The Power of Vulnerability in Goal-Setting: Lessons from a Navy SEAL with Alden Mills

0:02Who's ready to rock today fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like No Straight Path. Today, we'll be breaking down the power of vulnerability in goal setting, lessons from a Navy SEAL. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Alden Mills into EO Fire Studios. Alden is the former Inc. 500 CEO of Perfect Fitness, co-founder of Goal Bud, best-selling author, three-time Navy SEAL platoon commander, keynote speaker, and missioned to help 100 million people be unstoppable.

0:36And today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about vulnerability, the power of it. We'll talk about goals, unlocking the potential of focused social networking, three essential actions for achieving goals, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Alden and our sponsors. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business with episodes like how to get out of your day-to-day operations without crashing your business.

1:10Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Alden, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. The biggest thing that I think most people would disagree with is they start setting goals that are just realistic. And I want people to dream way beyond the horizon of how they can even imagine it going to come true and dream up those kind of big goals. Fire Nation, we're talking about big goals. We're talking about the power of vulnerability and goal setting. We're talking about lessons from a Navy SEAL.

1:51And Alden, a lot of people equate showing vulnerability as showing weakness, which they equate as a bad business practice. Can you share your belief in the power of showing vulnerability? The reason vulnerability is so important is that what I have discovered along my entrepreneurial journey is that most entrepreneurs think they got to do it all by themselves. And in fact, the real success lies in building out their team. But to build out their team and bring their team to the table to start to dare with them, they have to know that you know that you can't do everything. And when you can't do everything, you've got to be vulnerable to admit, hey, this is what I suck at.

2:38And this is why it's so important for you to be on my team with me, because I value what you're great at, because I am not great at that. That's where I look at the power of vulnerability. So Fire Nation, I suck at a lot of things. And I mean a lot of things. I am great at a couple things. And guess what? I spend my time doing those couple things that I am great at. And then I build a team around me who's great at doing all of those things that I suck at. And when you can do the same, Fire Nation, you will have the business, have the life that you've been dreaming about. Now, Alden, we all know the power of goals, but I want to talk about the ways that we can unlock the potential of focused social networking when it comes to goal setting.

3:32I am such a believer in the whole goal environment for the last 35 years. That's basically every single one of the successes and the many failures, which I have failed, by the way, way more than I've succeeded, but I've always just been able to keep getting up one more time. is through using a network of what I call a goal team to help support me. If you go back to looking at SEAL Team and how SEAL Team is built, and by the way, and I know with your background, JLD, the Army has the same thing. In SEAL Team, we have swim buddies. That's the smallest team for us. It's two people. In the Army, you've got battle buddies, and the Marine Corps uses something similar.

4:16but the idea here is that you're never going at it alone and about three years ago i started to hatch the idea that the social networks that were created today were really about feeding somebody's ego and not about helping each other get better and perform at our highest or unlock our potential of going and doing the things that we as entrepreneurs would like to do and so i took the concept from SEAL Team of creating your swim buddy and then using the power of vulnerability of putting yourself out there of bringing out what your goal is and then creating a commitment around it. Now you've got a next generation social network that is completely focused on helping people help each other achieve goals.

5:09I love this concept of helping people help each other, Fire Nation. How can you do that in your life, in your business? Now, you believe there are three essential actions for achieving goals, Alden. Let's go through those one by one by one. I'll tell you, JLD, it's a simple process. Now, it ain't that complicated, but as one of my old SEAL instructors would say, it can be hard, as he'd say in that deep Southern accent. The first one is you've got to make that goal and define the goal very specifically. Imagine for a moment you stumbled across a magic lamp and you rub it and the genie comes out and says, tell me exactly what you want and I'll give it to you.

5:56That's how I want you to be thinking about when you make a goal. And then after you make that goal, the number two element is selecting your goal team. And I want you to think of selecting your goal team like you're putting together a team to go win the Super Bowl. And who are the absolute best people that you're going to bring along to help you win your Super Bowl? Or from a military perspective, I'm putting together my SEAL team to go help me with my mission. And my mission is to accomplish that goal that I've made. And then the third piece is now I'm going to create commitments. and I'm going to create very specific daily actionable commitments, not even big ones at first, that I'm going to take action on and I'm going to report to on my goal team every week.

