Podcasts

Pete Mockaitis
Alex, welcome.

Alex Neist
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s great to be chatting with you. And I will tell you, I am a Hostage Tape customer and lover. So, first things first, for the uninitiated, what the heck is Hostage Tape?

Alex Neist
Hostage Tape is mouth tape, okay, quite simply. And for those who have never heard of mouth-taping before, what it does is it forces you to keep your mouth shut so that you breathe through your nose. It sounds absolutely wild and crazy, I know, but I promise you’re not going to suffocate.

We were born, we were made to breathe through our nose, and it seems to be something that we just lost over the last 20, 30, 40 years, especially with a lot of changes to our diets, what we’re eating, all sorts of things that have kind of changed us. And over 70% of people in this country are mouth-breathing at night when they sleep, and we shouldn’t be.

And so, mouth tape shuts your mouth, forces us to nasal-breathe the way that we were made to, and it does a whole host of things. We get more oxygen. We wake up feeling better. We don’t have mind fog. We don’t annoy the heck out of our partner. And just everything opens up and you feel like you’re 20 years old again. You feel like you found the cheat code.

This is how I explain it. It’s like when we were younger, you played Nintendo and you had that Konami code, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B-A-B-A, start. It’s like you found the cheat code from Nintendo, but for life, and now you feel like you’re 20 years old again.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Alex, I love so much of what you’re saying here. And it’s funny, we’ve had sleep doctors on the show, and this is actually not really a sleep episode, although that’s a freebie, huh? We’re getting some bonus goodies here, Alex.

Alex Neist
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve read in the research, because I’m such a dork for this, that mouth taping is particularly excellent for individuals with mild sleep apnea, and I was such an individual, and I was not feeling the CPAP machine, but I needed a little something. I need a little something, something, Alex, and the mouth taping and some other interventions combined did the trick, so I’m off the CPAP machine, and I’m having great sleep, and I’m a fan.

Alex Neist
So, what you’re describing right now, Pete, is a pretty common thing where, again, I’m not a doctor. Ironically, I grew up in a doctor’s family. Like, my dad was a doctor, so I come from that whole world of medicine, but I’m not a doctor, and I think CPAPs are over-prescribed to people because I think the reality is, from what I’ve seen with all of our customers, is that there’s a certain person that definitely needs it, and those are the people who are like severely overweight.

Guys who are really overweight, who’ve got excess weight in their neck and everything, that’s pushing down, they definitely need help, but I think for, like, the average guy who’s not overweight, man, it’s as simple as just keeping your mouth shut. Assuming you can breathe out of your nose and it’s not like severely impacted, it’s just keeping your mouth shut and breathing through your nose. And we don’t need a CPAP for that. We really don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.

Alex Neist
The amount of people who have used a CPAP and then now they don’t because they wear Hostage Tape, countless. But there’s also people who, they’ll use their CPAP and the Hostage Tape helps it work better because it keeps their mouth shut so that there’s no air leak.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true, especially like a nasal-only CPAP. We’re getting into the details. And if folks have sleep apnea who are not overweight, I just want to give you a shout out. I know that also happens with anatomical things, neurological things in the mix as well. But, yes, great sleep is important. We’ve covered that with a few sleep docs before, and we’ll just check that box, and mouth taping might help.

I want to talk about branding and storytelling, because, Alex, you’ve done a heck of a job. I remember my favorite CPAP influencer, and there are many, will be Uncle Nicko from SleepHQ.com. And he said it very well about you guys. He’s like, “Great job, guys! You made mouth taping cool!” He’s Australian. Apologies for the poor accent impersonation.

And it’s true, and it’s so interesting. In terms of brand, I have so many questions, but why don’t we start by, tell us the tale. What made you think, “Let’s call this thing Hostage Tape” was a good move?

Alex Neist
Yes. So, here’s the story. So, I actually went through a low point in my life and I hit rock bottom. And it was at this point of hitting rock bottom, where, my wife and I were actually separated and we divorced, and so I was living in another house at the time.

And when you go through a divorce, it’s messy, it’s crazy, assets freeze, you know, all that kind of wonderful stuff that happens. But I was in my aunt’s house. I was living in her basement at the time, okay? And I said to myself, “Okay, I need to really work on myself. How do I become a better man, a better father, a better leader, a better business owner, all those things?”

And I call it my Jocko-moment of extreme accountability, like I need to take extreme accountability for me and work on everything that I can control. And I started with my health, specifically my sleep, because I snored so bad for so many years that it pushed my wife out of the bedroom. And I explained it like this. It’s kind of like Indiana Jones running out of the temple. You got this boulder coming after you, and, at some point, it catches up to you, overtakes you, and then you don’t know what to do.

Because snoring is one of those things where it causes all these issues, it’s like an accelerant of all these other things that happen that just kind of get out of control. And then before you realize it, it’s out of control, and you just can’t fix it, and you can’t get it back. And so, that’s what had happened. And so, then I looked at my sleep, and I went, “Okay, what do I got to do to fix my sleep?” And I went down this rabbit hole of mouth tape, of all things.

And when I started the mouth tape, whenever my kids would be over, I would say, “Okay, guys, kids, if you bust into the room, and you see me, it’s going to look like I’m being held hostage, so don’t freak out, okay?” Because anybody that you see is mouth-taping, it looks really, really strange, really weird. And so, there was that part of it.

And, at the time, I didn’t know that I was going to start a mouth tape brand just yet, let alone call it Hostage Tape. But then I realized that, “Wait a minute, there’s this like double-sided coin to this here. Yes, you look like a hostage when you’ve got tape on your mouth, but we’re actually tapping into this core emotion people feel. People feel held hostage by poor sleep or their partner, and they don’t know what to do. So don’t let bad sleep hold you hostage.” That became the idea. And I was most importantly inspired by my favorite water, Liquid Death.

Pete Mockaitis
I was literally talking to your publicist about Liquid Death and branding.

Alex Neist
Yes. So, I explain this to many people, and a lot of times when we meet with retailers or anybody else that’s interested in the brand in some way, I say, “We are the Liquid Death of the sleep space.” And they go, “Oh, okay, I get it.” Because, inevitably, there’s always somebody that goes, “Wait a minute, why would you call it that? That’s really weird. That’s really polarizing.” And then I say, “Liquid Death,” and they go, “Oh, okay, I get it.”

So, it takes like a giant, like what Mike did with Liquid Death, for people to truly understand, “Oh, I get it. Okay.” Because I knew, in this day and age, Pete, it’s all about attention, right? And I saw a quote the other day, that when you think about products, things that people buy, mouth taping, it’s not a fad. It’s not one of those fads that’s like, here then gone tomorrow, because it’s based on fundamental core principles of our body, and it’s solving a clear problem. So, it’s not a fad.

And it’s gaining awareness right now. With the amount of money that we spend on marketing, more and more people are gaining awareness of it. You’re seeing it on TikTok, because we’ve had other copycats try to do what we’re doing, and more people are going, “Mouth taping. I keep seeing this. I keep seeing Hostage Tape everywhere.”

