Episode 151: When You Follow Your Purpose, The Hustle Is Worth It With Alan Stein Jr.
In this episode, we discuss how Alan Stein Jr.'s parents were an influence on his future career by their example of following their purpose and helping him understand the value of earning money. Alan shares his journey of combining his love for basketball, performance training, and educating others, which has allowed him to enjoy his work every day, despite the challenges he faces along the way.
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When You Follow Your Purpose, The Hustle Is Worth It With Alan Stein Jr.
Introduction To Alan Stein Jr.
Welcome to this episode of Breaking Beliefs where I interviewed Alan Stein, Jr. He is a world-renowned coach, speaker, and author. He has spent fifteen-plus years working with the highest-performing basketball players on the planet and now teaches audiences how to utilize the same strategies in business that elite athletes use to perform at a world-class level. Alan specializes in improving individual and organizational leadership, performance, and accountability.
He inspires and empowers everyone he works with to take immediate action and improve his mindset, habits, and productivity. During my interview with Alan, we discussed how his parents influenced his future career by their example of following their purpose and helping him to understand the value of earning money. Through his journey, he found the combination of his love for basketball, performance training, and educating others that led him to enjoy what he does each day even when there are hurdles. I hope that you enjoy this episode with Alan.
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I am here with Alan Stein, Jr. Alan, do you want to give some background on yourself before we start?
I'd be happy to. I guess what would matter most to your readers is that basketball was my first love. I spent the first portion of my life as a basketball player. While I was in college, I started to develop an equal love for training, conditioning, and performance work. When I graduated from college in the late ‘90s, decided to become a basketball performance coach.
Transition To Keynote Speaking
The reason I share that is it was pretty exhilarating to graduate college and combine my original love of the game of basketball with a newfound love of performance training. I did that for just under 20 years before I decided to make another distinct pivot and move into the corporate keynote speaking realm, which is what I do now. The reason I say all of that is I am grateful that I've been able to not only earn a living but build an extraordinary life around something that I'm passionate about and love what I do. For those who like labels and titles, I'm a keynote speaker, and I'm an author.
I’m very happy to have you here. Why don't we start from the beginning and get to how you got to where you are now? Give me a little background on yourself. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do for a living?
I grew up where I still live now, which is a suburb of Washington DC. I live in Gaithersburg, Maryland, about 30 minutes north of the city. I was raised here by two parents, both of whom were elementary educators. My mom was a 1st-grade teacher for 30 years. My father started as an elementary school teacher and then moved up to administration and became a middle school principal. Two parents who were heavily devoted to education.
Working With My Brother
I have a younger brother who's three and a half years younger. We very much share the same sense of humor but outside of that, we are very different in almost every way. My brother works with me now. He's what I call my Digital Ninja, and he manages my social media accounts, my podcast, my new email newsletter, and my video work.
He's the behind-the-scenes guy with everything I have going on with my speaking business. It's cool for us to have an opportunity to work together. Even though I grew up in this area, my parents retired and moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina just over 20 years ago. My brother got married and moved down to Saint Augustine, Florida fifteen years ago. I'm the last one here in the greater DC area.
You're holding on.
Yes. It's funny. When my children grow up. I have twin sons that are just started 9th grade. They're fourteen years old and have a daughter who just started 7th grade. She's 12. Whenever she graduates high school, I will most likely move somewhere else. I'm ready to live somewhere different.
I get it. I've gone through the empty nest thing and a year and a half ago, got a place in Florida as well. First, let's talk about your brother a little bit. Growing up, were you close growing up as children? It is because it's cool that you guys can manage working together.
I would say when we were young, in middle school and below, we were very close. I think even to his admission, he probably had a little bit of the little brother syndrome where he would be interested in and want to do anything that I did. If I played sports, he'd play sports. If I skateboarded, he'd skateboard. If I collected baseball cards, he'd collect baseball cards.
