Alden has accomplished extraordinary things. He became a nationally-ranked rower, a 3-time Navy SEAL platoon commander, an entrepreneur with over 40 patents, and CEO of the fastest growing consumer products company in America (2009, INC Magazine).
This is more remarkable when you learn Alden started as an uncoordinated asthmatic. Then he learned about perseverance: Alden became an Olympic Festival rower, a stand-out at the US Naval Academy, a #1 ranked Navy SEAL platoon commander, a top MBA student at Carnegie Mellon, and an INC 500 CEO.
Today, you’ll find some of his lessons learned in his books and through his keynotes. Alden is well-known for his charisma, riveting storytelling, and leadership-focused frameworks. Stay tuned for some of his favorite unstoppable, inspirational, motivational keynote presentations.
I Tried the Navy SEAL Water Challenge
Drown proofing is not a tactical purpose, it’s a strategic purpose because they want to see if you want to do this bad enough to overcome what your mind thinks is impossible—limits that you don’t even know you’ve set for yourself. It’s all about your taking control of what you can do.
How to Be Unstoppable | Alden Mills | TEDxIESEBarcelona
Remember, your dreams are going to put you in really scary places, and that’s okay. It’s okay that you don’t know what you’re doing—that’s normal. It’s normal to be scared go out there go after those dreams. You have to understand that your life is up to you—the actions that you can control when you connect your head and your heart. It not only magically starts pushing you forward, but you’ll start attracting some other people that will buy into your dream. When that happens, then you’re unstoppable; so go dream those big dreams, give it all you’ve got, empty the tank. When the big man upstairs comes knocking someday—and I hope it’s a long time from now—you can look at him with no regrets and say I lived the life that I loved—I gave it all. You go…be unstoppable!
ScaleUp Summit (with Fortune Magazine): ALDEN MILLS
If you think about what a brand really stands for – if you really drill down to what your business is all about – it’s about a promise. It’s about a promise to two different types of people – people inside your company who are you’re your employees and people outside your company who are your customers. As the world gets more complex, you have to get more simplified in the messaging of what it’s all about. Your homework is to think about what your real promise is. Do your employees and your customers know what the promise of your company is? Do you have a process as you go through the scale up that allows people to embrace and galvanize them to your promise?
ALDEN MILLS: Keynote, St. Ignatius School
A favorite quotation of mine from Henry Ford is “Whether You Think You Can, or Think You Can’t … You’re Right.” That’s one of the key things that they do in SEAL training—they spend so much time teaching you that your body obeys your brain. They call the body the weapons platform—your body is a brain-housing group. In SEAL team, they don’t give you a single gun—they don’t give you anything of any worth—until they can teach you to sit in that cold water and learn that the body obeys the brain—they want you to understand that concept.
Optimize Interview: Be Unstoppable with Alden Mills
For “Be Unstoppable,” I knew I wanted to write something that was engaging—a fun, interesting fable that uses the context of an individual’s boat as their metaphor for life. Over time, you can make improvements to your boat from the seaside fictitious village where so many people in life never leave the harbor. They don’t want to leave the safety of it because leaving the harbor—leaving land and having no horizon—is a lot of kind of what it feels like when you’re starting a business for the first time or you going off and doing something you’ve never done before. I wanted everything to be about persistence—figuring out how to get up and keep going every day when other people are not cheering for you and you’re getting frustrated and you’re thinking that it’s time to give up. I wanted that to be a message for my boys and anybody else who read it to say, “You know guys, it’s darkest before dawn.” Dig in, and if you’re really fired up about this, don’t you dare give up—figure out another way to get over the obstacle.
I Tried The Navy SEAL Body of Armor Workout
The Murph challenge is inspired by a Navy SEAL platoon commander, Michael P Murphy. We called him Murph—he received our nation’s highest decoration the Medal of Honor for actions while serving in Afghanistan saving his teammates’ lives. The Murph challenge is what he called his favorite workout otherwise known as the Navy SEAL body of armor workout. This is not an easy exercise—it consists of five parts: a one-mile run, 200 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, and 300 air squats, followed by another one-mile run. So what do you say—up for the challenge?
Alden Mills at Lennox Live 2018
Three miles—that’s how far you can see if you’re a 6-foot-tall person standing at sea level on the water’s edge. When you’re looking at the horizon, the area that you focus on the most is the comfort zone—the known area. Past the horizon is the unknown area, and that’s the area that’s hard because you don’t know what’s out there. It’s that scary area where there could be sharks—there can be competition—you know it’s coming, but you have to make a decision. You have to make a decision to adjust your focus to go past the horizon.
Unstoppable Teams: The 4 Essential Actions of High-Performance Leadership
In today’s hard-charging world, success is determined by your ability to build and lead teams. There’s no greater challenge than galvanizing people into teams that are equipped to solve problems, overcome hurdles, and simply do more.
Alden—through surprising stories and lessons from his many years as founder and CEO of the fastest-growing consumer products company in America, as well as his tenure as a three-time Navy SEAL platoon commander—shares the 4 pillars he uses to develop Unstoppable Teams. You’ll also get his C.A.R.E.-based leadership framework, which will make it easier for you to discover new passion for leading and building teams.