So, because that awareness is growing, what happens, it’s kind of like the 95/5 rule, right? 5% of your people are in market to buy. The other 95% are not. But for those 95% of people, when they are in market to buy, what do they do? They buy the brand that they remember. And who are they going to remember when it comes to, “Oh, yeah, I keep seeing mouth tape. You know what? I’m going to try that. I’m going to buy Hostage Tape.”

Because when you see Hostage Tape come across your feed, you never forget it. Ever. I’ve never met somebody that didn’t go, “Oh, Hostage Tape. Yeah, I’ve heard of them. They’re that mouth tapering.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s black, and it can look a little scary, and it’s intriguing. When you said polarizing, I think, I want to dig into that for a bit. Like, I remember I was telling my cousin, Carrie, that I was doing some mouth taping, and I was like, “Yeah, I love my Hostage Tape.” She said, “Wait, it’s actually called Hostage Tape? Wow, they’re really leaning into it.” And I was like, “Well said, they are really leaning into it.”

And I think that it’s so intriguing because you say polarizing, and that’s the word, because I think some might say, “Alex, hostages are no cheeky, fun, laughing matter. Right now, there are hostage situations in the world. And it almost seems like you are kind of poking fun at it a little bit.” And so, help me out there with polarizing, because I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten furious messages or if that’s just me.

Alex Neist
Oh, we get it all the time. Yeah, we get people all the time. In fact, somebody DM’d me on LinkedIn the other day who said exactly that. And I think you have to look at it like this. Like, the wonderful thing about language is that context matters. We have all these words, we have all these amazing ways to use language, and context matters. Intent matters.

So, when I use a word like hostage, Hostage Tape, look at the intent, look at the context. It’s not poking fun at those awful situations. Just like Liquid Death, how many people die and get murdered? Like, a ton of people. “Liquid Death, murder your thirst,” like they’re just as bad, if not worse, than we are with this term death and murder, right?

But when you look at what they are, who they stand for, and the authenticity behind it, look at the authenticity behind our brand and why I started it, I’m not just some no-name, no-face, like brand that said, “We’re going to poke fun at this.” I’m a real guy. You do a little bit of research and you see me everywhere. You see me talking about it. You see me telling my story about feeling held hostage.

And then once you explain that little bit of the term hostage, everybody relates to it. Then that’s the genius behind it, is that everybody can relate to feeling like a hostage from their partner or their sleep, and they feel helpless. So that’s why it’s so good, is, again, context and the intent behind it.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s intriguing, I was listening to an interview with the Liquid Death guy. What’s his name again?

Alex Neist
Mike, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And it was really interesting, he said, “Well, our water, it’s in a nice aluminum can, and it’s tall, and it’s from a natural spring. So, there are some kinds of objective matter material elements of it that that make it seem quality relative to alternative packaged waters.” And he said, “And yet, the bulk of the price premium for it is just for the brand, the associations, the experiences, the hilarious marketing that is attached to it.”

And it was really interesting, he got me thinking hard, he said “That’s kind of how I define brand is it has a value for its associations,” I might be using my own words here but it has a value for associations in your brain, above and beyond the actual matter inside the package.

Alex Neist
You want to know why?

Pete Mockaitis
Lay it on us.

Alex Neist
Because people don’t buy with logic. They buy with emotion. That’s why. So, what people do, the way that our brains work, is anytime we make decisions on buying things, you know, especially if it’s not something that costs, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars, that’s a little bit of a different decision process, but something as small as mouth tape, Liquid Death, whatever, we might buy on emotion.

We do buy on emotion for the most part because we’re connecting to something about it, and with a brand like Liquid Death and a brand like Hostage Tape, people are buying on emotion. There’s something about the brand that’s attaching to their psyche or the way that they are. And then after you make a decision on emotion, then you validate it with logic, “Oh, yeah. Well, of course, I bought it because of A, B, and C.”

And so, that’s, I think, what Mike was really talking about there with Liquid Death, is that you’re creating this emotional connection with people, and that’s what makes a strong brand.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s interesting. And I say before I had encountered Hostage Tape, I was using some 3M micropore tape, and that kind of works for keeping your mouth closed, but it doesn’t stick as well. It’s not as comfortable. It’s hard to get just the right size. So, these problems are relatively minor but I will hand it to you, you solved all of them. It’s like this is more comfortable, it’s quicker, it adheres better, it even has just a little bit of holes or perforations or whatever, so it’s like…

Alex Neist
Yeah, because it’s a fabric, it’s completely breathable. And that’s what people think when they think, “Hostage Tape? Mouth tape?” They think it’s like duct tape, but in actuality. It’s a flexible fabric. You can breathe through it, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s interesting in that your product cost more than the generic micropore tape, and it has some performance characteristics that are superior but there’s also all this emotional stuff, and I just find it fascinating how that works because I don’t think I’m very good at brand, branding, both in terms of when I market stuff and when I buy stuff, I think it’s like, “Oh, this costs 10 times as much. Is it 10 times as awesome?” Well, maybe, yeah, in terms of when I’m sleepy and I don’t want to be fiddling with my tape for an extra 30 seconds, I value that substantially. But, again, maybe I’m just doing that post-emotion rationalization you were speaking of in the moment.

Alex Neist
Well, think about it like this too, right? So, when I built the brand, I had that dilemma that everybody has when you start a new business. You go, “Wait a minute. Is there a business here? Could I actually build something that’s worth my time and money to put into this because it’s just tape? Like, it’s a commodity. Is there a moat here? Can I actually build this?”

And then it was looking at Liquid Death. In fact, it was Liquid Death, but it was also so Moiz Ali is famous for the Native deodorant founder, okay? And I’ll never forget, he was talking about, when you go down the aisles of Target, and you look at a wall of, let’s just say, white of a product, there’s an opportunity there. There’s an opportunity because the TAM is there to create a product that stands out, that’s different.

And that logic, to me, went, “Okay.” Now granted, there wasn’t really a market for mouth tape, but there’s tons of tape, so I knew I could take something and I could improve upon it. And guess what? There’s 70% of people in this country that have this problem, so it was a very clear problem solution. And I had experienced it, that I went, “This is too big. This is too big not to be able to build something, but it all hinges on brand.”

So, I knew, the point I’m getting at was I knew that nothing about micropore tape, 3M tape, inspires you to go down to Walmart, Walgreens, Target, or even on Amazon, and buy mouth tape. It doesn’t inspire you at all, because that’s not really how we all make the decision to begin with, like, at least consciously.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you got to be desperate, like, “I need something, and I’m out. I guess I’ll go, not like I’m excited or inspired.”

Alex Neist
Well, and mouth tape, to begin with, because it’s so weird and new and different, you’re not going to see an ad for 3M micropore tape and think, “You know what? I should use that and put it on my mouth.” And even if it was advertised, you would think like, “Well, that’s just weird. That’s not cool. I don’t want to do that. That sounds dumb.”

But then you see this, like, really cool story that’s relatable, that you go, “Oh, I’m going through that same problem, too. My wife’s sleeping in the other bedroom. You mean to tell me he solved it by taping his mouth shut? Oh, man. Well, that’s kind of weird, right? Well, but that looks actually kind of cool. I like it. Okay.”