When we had all of those common interests, we certainly got along well. Then, when he got to high school, understandably, he started to carve his path, and he was in a band. He's very artistic and very visual. I'm a very linear thinker. He's very creative. I think many of our differences became exposed at that point.
Not only differences in personality and temperament but also in our interests. We started to grow apart because we just didn't share the same interests, for lack of a better term. There was a period, I would say, from high school to young adulthood. We just did our own thing. There was never any malicious intent.
There was never any big falling out. It was just, “You've got long hair and are wearing flannel shirts and are in a grunge band, and I'm on the athletic side, and we were just different.” Thankfully, we came back full circle in the very early 2000s because of his interest in graphic design and the Internet, which, of course, was new at that time, is what reunited us. He has been my digital ninja for two decades now.
Even before this, as a performance coach, you were working with him?
Yes. As soon as I graduated college in the late '90s and started my own performance training company here in the DC area, this was the beginning of when people started to have websites. Even with dial-up modems and forth. He created the first website that I ever had and it was all self-taught on his end. He was super into that.
Then, that was the help I needed. The same thing when social media got going, in 2007, 2008, and 2009, somewhere in that ballpark. That was something he became interested in and developed a very high acumen for. I certainly had an interest in it from a marketing standpoint that just cemented our relationship even more.
That's very cool. Your brother's doing marketing, but your parents are teachers. Is that how you got involved with what it's like to be a teacher or trainer? How did you see them at work? Did you ever go to their classroom and get an idea?
The thing that I got to see firsthand was my parents loved what they did for a living. They took a tremendous amount of pride and got a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction out of pouring into young people. I'm very thankful that what was modeled for me very early was two people who loved their work. Now, of course, teaching has a lot of pain. There is a lot of teaching that is challenging.
Following Your Purpose: Watching my parents pour into young people showed me the power of purpose. It’s not about the title; it’s about the impact.
By no means am I saying that every moment of their lives were puppy dogs and ice cream but overall, they found a tremendous amount of purpose in their work and a lot of fulfillment in their work. I knew that I wanted that same thing. I didn't exactly know in what capacity, but I knew that I wanted to feel about my work the same way they felt about their work. The same with many kids going to college, I didn't have the foggiest idea of what I wanted to do for a living.
I started college as an Elementary Ed major. I figured, “If I'm going to just take a shot at something, I might as well just do what my parents did.” I learned very quickly that was not the path for me. I enjoyed pouring into young people, but I did not enjoy teaching. That was when I decided to follow the path of being a performance coach. I looked at it as basketball would be my subject.
How Performance Coaching Shaped My Career
Strength and conditioning and performance work would be part of that. I would still be a “Teacher.” but when you do it in that capacity, then you're called a coach or you're called a trainer. It was still a derivative of what they did. I just found the subject that I loved, which was performance training in basketball.
What struggles did you see them have as teachers? You said there were pain points, but they were able to stay aligned with why they loved it.
For starters, I do think most people will acknowledge that teachers are fairly under-compensated. For the role they play in our country and for how much time and effort they pour into young people, relatively speaking, you're not going to get rich being a teacher. Now, that's okay. My parents' goal, of being rich wasn't one of the factors of why they chose their vocation, but that's certainly a constraint. Another constraint, you're responsible for 30 young lives every single year.
Anyone who's ever been in an elementary classroom can acknowledge that you don't always go 30 for having kids who are easy to work with. Every single time you've got 30 kids in a class, you're going to have one or two. They try your patience. They have behavior problems. They have discipline issues. Then, of course, the next rung of that is you're not just dealing with young people, but you're also dealing with young people's parents. Now, you've got to be able to talk and communicate with parents who are unhappy about what's going on.
It was a lot, but their purpose of an altruistic profession of servant leadership and pouring into young people was what I saw most often. Every once in a while, you'd have a tough day or a tough issue with a kid but overall, my parents enjoyed what they did for 30 years. For that, I know they're very grateful and I'm very grateful that they modeled that for me.