6:50And when I think of that initial action that you're creating a commitment around, I don't want you, don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach. Just go after something that you can start to dedicate a small amount of time to that you can start to build a routine about. So these three actions are making define the goal, build a goal team, and then create commitments that you're going to report on weekly. And all of that is the backbone of our new app called GoalBud. Fire Nation, I want to go through this one more time. Define your goal specifically, And I love that lamp analogy that Alden shared.

7:32Build your goal team, then create commitments. Now, let's have you, Alden, take us through what this looks like in the real world with a goal. Walk us through these three steps with an actual real life goal. I've got one that I just fulfilled on Saturday of last week, and it had taken me two and a half years to complete. And that was writing my third book. unstoppable mindset. I am no English major by any stretch of the imagination, but I have such a passion for helping people be unstoppable. And I've learned a whole set of things that I think will be helpful to people, but I needed to find time to just create this third book.

8:18And what I ended up doing was defining the book, making the goal of when I wanted to actually be completed, which was on April 15th, 2023. And the specific number of words was 75 ,000 words. I turned in 75 ,011 words. We'll be interested to see if it stays that way. But that was the initial goal. I then created a very small handful of goal team members. One was somebody I could bounce my ideas off of on a regular basis. That person lived out in New York City and agreed to be someone that I would report to and give daily updates on. The next person was a team member that had been with me through all the other books.

9:09She lived out in Boston and I'd report to her monthly on the updates along with a publisher and an editor. So I had a four-person team that helped me at each step of the way. And they would remind me when I didn't report on a commitment. So that's a simple example of then breaking down a commitment of working on doing, I would look at first of just submitting 250 words a week that I would write on. And that set of commitments got me to the point where I was able to submit 75 ,000 words worth of a book. Fire Nation, amongst everything that Alden just shared, one thing that I always hammer home to you, Fire Nation, is listen, it is so important to have people around you, to have people that you know, like, and trust, that you respect, that are going to hold you accountable, hold your feet to the fire.

10:12You are going to get so much more accomplished in life when you set a goal, when you share that goal with somebody, that's going to hold you accountable to accomplishing that goal, that's not going to let you slack off. Now, we're going to be talking about some important stuff around this topic when we get back from thinking our sponsors. I remember back in 2013 when Entrepreneurs on Fire was scaling fast. And in those early days of our business, we sometimes found ourselves struggling to keep up because we couldn't find software solutions that were easy to use and that would grow with us. Wasting time worrying about software that's complicated, a pain to use, and that doesn't do what you need it to do is not fun or productive.

10:53So what do we wish we knew back then that we know now? That a powerful all-in-one CRM platform that will accelerate your business growth is a HubSpot CRM. Unlike a lot of solutions we were using back in 2013, HubSpot's CRM grows with your business. Whether you have an MVP or you just IPO'd, HubSpot CRM is built for scale because your tech stack should work for you, not against you. And with over 1 ,300 flexible apps and integrations, you can customize HubSpot's CRM to the way you do business. Get started for free at HubSpot.com. That's HubSpot.com. Alden, we're back and I want to talk about some of the common pitfalls that people face when they're trying to harness the power of social networking to achieve their goals.

11:42Talk about those pitfalls. One of the biggest pitfalls is that what ends up happening is we start to not be vulnerable. We start saying, well, I committed to this, but then I actually didn't fulfill it. And I'm embarrassed and I don't want to say anything about it. So I'm not going to report on it. And I push it off. You know, your team is only going to be as good as the actions you put forward on going after your goal. So one of the biggest pitfalls is your own ego getting in the way. And I'll often tell people your ego is not your amigo when it comes to trying to push yourself out of the comfort zone to do something new.