And then you start connecting the dots, connecting all these emotional barriers, and then, boom, you’re now inspired to go online and order Hostage Tape because it’s cool, it makes you feel cool, it makes you feel like you’re actually solving a problem, which you are, and you don’t feel weird because you’re putting medical tape on your face.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you said, when you go walk down Target and see white, do we literally mean the color white? What do we mean by you see white?

Alex Neist
So, it could be anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Like a gap or blankness?

Alex Neist
Let’s use, like, deodorant as an example. Like, you might go down a section in Target where it’s just the deodorant aisle, and they all look the same. That’s the point, if that category exists and they all look the same, that means the TAM is big enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Total addressable market.

Alex Neist
The opportunity is big enough, and you have a chance to stand out to create. It’s, like, Dr. Squatch is another really good example. Dr. Squatch said, “We’re going to take soap,” which is like, you know, this behemoth, huge behemoth in soap, and it’s just soap, right? But that guy took it and went, “I’m going to make it different, all natural, but I’m going to create this amazing brand around it.” And now look at them, you know, they’re huge, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so now I’d love it if you could bring it into the realm of the average professional. So, all right, we’re not building, we’re not inventing brands, new products, but we are seeing opportunities and certainly having to make a case, build a story, conjure up some emotion for support of initiatives and whatnot. So, tell us, how do we apply some of these perspectives to our everyday conversations and persuasions?

Alex Neist
The first thing that pops into my mind that we could riff off of is, like, when people are thinking that they want to start a business and they want to build something, they always ask, “Well, how do I start? Where do I start?” And I always tell people, “Look, the best place to start is like solve a problem, number one.”

And then when you solve that problem and you figure out what that business is, then there’s a story around it. That then you have to learn how to tell the story for that particular product in business, and then tell it in a way that’s relatable. And I’ll be honest, I launched this business, Hostage Tape, three years ago, and it’s taken me three years to craft the story in a way that’s relatable for people.

Very early on, I would tell the story, and I don’t think it was relatable enough, and I kept telling it, and then I kept hearing it, and I’m like, “Who can relate to that? Like, yes, there’s elements of shock and amazement that are interesting, but at the end of the day, people aren’t going to buy into something that they can’t relate to and see themselves somehow looking back at them.”

And so, I’ve morphed how I tell the story in a way that, “How do I bring out the right pieces of the story that are relatable to people?” So, I keep evolving it in a way that is not so grandiose. In fact, you probably know, the guy that I love is Matthew Dicks. He has a book on storytelling. And this dude, he wins all these awards for these competitions he goes to where he tells a story.

And one of the things he talks about in storytelling is, you don’t need to tell an amazing, oddball, wild story to have a great story. Most of the time, it’s a story about the most simplest thing that happened to you in your day that most people are going to think, “Well, that’s not interesting,” but it actually is interesting. You just have to learn how to tell the story, and then you make it relatable in a way, and also, you’re showing change.

A great story shows a change, “At one point, I was this, then this happened, and now this.” And so, that’s it, that’s another key there with that storytelling that you’re talking about, is that so many things happen to people during the day that you can tell stories on rather than just reciting back, “Well, this happened.” Well, that’s boring, like just reciting back anecdotally what happened to me today.

It’s telling it in a way that says, “I changed,” or “Something changed.” That’s what captures people’s attention, right? It’s like that when I tell the mouth tape story, I like to tell the story about how, “Before mouth taping, I was this. And then that first night I mouth taped, then I woke up and my whole life changed in that moment. And I knew that, now, I was going to be a different person. I was going to be able to get to here just from that one night of mouth taping.”

And for anybody listening to that, who can relate to having bad sleep, goes, “Wow, that’s crazy. I can resonate with that because I feel the same way. I felt the same way. And maybe if I just put a piece of tape on my mouth and shut my mouth, I can feel the same way too.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, I’m a believer in sleep, so it does not strike me as hyperbole at all. The difference between terrible sleep and great sleep is night and day for mood, productivity, all the good stuff. So that’s intriguing. So, a good story, change, you reminded me of, I think, in Dan Harmon’s Story Circle. I’ve actually worked through that with my kids a few times. And so, yes, and then the character returns changed at the end, and it’s fun to watch Community, because they are deliberately doing that with every character in every episode.

So, change and relatable. So, help us out. If the story’s evolved, can you share with us a suboptimal, prior version of a snippet of the story, and then give us the improved version, and tell us why is that better?

Alex Neist
Exactly. Okay. So, I used to be a professional athlete. I was a professional quarterback, and part of the story that I tell is I used to tell it where, so when I discovered the fact that I was mouth-breathing, I basically read a book. It was a book by James Nestor called Breath. And in this book, he details this experiment.

And part of the story is, as I talk about this experiment, reading this book and how it opens my mind, and I say, “How have I been a professional high-level athlete my entire life and my coaches never taught me this?” And so, then later I went, “Wait a minute, being a professional athlete has nothing to do, like it doesn’t matter to the story that I was a professional athlete, and nobody listening to that story is thinking, ‘I was a professional athlete, too, and my coaches never taught me that.’”

There’s a sub-small percentage of people that have ever gotten to the level of being a professional athlete that can relate to it. So, then most people then might feel alienated, and thinking like, “Well, I’m not a professional athlete, so I guess I don’t really know how I could relate to that.” But now, rather than say I was a professional athlete, I just say, “Look, I was an athlete my whole life. I played football, I played sports growing up, and my coaches didn’t teach me that.”

How many people played sports growing up and were athletes? Almost everybody did, in some capacity. So, that’s way more relatable that people now can connect, they can lean in, and go, “Oh, yeah, I was an athlete, too. Yeah, and my coach has never taught me that. Wow. Huh, this is crazy.” So that’s a really good example of something that I’ve adapted.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s funny, and not to critique your story life here, Alex, but I guess I have the hubris to do it. It’s like, I’m thinking that what you’re saying is perfect because, like, “I was a professional athlete,” it’s like, “Okay. Well, we’re not vibing with that.” But what’s interesting is we had Anjali Sharma on the show recently talking about this storytelling principle just like this.

It’s like, “You think you want to have it dramatically awesomely whoa remarkable, but you don’t want to be remarkable. You want to be relatable,” because it is remarkable that you were a professional athlete. And it is all the more remarkable, shouldn’t someone have known, with all the recovery information that’s so important for high performance?

Alex Neist
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So that makes it more remarkable but less relatable. And so, I’m intrigued, as someone who didn’t play very many sports, just that the notion that I’m relating to most about is it’s like, “Hey, shouldn’t someone have told me?” Like, I almost feel betrayed or shocked, disappointed. Like, “Shouldn’t someone have told me you can enable shortcut keys in Gmail? Everyone knows I love productivity and I use Gmail.”

Or, “Shouldn’t someone have told me that Severance is an amazing TV show?” So, yeah, I like that a lot in terms of we’re going to drop some of the most amazing wow factor pieces in pursuit of more relatability.