Why did they feel this need to be poured into young people? Was there something that drove them in their lives to it that made it very passionate for them?
Honestly, I don't know where that fire started for them. I just know that that is something that they took a lot of pride in. I've known that some of that has been downloaded to me. When I was in the basketball performance training space for almost 20 years, the overwhelming majority of players I worked with were high school or middle school age.
I enjoyed not only teaching players how to run faster and jump higher, but I took pride in being a role model for them off the court and helping young people navigate their young lives at 14, 15, or 16 years old. I loved pouring into kids. Part of that stemmed from how many people poured into me as a youngster.
I was involved in sports from five years old, all the way up through college. I can think of how many times coaches got me excited about the sport or I would have fun, making memories, and making friends. Yes. To me, it was just ingrained. I've always loved kids, loved children, and loved pouring into young people. Still to this day, even though my primary vocation is as a corporate keynote speaker, I get opportunities to speak to teams, coaches, or school districts, and I love those opportunities.
Give me a little background on your basketball. Where did that begin and where did you go with that?
My parents signed me up for my first team at five years old in kindergarten and I fell in love with the game immediately. I just had an absolute blast. Now, in my younger years, I had then and I still have now for someone who's almost 50 years old, a tremendous amount of physical energy. I was attracted to anything that just let me expend energy.
Anything that let me run, jump, climb, crawl, throw a ball, and catch a ball, I was into it. I did just about every sport under the sun, including some non-conventional ones. Skateboarding, BMX biking, and martial arts, as well as your traditional sports of soccer, basketball, and football. However, despite being exposed to all of those different things, for some reason, basketball always won out. Basketball always ended up being my favorite.
Now, part of it too is the timing. I'm 48-years-old. When I started my most formative years of playing basketball when Michael Jordan first came on the scene, they not only changed the game of basketball but changed pop culture. You're talking about an absolute rock star. I was just infatuated with him. My room was just covered in Michael Jordan posters and memorabilia. I would watch every single game he played.
That certainly helped continue for the fire to keep burning but, basketball was just always it. As I've been able to look back, I think one of the reasons is, I heavily identify as an introvert. I love solitude. I love alone time. I love being by myself. It's what refuels my tank. One of the things I loved most about basketball was the two primary skill sets of handling the ball, dribbling, and shooting were two things that I could work on by myself.
I could take my ball, go down to the playground, play for hours by myself, and just have my thoughts, or in those days, bring a boom box and play some hip-hop music while I was shooting hoops. I can work on my game by myself. I can go to practice with my teammates and use everything that I have done with myself to try to make them better and try to help us win games. I love the fact that I could combine being alone, working on my game, and being with others.
There's not a lot of other team sports that you can do that. You can't play football by yourself. You can't play baseball or soccer by yourself. In soccer, you could work on some moves and kick into a goal, but in football and baseball, you need someone else to throw and catch with. For whatever reason, there was just something about basketball that combined everything that was the right fit for me.
What was it about Michael Jordan?
He was just the coolest. Still to this day, he's the coolest. I've said numerous times, I'm almost 50 years old and I have an entire wall in my room of Michael Jordan shoes because I still wear Jordans. His shoes are more popular now than they were when I first bought them in the late 80s. That dude is the coolest of the cool and he was then.
As I said, he not only changed the game of basketball, but he changed pop culture. He's one of the very first team sport athletes who was promoted individually. Nike had a shoe just about him even though he played for the Chicago Bulls. He changed everything about the game. I can't think of a better way to describe him than he was cool. In my formative years of late elementary school, middle school, and college, you're attracted to what you think is cool. You want to be cool when you're that age. Yeah.
Were there any traits about how he played basketball that you modeled after or kept in your mind?
I certainly attempted to and that was part of the fun. One of the things I loved, especially about those sessions where I was just by myself. By the time I was in middle school, my parents put a basket up in our driveway in our front yard. I could play every single day. You better believe that was when my imagination, my imagery, and my creativity would come to life.
