of the things that's just so true the longer I've been in leadership other people, leadership is the fact that you know a lot of times leaders you know, leaders get it wrong all the time. You know leaders lead wrong all the time. You know and it's. But in many cases, it's the good leaders that understand that and are open and honest about that that are the great leaders, because they're reflective enough to understand. Hey, you know we just got to keep moving forward and we'll make adjustments, and you know we're going to win together. But, yeah, I think a powerful concept, one of the things I want to talk about. I'm fascinated to hear your perspective on this. So one of the big three that you mentioned was focus, and in Unstoppable Mindset you talk about that. We have been focusing wrong, so walk us through how we can actually understand the art of focus.
Speaker 2:
I'd like everyone to appreciate that they have a tool and the tool works a lot like a funnel, and I call it a focus funnel. And what focus does is it funnels our energy to the point of taking an action. Now what do we funnel to get the energy? We're funneling a thought, and if you can imagine and I think of pictures there's pictures in the book about the funnel and that's it. It's simplest, right? This funnel comes in, we continue to focus and focus and focus and we get right. How many times have we heard the laser focus idea? And that's just directing energy to take a very specific, committed action. That's at the highest level.
Speaker 2:
The problem with our focus funnel is that it has holes that it can sprout, and I make this depiction. On the left-hand side of the funnel, the hole makers are external things that are vying for our focus. It could be opening our cell phone and thinking we're looking at a text to respond to and then all of a sudden, we've got a news feed that crops up and then we turn into oh look, there's a squirrel, and we're not focused on what we really need to get done. It could be different times today, things that we eat, different things that direct us to weaken our focus. On the other side of the funnel, hole makers are internal hole makers, which are fear-based, limiting beliefs. No, I can't do that. Doubt, shame, oh, I can't dare fail at this. And before you know it, we've shifted our focus and decided not to take a committed act and we get this weak response. What I want everyone to think about is imagine there's a screen on top of your focus funnel and the screen's an adaptive screen. You have the ability to open and close that screen to let in the thoughts that are going to be helpful to what it is you're trying to do.
Speaker 2:
Now we're about thoughts for a moment. There are three basic kinds of thoughts First thoughts, present thoughts and future thoughts. And we generate all kinds of thoughts. Some neurosciences come up like oh, we generate 10,000s, a thousand an hour, 10,000 a day.
Speaker 2:
I can't tell you how many thoughts each of us generate, but it's a lot right, and I want everyone to think of thoughts just like clouds. They're constantly overhead, they're whizzed by, sometimes they're lingering, but the reason anything lingers is that we're deciding which one we attach to. A thought is neither helpful nor hurtful until we attach to the thought, put it into that focus funnel and give it energy, and at that point we start giving direction to where we want to go. Focus determines our direction, and it determines it in part because we associate it with a thought that is typically generated from a belief. And then, when we take that action, we then look at it and look for a reason to believe we should take the action again, take a different action or stop taking the action, and that's how the whole mindset loop at its highest level works.
Speaker 1:
You know, one of the things that I think is, I don't know right Number of years ago I thought this was like a little bit woo-woo, but it's like the power of thinking, the power of those words, right. And I think this goes back to where we kind of, where we started this conversation the self like the self leadership, but not just self leadership, like self talk, like what kind of thoughts you're allowing to be. You know the thoughts you have. You know it's like my 12 year old, so he loves skateboarding and he'll miss a trick and he'll go ah, I suck. You know it's like no, you can't say that, say it didn't land at this time, right, you know like you have to change that thinking. So is that what you're getting at that like it's this, it's like what you allow the context of the thinking to be, is really what helps kind of shape the actual outcomes, because it impacts the focus.
Speaker 2:
That's right there in the thoughts chapter Kyle, yeah, yeah, Neuroscientists, you know. Before I go down that path, let me give you another analogy.
Speaker 2:
And that's a great example of your 12 year old. Ah, I suck. I want you to think of attaching to a thought, picking a thought that you say to yourself. A lot like launching a product on Amazon. I've launched a lot of different products on Amazon with perfect fitness, and if I launch a product and I get a one star review first of all, would you buy products that have one that just have a one star review? No, well, no, you wouldn't, right. It's a really big issue. If you're the new product and you decide to launch and it's got a one star review is your very first review. You know how many five stars you need to just get close enough to a 4.5. Again, you need five. That gets me to 4.33. Okay. The analogy is this the moment you give a one star review to yourself, I suck. You need five positives to get yourself back up into the winners column and the 4.plus category. That's for individual, that's for you. Now imagine what happens when a leader goes you guys suck, okay, they may not All you guys suck.