Alex Neist
I’ve got another one, too. This is another one that I used. Okay, so the other part of the story that I used to really lean in on was, I mentioned it earlier that my wife and I, we had gotten separated, and then we divorced, okay? And we actually got back together. So, I used to tell that part of the story, and I used to say that, “You know, six years ago I had it all and then I lost everything, and my wife and I went through a divorce.” And then at the end of the story, “After building this thing, then my wife and I got back together.” And then I’m like, “Actually, you know what? How relatable?” Like, divorce is relatable to 50% of the population, yes. But still, you’re still alienating 50% of the people who haven’t gone through a divorce, and, to boot, getting back together.

Like, how many people get a divorce and then get back together with their partner? That almost never happens. So, then I’m like, as amazing as it is, and as amazing as the reactions I get from people when they hear that story, they’re like, “Oh, my God, that’s wild!” it is not relatable at all to anybody because it just doesn’t happen.

So, now, I’ve started really kind of dropping those points and leaning more in on the idea that, “Here’s what is relatable about that. The fact that I snored so bad that it pushed my wife into the other bedroom, and we slept in separate bedrooms. It killed the relationship, it hurt us, put a wedge between us. And then you know what? I discovered mouth taping. Now I don’t snore anymore. I feel amazing. And my wife and I now sleep in the same bed again.”

That’s a more relatable story, and it’s all true. I just left out the most amazing parts of it that actually don’t make the story better, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s interesting in that, now, what’s juicy about this is, unlike the first example, it’s sort of like nothing feels lost in terms of like, “Okay, we don’t know as much about how awesome you were as an athlete, Alex, okay. So, but that’s okay.” But here, it almost does feel like something is lost because it’s like, it almost makes the Hostage mouth tape less of a hero.

Alex Neist
It could be.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “It saved a dead marriage” sounds more awesome than what you’ve described. So, now it’s interesting. Now I feel like we have a real juicy trade-off here between the relatability of the story and the amount of heroic impact the product can make. How do you chew through that one?

Alex Neist
I think you could argue that, while heroic it is, like, I’m a phoenix rising from the ashes, I think that, there’s a hero’s journey, though, that I can tell, the true story of this hero’s journey of that bedroom tale that every man and wife, more men and women are going through that story. That hero’s journey that I can help them become the hero of their story.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you.

Alex Neist
So, I think that’s way more impactful.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Because we might have less of an emotional spike, but we have a broader set of folks getting into it. And those broader sets may actually have more of an emotional vibe.

Alex Neist
And here’s also the risk, because I’ve seen a ton of it. I’ve gotten a ton of feedback and responses over the years, the past couple of years here. The story sounds so unbelievable that people think it’s fake. Like, “Oh, it’s so fake. No way that happened.” I mean, it happened, it’s true, and I can understand why it sounds fake, but it’s so wild that it sounds fake.

And so, that’s the risk of it is that, again, now I’m alienating because of the craziness of the story. Now I’m alienating, again, too many people that I don’t need to alienate, that I could just tell a much more relatable story that still has the impact and goes the distance.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I’m reminded, I think, Ramit Sethi was talking about copywriting, and he said this product or offer of his really did have some epically transformational results for folks in terms of additional income or business revenue or whatever, but some of the results were so huge it was beyond belief. So, naturally, he wanted to say, “Look at the success of these students,” but he’s like, “Well, if I do that, I lose the credibility, even though it’s true, so I’m going to have to back it down.”

Alex Neist
Yeah, totally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alex, so much good stuff here. Any final thoughts on storytelling, branding, persuasion?

Alex Neist
I guess all I would say is, again, that everybody has so many stories that you can tell every single day that happened to you. You just have to pay attention to them, and they’re there, and just understand the key to a story is change. That’s the key. That’s what makes merely reciting facts versus telling a compelling story is change.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alex Neist
It comes from my mom. And she taught me that you can do anything you want in life. You just have to be willing to work for it.

And along with that what I’ve added to it when I tell my kids, is I always tell them that, “Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do it. If you want it, go get it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And a favorite book?

Alex Neist
It is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Alex Neist
Sauna.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Alex Neist
Go to HostageTape.com. You can find it on all the socials, Hostage Tape, Hostagetape.com. If you’re going to try to buy it on Amazon, you can, but it’s not the best place to get it. Just go to the website, HostageTape.com, and you can find your best deals. And don’t let bad sleep hold you hostage anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alex Neist
We’re in an age of virtual digital meetings worlds. I would challenge people to actually upgrade their equipment. Have a better camera. Have a better microphone. It makes so big of a difference when you’re on Zooms or you’re on Google Meets all the time, and you can actually sound great and you look great. It makes all the difference in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Alex, this is fun. I wish you much luck and good sleep.

Alex Neist
Awesome. Thanks, Pete. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Alden, welcome back.

Alden Mills
Pete, it is so great to be back. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. So much good stuff. So much unstoppability. This time we’re coming in to chat about Unstoppable Mindset. So important. And I’d love to kick us off, because I know you’re good for it, could you set the scene for us with a dramatic, exciting, high-stakes tale of when you had an unstoppable mindset at work doing something awesome?

Alden Mills
Oh, so there I was, I’d raised a million and a half dollars, only to learn $1,475,000 worth of ways not to launch a product, I was broke, and I finally decided to pivot away after four years of toil on the first product, and the unstoppable mindset arose when the team of five of us couldn’t raise any more money, decide we’re going to launch this product with $25,000, $500,000 of debt to a manufacturer, only 90 days of runway for benefits. And we decide we’re going to break this down one obstacle at a time.

And with 90 days, most people are like, “It’s not even going to happen. It’s not even close. You can’t even cut steel to make a mold. And let alone, where are you going to get a couple hundred thousand dollars to build the product so you could even make some money when you put it on a container?” Well, one obstacle led to another, led to another, led to another, but we were able to overcome each of those.

And 87 days later, we launched a product called the Perfect Push Up. And a lot of people are familiar with the Perfect Push Up. I know about 20 million people in the United States alone were. And that was the third product in this series of failures that I had beforehand, and that product was always one conversation away from never happening. That product, through almost three years later, we do almost 100 million in sales, puts us on the fastest-growing consumer product company, number four overall on the Inc. 500.

And I would say that was a monumental, unstoppable mindset by all five of us that decided to go after bringing that product to market.

Pete Mockaitis
I knew you would deliver, sir. Thank you. That’s juicy. So, wow, let’s zoom into that moment there in which you got this idea, but it seems like the odds are slim. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough people, resources to have a reasonable shot at this. And yet, away you go. What is going on inside your brain, inside that unstoppable mindset right there? It’s probably not, “Oh forget it, it’s no use. This is never going to happen.” What does that internal conversation sound like?

Alden Mills
That internal conversation was going between two basic fears: the fear of staying put and the fear of moving forward. In this particular case, the fear of staying put was very specifically called out by these five investors that I went to raise money from, and they’re like, “You have one option and one option only. Let me show you this chart. It’s called a cashflow statement. You don’t have any. There’s only one option for you. You have to go bankrupt. Your wife is pregnant with child number three. You’re not making any money. You have to go get a job.”