12:28When you do a goal, and this is part two, remind yourself of this. You've got to sacrifice something to enable yourself to do the new thing that you're after. all goals are based on daily action that you take and what will end up happening is we will then take too much of an action in the beginning and get ourselves overwhelmed and realizing oh this is too hard and then we'll realize that we'll give up within the first week you know i'll often relate goal achievement to weight loss. And one of my earliest businesses where we invented the perfect pushup and a bunch of other fitness products, I spent a lot of time helping people take control of their bodies.

13:19And when someone would say, like, I've got 100 pounds to lose. Well, if you have 100 pounds to lose, what do you think is going to work better? Taking incremental baby steps of, you know, I think this week I'll start to just reduce my amount of soda that I start to drink. and then next week I'll cut it back a little bit more and the next week I'll cut it back a little more or do you go cold turkey and say I'm going to work out an hour a day cut all sugar out of my meals and I'm going to only eat salads in very short order that number of actions will overwhelm you to the point where you'll decide this is too hard and I'll give up but if you take incremental actions with your goal team, you'll find that the progress that comes from that will be fuel for your persistence to keep going.

14:16Fire Nation, these are some powerful thoughts on how to avoid these pitfalls that people face when they're trying to achieve their goals. And I think this is one area that your app is going to solve some of these problems as well. So can you take some time, Alden, and talk about your new app? Yeah, the new app, which is called Goal Bud, allows you to do exactly the three things we just outlined for goal achievement. They are make that goal and it will help you walk you through the defining of that goal process to include linking up like your passion and your purpose behind that. Part two, helping you go out and get very quickly a goal team that you can build on the fly.

15:00You can either email them or text them and bring them together to say, listen, I'm putting myself out there. Remember, this is the vulnerability piece. And I am sharing with you on a private network, your own private network that you get to build on the fly with Goldbud, the goal that you're committing to. And then third, you're giving them the commitment. Hey, I'm going to report on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays of this particular action that I'm going to do in pursuit of my goal. You also mentioned a book that you've recently completed. What can Fination expect from this? The book, Unstoppable Mindset, is all about helping people take control of the three things that we can control.

15:48There's so few things in life that we can control, but these three things, how we think, where we focus, and what we believe in, and they all form a loop, allow us to change our destiny in life. And if you learn to harness them, and I'll give you about a dozen different techniques on how to handle dealing with the positive thoughts versus the negative thoughts and how to use the focus to get your fuel to then shift your limiting beliefs that will all work to spiral you upwards to continue to persist. And also in that book, you can learn a whole bunch of lessons on what they teach you in SEAL training.

16:33I find SEAL training to be a very powerful metaphor for anybody looking to do something new in life, especially as an entrepreneur. You're going to be doing a whole bunch of things that are unknown to you. You're going to have to learn how to harness fear as fuel. You're not going to have to push it aside. you're going to embrace it. And that's what the Unstoppable Mindset book will help you with. Now, Alden, you shared a lot of great content today from your app to your book, to the three essential actions for achieving goals. What is the one thing you want to leave Fire Nation with today? I want everyone on Fire Nation to know that they always have a choice.

17:18You know, my ministry, as I like to think of it, is helping people be unstoppable. Everyone can be unstoppable. They have that choice. Being unstoppable is a choice that you make. And you don't just make it once. You make it during many different decisions each and every day. Understand that unstoppable is a choice. and each and every one of you listening, you have the power to be unstoppable. So don't you dare stop dreaming. I want you to dream up big, hairy, audacious goals. And then I want you to set sail for them, but build your goal team and create those commitments because that's what's going to help you get there.

18:05Now, Alden, what is your call to action for Fire Nation? How can they connect with you? The best way they can connect with me is they can go to GoalBud, download GoalBud, and start the process of making their own goals. If they want follow-up information, go to alden-mills.com. But by downloading GoalBud, I will be here to help you any time of the day. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with AM and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Alden in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up.

18:49And thank you, Alden, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you so much, JLD. Go get them, Fire Nation. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Alden for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free, freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

19:28Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business with episodes like how to get out of your day-to-day operations without crashing your business. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.