Speaker 2:
When negativity is allowed to be embraced. That's what happens Now. Neuroscientists today there's a study that I included in there UCLA. She basically says hey, you need three positive comments to offset one negative. Because of our negativity bias is so powerful, we put a much higher focus and a much higher emphasis on negative than we do positive, and so we need to overwhelm our system with the positive just to get ourselves onto that course. When we now are thinking about doing something that we haven't done before, that is critically important. We're launching a new to the world product. We're embracing a new ERP system that we've never embraced before. We are changing how we're operating inside the company, and we've never done this before.
Speaker 2:
Your number one challenge will be, first and foremost, how are you leading yourself? Because how you end up leading yourself is going to directly impact how you lead everyone else. Now let me dovetail this. When you asked about focus, your focus, funnel has a couple of rules to it. The first rule is that your focus, our focus, is totally agnostic. It doesn't care what you put in it. It doesn't care what you put in it. You can put something helpful, you can put something hurtful, it can hinder you. It's totally up to you. It's your decision, remember. That comes back to being the leader. You got to own what you put in your focus funnel, because the reason it's so important is that the energy that it's created acts like a magnet. Get enough people to say I suck.
Speaker 2:
Well, guess what happens? It goes back to the old adage right, I'm bad apple, I spoiled a bunch. It will start to attract other negative focuses and everyone else will bring their focus funnel to be like Kyle's. Right, we can't do this. Why do we think we could roll this thing out? You know what HR is doomed. Why don't you even bother going here? I can't make a difference, get about it. And then, all of a sudden, everyone else starts going to that focus and then, before you know it, well, now you're living the victim life. It's a bit like skiing in the trees and not looking at the white space. But I'm looking at the trees, or I'm a race car and I'm not looking into the turn, I'm looking at the wall. Yeah, it happens. Right, we hit the wall, hit the tree. This determines our direction. But there's two other key players, positive or negative, on the thought process, and then what beliefs that are either limiting or empowering, to help us get to the direction we want to go.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely Powerful, powerful stuff. We're going to shift gears. We're going to go into the Rebel HR flash round, Position number one where does HR need to rebel?
Speaker 2:
What do you think I'm going to answer that with.
Speaker 1:
I have a feeling. I have a feeling.
Speaker 2:
Number one. You are all leaders. You own this destiny. Do not let the destiny own you. If you're not liking what's going on, look for ways to own the new direction. Just because HR has always followed these policies doesn't mean you have to keep doing it. The role of HR, to me, is the most critical role in the business. You're the human performance portion of this business, as Kyle was joking in the beginning because we were talking about it. Business is complicated because it involves people. Think of HR as the greatest leadership role there is. When all leadership goes down to one thing I can or I can't. We can or we can't. Rebel around, we can and find small different ways in which to build upon each different we can.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely love it All right. Question number two who should we be listening to?
Speaker 2:
Your heart first and foremost. I talk a lot about remember this is a leadership conversation we're having. We're talking specifically about leading yourself. Learn to get congruent. Or another way I talk about it in the book is alignment Alignment between your three intelligence centers your gut, your heart and your head. The head is very loud and noisy. Lots going on there. The more you start to listen to your heart and your gut, follow that. Don't be scared. Be courageous and try it.
Speaker 1:
I love it. I heard a really interesting comment on a podcast the other day. She was talking about frustration with the word counterintuitive, because the reality is as you just described. We have so much of our intuition is housed in these other centers of thinking and feeling, like our heart and our gut. It's really our intuition, trusting ourselves. I think a lot of times we can outsmart ourselves or, as I like to say, outsmart our common sense. I think a lot of times, if we just take a pause and actually trust ourselves a little bit more, the outcomes are just much better.
Speaker 2:
Can agree more.
Speaker 1:
All right. Final question how can our listeners reach out, connect with you, attend one of your presentations and get their hands on the book?
Speaker 2:
Go to Alden-millscom, you'll find that I do a series of blog posts. Every month. I've got five, six years worth of leadership content. It's all there. Just sign up for that or just go to the website and check it out. You'll also be able to the book's already available at all the different places that you would expect a book to be available at. From time to time, you'll also see some videos that I'm posting of different topics around mindset, team leadership and culture Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
We'll have that link there in the show notes. Open it up, click in, check it out. There's some great content out there. Alden's super active out there on LinkedIn and social media as well, you can guarantee you can gain some knowledge. Just congratulations again, alden, on the book. Looking forward to grabbing a copy and checking it out along with your other books. Thank you for spending some time with us again and helping us rebel a little bit.
Speaker 2:
Hey, go be unstoppable. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
Thanks, man. All right, that does it for the Rebel HR podcast. Big thank you to our guests. Follow us on Facebook at Rebel HR podcast, twitter at rebelhrguy, or see our website at rebelhumanresourcescom. The views and opinions expressed by Rebel HR podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any of the organizations that we represent. No animals were harmed during the filming of this podcast.