It wasn’t even a question of, “Oh, there was a slim chance.” It was like, “It’s over.” And when you ask a question, “Okay, so what’s going through your mind?” it became very clear that if we go behind door number B, called bankruptcy, we know exactly what’s going to happen. We’re going to flush the last four years of hard work.

But if you look at the A door, the alternative, and the alternative was, “Hey, what do we still have available to us?” Well one, we had a good relationship with our manufacturer. He knew what we were dealing with, and he liked the new product and he was willing to take more equity because that’s what we had left in the business. And he was able to float us the first couple of containers, and he was able to cut the mold, the steel, much faster than 90 days. He got it done in 26 days.

And when people started to realize, like, “Hey, this is it. We’re going bankrupt,” or “We can give you a little equity, and if you want to come along for this wild ride with us,” a lot of people chose to do the wild ride and chose door number A. So, when we talk about the two basic fears, I really think of it like this. Until the fear of staying put is greater than the fear of moving forward, you’re going to stay put.

I did not want to star in the bankruptcy movie, and I was willing to go way down the line of venturing on the unknown to see what would happen and what we were capable of. And one conversation would lead to another. One day led to two, led to four, led to a week, led to six weeks. And that’s how we tackled that. And, literally, the same analogy of climbing a mountain. One step at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that question a lot, “What do we still have available?” because it’s very grounding and very real. Because it feels like the opposite question is, “How are we screwed? Let me count the ways,” it’s like a poem, and the brain just rattles it off. It’s very untethered. It’s precarious. It’s floating. It’s drifting. But, “What do we still have available?” that’s very concrete and that’s grounded.

And you sort of look at it, write it down, assess it, and note like a great relationship with the manufacturer doesn’t just mean he thinks we’re cool, we think he’s cool, he gets our stuff kind of fast, and we’ve got good credit terms. It means, “No, he might actually become an equity player and provide some levels of flexibility and goodness that is absolutely atypical of a typical manufacturing customer.”

Alden Mills
You know, I think it’s very important to take inventory, and you learn that early on in SEAL team about taking inventory of, “Okay, what do we have available to us? What are the weapons?” I’m using that quotation wise, “And what are our assets? What are our skills? What are our strengths?” For every negative, there is a positive. It just comes in a different wrapper, and you have to look at it from a different perspective.

And I really find where you decide to put your focus is where your direction gets determined. Focus determines direction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, share with us a little bit of the how-to then. Any key insights, discoveries you made as you were kind of reflecting on these experiences and synthesizing the goods into the Unstoppable Mindset?

Alden Mills
The first thing I really want everyone to understand is that there are very few controllables that we have at our disposal. We can’t control the weather. We can’t control our kids, that’s for sure. We can’t control our colleagues. We can’t control the business environment. But we can control our thoughts, where we put our focus, and what we decide to believe in.

And if you think about those three mental controllables– now we have some others. We can control our emotions. We can control our physical capabilities, if we’re blessed enough to be able to use our arms and legs and our minds. And then we can control our faith. What we decide that we really want to put our faith into from a spiritual perspective. Okay?

And what I really want to hone the conversation on is the first one, the mindset, the mental controllables of thoughts, focus, and beliefs, and make sure everybody understands how they build upon each other. They work in what I call a loop, a mindset loop. Thoughts direct your focus. Focus drives to an action. And beliefs power a thought based off of an action that you or I just took or about to take.

And when you start to appreciate, and let’s start with thoughts. Every single one of us has a conversation, and it was the conversation that you just asked me in the very beginning off of that story, “Hey, what was going through your head?” Remember the conversation you just asked me? And that conversation, I call out in my latest book, there are two main voices, the whiner and the winner.

The whiner is your negativity bias. My whiner, when things are getting hard or I’m struggling and I’m tired and I’m starting to have a pity party for myself, sounds like a 10-year-old, “You know how hard this is going to be? Why do you think you can do it? Who do you know who’s done this before? Everyone else thinks you should go this way. No!”

And the whiner in your conversation, it wants to look in the rearview mirror. It knows what it knows from the past. It wants to bring the past into your present. Now that’s a danger because if you’re using something that’s restrictive or limiting from your past into your present, what do you think that does for your future?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it limits it.

Alden Mills
Yeah. Right? It lowers your ceiling. Because that whiner is living out of the comfort zone, the comfort zone of familiarity, which it breeds mediocrity. Now, once you get this thought, and then you got the winner, the winner whispers. The winner will say things, especially when you’re doing something new to you, and that’s what I really want to focus on.

When you’re doing something new to you, where you don’t know the outcome, you’re taking a risk, but you’re like, “You know, what if, what if I could do this thing, accomplish this goal?” The winner, when you do that in the beginning, it whispers to you because you don’t quite have the confidence yet, and it might say things like, “Hey, try again. Get up. Go another way. You can do it.”

And you have, all of us, we all have that conversation to deal with. And I call that conversation our first leadership decision. And it’s the first leadership decision of deciding whether I can or I can’t. And you have to know the deck is stacked against you. It’s stacked in the form of “I can’t,” that’s negativity bias. Neuroscientists will say, on average, we have about a 3-to-1 ratio of negative to positive. And we have that because it’s a survivability mechanism to keep ourselves safe.

Here’s the good news. Most of us don’t have to worry about staying safe anymore. It’s not just about surviving; it’s about thriving. So how do you override the negativity of your negativity bias that came from a couple million-year-old survivability mindset inside your brain?

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say 3 to 1, that means just in the course of my internal mental chatter, I’m likely, on average, to have three times more negative thoughts like, “This is dumb. I hate this. I’m tired. I want to quit,” than I am positive thoughts of, “Booyah! Let’s rock and roll.” Is that what you mean?

Alden Mills
Yes, and I can go a step further. There’s a study that I talk about in the Unstoppable Mindset book about a UCLA neuroscientist who goes through and figures out one negative thought needs three positive thoughts to offset the impact of the negative. And if you want to be in the plus column, you’re going to need somewhere around five positive thoughts.

So that’s how incredibly important it is when you’re starting to have that conversation, and the whiner is coming at you, to really flood your brain with, “Okay, we’re going to figure out ways we can do this. Let’s take our inventory. Let’s take a look at what we have available to us. Let’s remember that there’s always a positive to a negative.”

One of the tools that I use and talk about in the book is playing the opposite game. What I mean by the opposite game is when a negative confronts you, an obstacle that seems insurmountable to you, play the opposite game and give yourself, force yourself, force your team to come up with two reasons why this obstacle is a positive for us, “What are we going to learn from it?”

And when you do that, you’re going to get people to shift their focus. You’re going to force them to shift their focus. Sometimes, if you hear a lot of negative banter and you’re sitting around in a meeting room, like, “Oh, this can’t be done for this reason and this reason and this reason,” you’re like, “Okay, great. We’re done with the ‘can’t be done’ meeting. Everyone, get up. I want you to walk around the office space or walk around the building, and come back here in five minutes.”

“And once you’ve done that,” that’s a state change, by the way, moving, getting oxygen to your mind, “I want you to be thinking about the can-do reasons why we can do this and what that obstacle is going to do positively for us,” and watch what happens. It will take a while because you got to get people to look at it from a different angle, but you can find at least two positives. It wouldn’t surprise me if some came back with three or four.