I would be in my front yard. I'm 5 foot 3 inches, 100 pounds soaking wet in 7th grade, and I'm pretending that I'm Michael Jordan. I'm visualizing that I'm playing for the Bulls and I'm doing shots that I saw him do the night before, in a game. It was just playtime, and it was so much fun. Those are some of my absolute fondest memories as a kid where we were doing some of those things on the basketball court.
Still to this day, there are very few things that I find as therapeutic as just going and shooting hoops. I certainly can't move or play like I used to but if you just give me a ball and a basket and I'm just shooting around for 30 to 40 minutes, it's very reflective for me. It's great stillness and thinking time. There's something almost meditative about it and I love it. It started in my driveway 35 or 40 years ago.
When you were young, what was it? Did you want to be professional? What was your goal?
Yes, in elementary school and middle school, I thought that I had the raw materials to be able to play in the NBA because at that time, pre-Internet, pre-social media, you couldn't see any farther than the end of your street. For me, it just made sense logically. I'm the best basketball player at my elementary school. That's got to be good enough to play in the NBA.
Little did I know there are 100,000 elementary schools in the United States and every one of them has the best basketball player. Wasn't till I got to high school that my world expanded and I was like, “Okay.” Even if I'm the best player at my high school, there are some other good players around at other high schools. That's when, I don't want to say, I lowered my goal but I reshifted and I pivoted.
My goal when I got to high school was no longer to play in the NBA. I knew that wasn't going to happen, but it was could I play college basketball? That was an important goal for me that I was fully invested in and I'm proud to say that I was able to. Now, I play at Elon College, a very small school in North Carolina. I didn't play for Duke, Kentucky, UNC, or Indiana but I still checked the box of playing college basketball and achieving a goal that I had.
In the mid-90s, someone who plays at Elon College was not at the top of the list to go to the NBA. It just cemented the fact that it was okay to be able to play at that level but I knew that when college was over, my playing days were also over and I wanted to find something else that lit me up the way playing basketball did. That's what drove me to basketball performance training, where I can still do something that I love, just do it in a different capacity.
How did you even get into that or know about it? It's not necessarily a popular thing you hear as a career.
The crazy part is, it's way more popular now than it was in the late 90s. In the late 90s, it was almost unheard of. I got in at the right time. I started to get into that profession. There was a lot less competition. There was an abundance of opportunities to make things happen, which I'm very grateful for but, honestly, I didn't look at it as anything other than I love basketball. I love performance training, and I like pouring into young people.
If I draw a Venn diagram with those three things, the thing in the middle is becoming a basketball performance trainer for high school kids. I didn't put any more thought into it than that and it was a great decision because I loved what I did. Thankfully, just being at the right place at the right time and the right age, after a few years of that, that industry started to expand and explode. You started to see there was much more of a need for it.
Business was very good and then the next crop of players after Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, that next wave of players, the LeBron James of the world, were super into that type of stuff. That helped it because when the best players in the league are doing the types of stuff that you're doing, that just makes it a much easier sell, especially the high school-age kids. I just got in at the right time and the right place.
Were you always on your own? Were you part of another business?
No. I've been self-employed my entire adult career. As soon as I graduated college, there was a gentleman who was training a couple of NBA players here and that was why I moved back to this area to be an apprentice and a mentee to him. I did that for almost a year and learned everything that he was doing.
Then, at that point, probably part naivete and part arrogance, I said, “Alright. I'm just ready to do this on my own. I don't need to do this for anyone else. I'm 23. I know everything there is to know. Why don't I just go ahead and do it myself?” I jumped in head first. Ever since then, I've been self-employed in everything that I've ever done, which is something I'm very comfortable with now.
I didn't know any different then. When you're fresh out of college, you're in your low 20s, you have a very low cost of living. I can survive on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I split the rent with three of my high school friends. We all shared an apartment. I didn't need a lot of money. It was okay if I wasn't making a ton of money.
I was doing what I loved. I had many friends who graduated college, and they had to put on suits and ties and work in cubicles. I just didn't want to do that. I got to do something with basketball, in the weight room, and on the court with young kids every day of my life. I said, “This is amazing.” I’m very thankful that I went that path.
Also, you knew your purpose young and were taught that by watching your parents. That's a big thing because a lot of times, the focus is on the title or the profession, not on purpose. How did your parents support you in that process of being okay with not pushing you toward a title versus your purpose?
Understandably, they were a bit hesitant. I would never use the word disappointed because I don't think my parents had ever been disappointed in me. I imagine there was a little bit of disappointment when I decided not to go the elementary educator route. For two years, I was on that track with my college courses and I'm sure on some level, they were proud that I was following in their footsteps.
Then, when I took a very quick about-face and said, “I ain't doing this. I want to do something else.” Again, I don't want to speak for them and I've never asked them. Yes, they were probably a little disappointed but they've always supported, championed, and cheered on what I was doing. I do know that my parents are very conventional thinkers.
You have two people who worked for the same school system for 30 straight years, collected their pension, and retired. My parents and I say this with all the love and grace I have in my heart, they don't have an entrepreneurial bone in their body. They don't have a self-employed bone in their body. The thought that I wasn't coming home to work for someone else, but I was coming home to scrape and hustle my livelihood, I'm sure just worried them as a parent.
It's not that they didn't believe in me. They've always believed in me but they're probably thinking, “I know you don't have a lot of expenses, but are you sure you can find enough high school kids to train to pay your rent, your car insurance, and your car? They were probably just understandably a little bit worried. That probably lasted for a few years until I proved the concept that I could at least stay afloat.
I'm not going to be a multimillionaire training high school kids in basketball performance, but I can at least make a decent living. Of course, the good part was making a living from a financial standpoint, the bar was fairly low with them being teachers. I certainly could hustle enough to train enough people to make what an elementary school teacher would make per year and that was great.
Then, they finally started understanding what I was doing there. I made this pivot to keynote speaking, which is another world that they don't know a whole lot about. Even to this day, when someone says, “What does your son do?” They just say, “He's a speaker. He goes and he talks to businesses.” I don't know that they can describe it much more than that, but same thing.
Now that I've been self-employed for 25 years, they just know this is how I'm wired. They know that I'm comfortable having to hunt and kill my living. For my entire adult life, I have been 100% commission-based, and I'm okay with that. I don't think they would be in themselves if they had to do it over, but they certainly know that I can do it now and they believe in me now.
I was going toward the question because having parents who are teachers and have been in the same career, where did you model yourself after? I came from an entrepreneurial family, I saw business owners and what you had to do to get business. A lot of times that will come back to me when I need it, inside. Did you model yourself or did you have some mentors to help you in that shift from what you were used to growing up with?
I think it came from equal parts naivete and equal parts arrogance of just thinking that I could just do it. I also say this with a tremendous amount of love to my parents who who did a phenomenal job with me and my brother but because they were on, I guess, the fixed income of being teachers, I very much grew up with a scarcity mindset.
I very much grew up with a not-enough mindset. You need to save and you need to be very cautious with the money you have because whatever we make in a year, that's all we have. For whatever reason, I'm the black sheep of the family, and I've always been very different. I've always been driven by financial and monetary success. I've always had a taste for nicer things. I still joke with my parents to this day.
They don't like going to nice restaurants. They don't like staying in nice hotels. They drive very low-end conservative cars because that's what they like and there's nothing wrong with that. I don't say that with an ounce of judgment. I love my parents very much and I love the life they built but I've always wanted bigger and better.
One of the things my parents taught me when I was younger and I don't think this was intentional. I just think it's what they did at the time. We talked about Michael Jordan and when I was younger, when the Jordan 1 came out, it was the hottest shoe on the market and it was $100, which at the time, you could get a pair of nice basketball shoes for $25 or $30. I wanted the Jordans and I could not convince my parents to buy me Jordans.