So that’s on thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, I’d love it if you could give us a couple examples. Like, this thing seems bad and I got two positives on it.

Alden Mills
Okay. Gee, really negative that we’re going near to bankruptcy, like, this is the only stop we have. Give me two things why my investors said, “Hey, your only option is bankruptcy.” You sit around the table, and like, “Well, it’s going to get us really focused.” You know, one of the big problems was when I raised a million and a half dollars, I didn’t have a massive sense of urgency to hit our timelines.

When you have just $25,000 left in some credit cards, you have a real sense of urgency and it brings everything into clarity very quickly. So, we got clarity from the fact that there was bankruptcy. Number two, when you go to a supplier, and say, “Hey, your only other option is bankruptcy,” they don’t want you to go bankrupt. They start to lean into you, if they like you and you’ve been honest with them, and they started to work with us and give us new ideas that we hadn’t gotten in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Understood. All right. And so, what I’m hearing is with the two positive reasons, it’s actually actively positive as opposed to, “Well, it could be worse. Well, I guess it’s nice that we have bankruptcy protections in this nation and I don’t have to be thrown into debtors’ prison.” I mean, I guess, yeah, it could be worse, but that’s not what you’re saying. It’s like, what we’re saying is, “No, this is actively positive.”

Alden Mills

Yeah. And I want to be clear to everybody about positive. Sometimes when I’m up on stage, I will ask people, “Hey, raise your hands if you’ve done 23andMe, or some variant of genetic testing?” A bunch of hands typically go up. And then I’ll ask somebody out of the audience, “Hey, you that just raised your hand, tell me, did you screen positive for the positive gene? Did you get the positive gene?” And they’re like, “Uh, I don’t remember.”

And I go, “Well, let me tell you, it’s right above the leadership gene and just below the success gene.” And then they kind of get it, and they’re like, “Oh, uh, no, I don’t get that.” And I’m like, “Obviously you didn’t, because there’s no such thing!” And when I talk about the positive, let me be specific here, I’m talking about can-do positivity. I’m not talking about just saying, “Hey, let’s be a cheerleader for cheerleaders’ sake.” I’m asking you to look at this from the perspective of “What can we do?”

Pete Mockaitis
And, indeed, how does this circumstance enable us to can-do it better than if it were absent? Bankruptcy yields focus, and that’s handy.

Alden Mills
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, yeah, let’s hear about the focus.

Alden Mills
So here it is, we’ve had this conversation, and we’ve generated some thoughts. We’ve generated a bunch of negative thoughts because that’s what the whiner is really good at. And then we’ve got some positive thoughts and can-do thoughts, like, “Hey, okay, so now we got a tight timeline. Time to get to work. We’re going to cut out all the slough of what we need to do, and just focus on how we’re going to bring this product to market.”

A thought is neither helpful nor hurtful until energy gets attached to it. Neuroscientists today will say we generate somewhere upwards of 10,000 thoughts a day, and I don’t know how they’re counting that, but a minimum right. It’s a large number of thoughts a day. Thoughts come in three main categories: past, present, and future. But how do we add energy to a thought? We do it through focus.

Well, how does focus work? The way focus, this is the way I communicate how focus works, is that it acts like a funnel. It funnels energy to a thought that drives us to an action. The action could be, “We’re going to sit on our hands and feet. Sit on our hands and do nothing.” Or, it could be, “All right. We’re going to call up that manufacturer and see if that manufacturer will work with us and help us with this new product.”

The important thing is thoughts are constantly going over our focus funnel, which we all have. And until we put the thought into our focus funnel and apply energy to it, thoughts are neither helpful nor hurtful. Now, here’s how I want people to think of it, and I offer five different solutions. And I love acronyms, and I created an acronym called FOCUS. And I’ll give you the F of FOCUS as one of five different ways to hone your focus when dealing with a thought.

I’d like you to think, on top of your focus funnel, that you have an adaptive screen. You can open and close that screen. You’re in charge of what thought you want to give energy to it. Now, let’s just do a little thought classwork. If we focus on a negative thought in the past, what do you think that leads to?

Pete Mockaitis
Emotionally? Maybe bitterness, resentment, regret.

Alden Mills
Yeah, those are all components of depression. They lead to depression. If we focus on a negative thought in the future, what does that lead to?

Pete Mockaitis
Like, worry, anxiety.

Alden Mills
Anxiety, okay? That’s the power of our leading ourselves. Everything we’re talking about here, Pete, is leadership, and it is leadership of what I call the first level. The last time I was on here, we talked about second-level leadership. That was team leading, right? The level before team leading is how you lead yourself. In these first initial leadership decisions, okay, picking the thought, then we’re deciding, “Okay, where are we going to put our energy? Where are we going to put that focus?” That’s leadership decision number two.

So, when we get this adaptive screen that’s on top, and we put a thought in there, how do we sort out all these thoughts that are going into our funnel? Because we only really want one, and we want the one that’s going to be most helpful to getting us to our goal. So, I have this very simple question that I ask people, and I’ve even made-up little wristlets so people can remind themselves of it, “Is this helpful or hurtful towards the direction of the goal I’m going?”

Case in point. Is it helpful or hurtful to focus on going bankrupt? Or is it helpful or hurtful to focus on, “How can I figure out a way to cut steel in less than 90 days so we have a shot at launching the product?”

Alden Mills
Now, you may say, “Well, Alden, that’s remarkably simple.” And you know what? It ain’t complicated. It’s just hard, as a good old Navy SEAL instructor have us want it done. And that’s what we’re after here, is I want people to walk away from our conversation today with a couple of very simple tools that they can ask themselves or their team members, “Hey, every time you come in here and talk about everything we can’t do, do you think that’s helpful or hurtful to trying to accomplish the company goal that we’re all being measured against?”

It’s like throwing cold water on somebody. And then when people start to go, “You know what, I guess it’s hurtful.” I’m like, “Yeah. And if you’re saying that inside your mind, and now you’re saying it out to infect everybody else, remember the old adage, ‘One bad apple spoils the bunch’?”

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah.

Alden Mills
That’s negativity bias. It’s the same thing we’re talking about here.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s zoom in. So, we’re living life, you know, we’re having idle moments of me in the shower or driving, and then a thought comes into the mind, like, “Oh, I might go bankrupt and we might have to downsize, sell the house, and get a tiny apartment somewhere.” So, I guess that’s a future negative, anxiety-producing.

And so, I can ask myself the question, “Is that helpful or hurtful? Oh, it’s hurtful. It’s making me anxious instead of, like, focused and zeroed in.” And then what? Do I just kind of try to have my list of go-to helpful thoughts to return to? Or how do you recommend we manage that in these moments?

Alden Mills
Great question. First of all, we’re human. What does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
We have feelings.

Alden Mills
It means we’re imperfect. It means we can’t do it all. It means that our focus funnel, that Alden just talked about, it’s porous. It can sprout holes on the side. And it can sprout holes from external forces of different people saying, “You can’t do that. It’s never been done before. No, that won’t work.” And, all of a sudden, energy gets pulled off the side of your focus funnel, so you’ve lost your laser focus.