They just said, “Basketball shoes cost $30. If you want $100 shoes, then you need to go out and earn $70. We'll give you the $30 it costs for basketball shoes, but if you want something better than that, then you've got to earn that money. I said, “Fine. I'll take that bet.” I started working at a very young age because I wanted to earn money to have the things I wanted.
They ended up having the same deal when I turned sixteen. My parents said however much money you've saved when you've turned sixteen, we'll match that and you can get your first car. I saved up, $2,500, and I got myself a $5,000 piece of crap as my first car and I was proud of that thing. I had some skin in the game. I learned at a very early age that if I wanted nicer things, I had to go out and hustle for them. I got to go out and work for them.
I've always had that mentality. Now, as I've gotten older, thankfully, I've become a lot less materialistic. I'd skew more toward being a minimalist if anything else. In fact, the overwhelming majority of things that I have in my apartment, you can see in this screen behind me because my office is filled with different mementos and knickknacks and memories.
However, if you go through the rest of my apartment, it is very minimalist. I'm not as driven now by material items, but I am driven by financial security. I am driven by financial freedom. I'm still very much a capitalist at heart and want to make as much money as I can to provide me and my family with opportunities, experiences, and security.
Following Your Purpose: Financial freedom isn’t about material things—it’s about security, opportunity, and the ability to give back.
Most of that hasn't left me. It's just not directed toward me, I don't need $1,000 suits or $20,000 watches. I don't need to have a fleet of cars. I'm pretty basic when it comes to material items, but I still heavily crave financial freedom and financial security. That's why I still, to this day, hustle and work as hard as I do. I think my parents inadvertently accidentally taught me that by saying that.
It's interesting. Everybody's born with these unique souls of what drives them and because that drove you, they taught you entrepreneurship. Which is funny and they didn't even realize they were on that path with you. Just more like, you want that? You have to understand the value of money.
Absolutely, and for that, I'm grateful. For my children, I'm trying to take the best of both worlds. I'm trying to think that the lessons that my parents did teach me that I'm in full alignment with, as well as things that I believe are different. As I said, I am the black sheep of my family on most major topics. Whether you're talking about politics, religion, money, sex, or anything in between, I am very counterculture to what my parents believe.
That part, I'm okay with. One thing my parents did help with is to try to teach me to be a free thinker and that's what I try to do with my children. I had this conversation with my kids the other day and said, “I will never tell you guys what to think, but I'm going to consistently try and teach and model for you how to think.”
“If you ever ask my opinion on anything or what I believe, I'm happy to tell you, but don't think for one second that I expect that you need to believe the same thing.” “You have every right to form your conclusions and your own opinions.” That even can spark some very healthy debate, which I think is much needed in today's world. I think we need to be able to have civil discourse with people that believe things that are different than us and I'm all about that and love that.
What are the messages now that you're trying to get across in your speeches when you go out and talk to corporate environments?
Teaching Corporate Teams About Performance
From a corporate standpoint, most of what people bring me in for is some derivative of performance, either individual performance at the employee level. How can we get our employees to improve their habits, their mindset, and their focus? Some groups bring me in more for leadership training. How can we become more impactful and influential?
How can we improve our perspective on how we lead? How can we lead with more core value-based decisions? How can we be more purposeful? Some groups bring me in more for organizational performance. How can we get everyone playing together nicely in the sandbox? How can we improve role clarity, communication, and accountability? Then, many groups want a little bit of each of those.
Are people showing up as their best selves? We want our leaders to pour into others, but we want everybody to get along and row in the same direction. It's usually one of those pillars, but it's all under the umbrella of performance. I don't speak to anyone who's looking for something outside of that because that's outside of my wheelhouse of what I believe I have to offer.
How if I wrote down your purpose before correctly, it was performance training, basketball, and love kids. Has your purpose evolved now with what you do?