Or you have internal focus funnel hole-makers, that are saying, “What are you doing? You can’t do this.” They’re based off of fear, things of doubt, or questioning beliefs. And when you get to those points, the key is being aware enough to be like, “Hey, hey, hey, that’s a negative hypothetical. If I’m thinking about something in the future, if I can’t do this, then I’m going to have to move to a smaller apartment, and I’ve just gotten married, and my wife’s going to hate me, and I’ve burned through all of this, and, oh, my God, I’m going to look like a loser, and I’ll never get a job. Whoa, I should stop right now. What am I doing?” Right?

That is projecting a negative hypothetical into the future. Pete, helpful or hurtful, negative hypothetical?

Pete Mockaitis
Hurtful.

Alden Mills
Yeah, right? But you, the listener, has listened to Alden and Pete talk about this and say, “Hey, that’s something in the future. I can’t control that yet.” The only thing you can control is what you decide you want to create for your own future. And at that point, you get to go back and say, “Hey, flush the funnel. New idea. Alden, what is helpful that I can do today to take action to accomplish this goal? What one thing can I do?”

And when you start having that conversation hourly, sometimes by the second, example, going through Hell Week in SEAL training, where they give you a total of three and a half hours of sleep over five and a half days, you get to a point where all you’re saying is, “Can I take another step? Yeah, I can take another step. I’ll take another breath. I’ll do one more step.”

Climbing Denali at 50 in 15 days and I didn’t get to see the summit until 45 minutes before we made the final turn. Do you think it’s helpful or hurtful to say, “Where’s the summit? I can’t see it.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Are we there yet?”

Alden Mills
“Are we there yet?” Right? No. No, it’s not. But you got to be like, “Hey, forget about that. I’ve got to stay in the moment and not focus on the mountain.” And that’s a phrase that I use a lot. And then talk about staying in the moment versus the mountain. Use the mountain of work in front of you as a way to measure the yardstick of your progress because you’re still making progress.

Even if you’re like Thomas Edison and you fail 10,000 times in inventing the light bulb, you learn 10,000 different ways not to light the light bulb, right? Stay in the moment and ask yourself, “What’s helpful or hurtful to get me a step closer to my goal?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Thank you.

Alden Mills
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And then we got belief.

Alden Mills
We got beliefs. So here it is. We’ve now taken an action. An action we think, hopefully, is helpful in the direction of the new goal, the new thing. We have dared to try to do something new to us. When I’m doing all of this conversation with you, those are the people I’m speaking to that have been willing to set a goal that’s audacious, that sometimes they have no idea how they’re going to accomplish it, but they know if they accomplish this goal, this could be transformative for them, or at least a step in the direction of something transformative for them.

So, we take the action. And, lo and behold, we fall flat on our face. We create this product, we cut steel, we spend all this money, and the damn product doesn’t work, or people don’t like it, or it doesn’t do what we thought it would do. I’m using that as the example. We have a decision to make. We look at that action, and we say, “Oh, my God, I’m a total failure. This is never going to work,” and we accept that as fact, and then our thoughts get in alignment with our focus, and we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Step one.

Or step two, we look at it, and go, “Yeah, it didn’t quite work the way I thought it was going to work, but, hey, we learned how to cut steel, and we got a product that we didn’t have before, and now I can go around and get feedback from people to tell me what they don’t like about it because it’s so much easier to have the hard good in their hands versus just talking about it on a PowerPoint, right?”

And then we start thinking to ourselves, “Wait a second, I got a couple other ideas,” and we develop a different belief. What is a belief, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, a belief is an assertion that you hold to be true.

Alden Mills
Amen. Bingo. Hundred points for Pete today.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Alden Mills
That’s all it is. It’s something we have determined that is true. We’ve determined it. Now maybe we’ve picked it up from other people because beliefs come from all different portions of our life. Beliefs can come from the environment we grew up in, from our parents, from our brothers, our sisters, our coaches, our teachers, on books we read, the TV shows we listen to, or watch, the podcasts, whatever. They come all over the place.

And here’s the wonderful thing about beliefs. We can decide which ones are true or not, and we get to change them. Leadership action number three – we get to decide. I decide what I can or cannot do. Nobody else. You might allow other people to do that, but at the end of the day, it’s your leadership that decides “What I want to believe in.”

Alden, born with smaller than average sized lungs, asthmatic since the age of 12. I remember my mother said, “No, you can’t go to the Naval Academy. They don’t like asthmatics. You’ll definitely never go to SEAL team. Forget about it. You’ll never be a Division I athlete. You won’t be able to try out for the Olympic team. Are you kidding? You have smaller than average sized lungs.”

You know a couple of things they didn’t even know back then? If you really work aerobically, you can increase the volume of your lungs. They know that now. They didn’t know it then. Huh?

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Alden Mills
Interesting, right? So, what’s that got to do with thoughts and focus? Beliefs come in two, this is how I think of them. They come in two major genres: limiting or empowering. Is the belief I’m deciding to be true helpful or hurtful toward my goal? Imagine starting off in a company going, “Well, I’m raising all this money, but I really don’t think it’s going to work.” Would that be helpful or hurtful?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s hurtful for your motivation and belief in doing all the things you’re trying to do.

Alden Mills
But why would you do that? But you know what? Half my SEAL class, who took, on average, two years to show up and get to the starting line, when push came to shove and they had already passed a PT test, physical fitness test, four times, they got one more time to do exactly the same test. This is the lead story in the book, right in the beginning, 122 of us, 64 passed the test. You know why?

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me.

Alden Mills
Because they had a belief that they really couldn’t be there. They really couldn’t do it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they passed it four times previously, and the fifth time…

Alden Mills
But the fifth time, when it mattered to class up and actually start training, because all of the other stuff was just pre-phase training, they don’t class.

Pete Mockaitis
That is surprising.

Alden Mills
Belief, it’s an operating system. It’s our basic operating code. And here’s the rub wrong with the belief? A belief acts like a seed, and the more we empower it, fertilize it with our thoughts and focus, it drives us to take an action. That action is called a behavior. We decide like, “Hey, you know, I think I could run a little bit faster,” or, “I think maybe my manufacturer will give me a little money, or maybe they’ll accept. I’ve got to try, I’ve got to ask, I’m going to take a behavior and I’m going to try something different.”

And then over time, that behavior can turn into a habit. Now habit is an interesting challenge. It’s what keeps me in the coaching business, because a lot of people, the habit becomes so automatic that they don’t even know about it anymore. The automatic could be, well, the first thing that comes up is that, “No, this can’t be done.” They listen to their whiner. They’re talking like the whiner, and they’re the one that’s holding back the whole team.

And then they call in somebody like me, to say, “Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Executive, if you don’t fix that, you’re not helpful on our team anymore.” And that is where you’ve got to go to work on your belief. So how do you do that? Well, you do it the way we initially started when you asked me that big question, and you say, “Hey, we have to ask ourselves these two basic fears, the fear of staying put, or the fear of moving forward.”

And you run an outcome account in your head. What’s an outcome account? Basically, “Hey, what happens if I allow this belief that I think I should accept as true? Am I accepting the fact that it will hold me back from achieving this? Am I comfortable with the fact that I don’t achieve this?” If you’re comfortable with the fact that you’re not going to achieve it, you’re going to stay put.

But if you’re not comfortable with that outcome, and you say, “You know what, the risk of going out there and trying, and maybe, you know, some people laugh at me for failing, or maybe this, that, or the other thing, I got to believe that we can try.” Then that’s going to empower you to look at your beliefs in a different way.

Now the other thing you can do, and I call this confess and assess, is you find somebody, a swim buddy, a close friend, someone that’s not going to judge you, and you call up your buddy, Pete, and you say, “Hey, Pete, I’m struggling here. I can’t seem to see the light of day here, but something’s holding me back. This is what I’m dealing with.”

Pete asks a couple of basic questions, like, “Well, tell me more. Why are you thinking like that? Are you okay if you take that action or don’t take that action? How does that make you feel?” “Oh, no, that would be miserable. I’d hate that.” That’s the confess. When you get your judgment, that inner narrative that’s driving the belief out on the table, and then you use you and your buddy to assess it, that can help you on the path of what I call the “I Can Belief” loop.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s cool. And I’m thinking, we had a hypnotist, Dr. Marc Schoen, a clinical psychologist, who also practice hypnotherapy, given his credentials. And I asked him about what are some of the suggestions or beliefs that are kind of core and super powerful, useful, all the time in many, many contexts, and just to carry with you everywhere.

And I’d like to ask you the same thing. Are there a couple go-to super beliefs that are just so handy in so many circumstances that you cling to?

Alden Mills
Yes. So, I would classify those beliefs as mantras. And that is absolutely one of the things that I encourage, and I talk about it in the book on how to build mantras that help you with your focus of, “Is this helpful or hurtful?” And one of the mantras is, “I decide what I can or can’t do.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Alden Mills
“I’m unstoppable. I can do this.” And you speak in the present tense of what it is you’re trying to do. I love to help people achieve things they didn’t think they could do. That’s kind of my term about being unstoppable. And, by the way, to be unstoppable means you first have to have been stopped. And let’s say, in your case, Pete, you want to be a best-selling author. I would say to you, “Okay, Pete, the very first thing, I want you to create a new mantra for yourself, ‘I am a bestselling author. I write books people want to read. I write books that help people unlock their potential.’”

“Pete, throughout the day, anytime you’re sitting down, and you’re thinking about writing, I want you to start talking to yourself in that present tense, and give yourself that mantra because that’s the goal we’re after. I want the mantra to be in alignment with the goal you’re after in the present tense.’” So that’s one of the techniques.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I also want to get your quick thought on, you said we can control emotions, and I think some might say, “Can you? Is that possible? What about depression? Isn’t that a thing where we cannot?” What’s your hot take on controlling emotions? And any quick tips on how to do it?

Alden Mills
Emotions. What is an emotion?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny. I was reading Ethan Kross’s book, and apparently, it’s somewhat complicated. But I’m going to simplify it, and just say it is a feeling and thought existing within us.

Alden Mills
There’s something called a feeling-thought loop, right? Thought gives energy to it, generates a feeling. Emotion derives from it. The definition that I enjoy most about emotion actually comes out of a book from Conscious Leadership that is called E-motion. It’s energy in motion. Now, if you have an E-motion, and something that has been driven from a thought and a feeling, you first need to know the root cause.

If I sit here and spend a lot of time stewing on, “Somebody ripped me off,” I’m making that decision to go down and create that emotion. Can you control every single emotion? No, we’re imperfect, right? But can you control emotions? A hundred percent, you can. It’s in your control, but how do you do that?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess the pathway then sounds like is, if there’s an emotion I would like to experience, “I would like to feel inspired and motivated,” I’m going to choose a thought that’s in the inspirational motivational zone and resonant for me, maybe an experience, a memory, a goal, and I’m going to put focus and energy upon that thought. And, in so doing, I will often, but not always, conjure emotion.

Alden Mills
Yeah, and make it even simpler, “Hey, you know what? I’m feeling kind of blah right now. I’d like to feel a little bit better. What’s a simple way to do that? Oh, I love American Authors’ ‘Best Day of My Life’ song. I’m going to listen to that.” Boom! What just happened there? I just changed my emotion. I did a state change, “You know what? I don’t feel that great. I feel low on energy and I feel kind of blah. I’m going to go for a run. I’m going to get on the rowing machine. Get a workout.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure. Get a glass of water. I mean, I guess when you raise the question, you naturally say, “Oh, there’s several options that I can immediately take right now.”

Alden Mills
A hundred percent. And, by the way, that’s you leading you, right? So, in the case of when you get ambushed, and I talk about this in the chapter I used, one of the hardest Navy SEAL training evolutions is practicing an ambush. They’re violent, they’re terrifying, they’re unexpected, and you got to think clearly when you get ambushed, but we ambush ourselves all the time.

We let our thoughts run wild. We’re not paying attention because we’re doing something else or looking at our phone, and, all of a sudden, something pisses us off. Before we know it, an emotion comes out and we’re all fired up. So, you got to learn to move that emotion. Now, what is a big challenge when we get an ambushed emotion? Well, that fires the amygdala, the amygdala, the little almond-sized piece of our brain that has to deal with fight, flight, or freeze.

And the problem with when the amygdala gets fired is it changes the blood flow from the prefrontal cortex, the front of our brain, where executive function and compassion and collaboration live, and put us in a state where cortisol and adrenaline are firing through our veins. Cortisol, so we can just go to the sugars. Adrenaline, so we can get up to speed or whether we’re going to fight or flight. And then we’re not solving anything creatively, and then more emotion can stack on there.

The quickest way to move that, and you have to work on this, is through a box breath is one example. Breathing through the nostril, holding, exhaling, holding. Moving, doing a state change, getting yourself to calm back down from that emotional ambush.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well, tell us, anything else you want to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Alden Mills
I really want people to understand they are their own best leader. Every single one of us is a leader. We have to lead ourselves to get up in the morning. We have to lead ourselves to listen to this podcast. We have to lead ourselves to decide what we can or can’t do. And you have to lead yourself to decide, “What’s the helpful or hurtful thought? Where am I going to put my focus? And what am I going to decide to believe in?” If you learn to lead yourself through those, watch how many people will learn to lead to follow you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now, could you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alden Mills
Of course. Seneca, “Success is a matter of belief.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Alden Mills
I’m really geeking out on this book right now, “A Calendar of Wisdom” by Leo Tolstoy. Daily little wisdom to get your mind in the right place, your thoughts, your focus, and your beliefs to start the day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Alden Mills
Telling my kids I love them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with audiences, something they quote back to you often?

Alden Mills
“Is this helpful or hurtful?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Alden Mills
Alden-Mills.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alden Mills
Yes. I want you waking up every day asking yourself, “What’s one thing I can do that’s going to push me out of my comfort zone, that’s going to drive me to do something courageous, audacious, something that, over time, will change my life?”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Alden, this is so powerful. Thank you.

Alden Mills
Pete, great questions. I always love being with you. Keep inspiring, brother.