It has, but it hasn't. It's still fairly similar. I still consider what I'm doing today to be performance training. I'm just not training 15-year-old boys to run faster and jump higher. I'm training men and women in the corporate space how to show up as the best versions of themselves so they can make a maximum contribution to their team. What I'm doing is still very similar. It's just the way that it's expressed is different.
Instead of being in a weight room with 15 high school basketball players, I'm now on a stage in front of 300 sales professionals but the goal is the same. How can I get you to commit to the fundamentals to show up to be the best version of yourself so that you can make a maximum contribution to everyone and everything around you? Just your contribution won't be putting a ball in a basket on Friday night. I still look at what I'm doing to be very similar.
There are so many great things that you've shared with us, and I'm sure everyone's going to appreciate it. I like to close out with just some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category, either family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
Let's go with health.
Things or actions I don't have that I want to have with my health?
I know I'm going to sound like I lack hubris with this one, but now I can't think of anything because I have been, for the last decade in particular, so dialed into my physical health. It's a huge part of my identity. I am militant with my morning routine, my workout routine, and my eating. Now, I am exposed to new stuff all the time.
Perfect example, two and a half years ago, I started reading and hearing about the benefits of sauna. Now, I do two to three sauna sessions a week and haven't missed them for the last two and a half years. I hear about the benefits of cold plunge and cold therapy, same thing. I hear about a new work. That is constantly evolving and I do the best I can to stay on the cutting edge. At this moment that you asked the question, I can't think of a single thing that I'm not doing that I want to be doing or should be doing.
Anything, as far as your health, that you do have that you want to keep?
Thankfully, I've got pretty high energy levels. I told you when I was five years old, I was constantly running around looking to expend energy.
I was just picturing a dog and that you've got to get the energy out.
Exactly, I still have a degree in that. If I'm not able to work out for a few days, I'm just like a caged lion. Now, what I've learned is that it takes a lot more at 48 years old to restore that energy. I need more sleep than I've ever needed before. I need to eat healthy. I need to have proper days off and get rest and recovery.
There are things that I have to do now that I didn't have to do when I was younger. The way I look at it now, my iPhone's a couple of years old now. The battery is not quite what it used to be. When I first got my iPhone, this specific model, the battery was at 100. You could be on it for hours and it'd be down to 93%.
Now, if I'm on my phone for hours, it goes from 100% down to 12%, and I have to plug it in all night to get it back to 100%. That's how I view myself now. It takes a lot more intention and purpose to have the rest and recovery to be high energy, it doesn't just happen automatically. Whereas, when I was younger, I was just brimming with it.
These are actions that I don't have that I don't want. You don't want to have it as part of your health.
That's an interesting one. Maybe this will spark an answer to what you did ask. I'm trying to learn to get better at having a little spontaneity and letting go a little bit. My comfort zone is in structure. I love structure. I love routine. I love consistency. I love systems and processes. If I showed you the level of detail at which I monitor my workouts, my eating, and my sleep, it makes most people claustrophobic because it's oppressive but it's what I love. It's how I operate best. I'm not encouraging anyone else to do that in their lives, but I found what works well for me.
I'm trying to get much better at flexibility and having the resilience that when my schedule or my routines get knocked off kilter, I can still perform at a high level and I can still be a functional human being. Those who are closest to me know when my routine gets knocked off course, I can be a little irritable. I can be a little moody. I'm not my best self. That's something I'm trying to improve because I don't ever want my external circumstances to dictate how I show up at the moment. I'm getting way better at that, but I ain't out of the woods yet.
I get it. I'm very routine-oriented as well, and it gets hard, especially with travel, to stay on it.
That's what's funny. When I travel, I get even more dialed into my routines because it does give me some level of control but what I'm trying to do is make sure that I'm not downloading that onto my children. I want to make sure my children know, “You guys can opt-in to do what you want to do. You can create your patterns and your routines.” They don't have to be the same as mine. I constantly try to encourage my kids. I constantly try to model for them the traits that I believe would be in their best interest to emulate, but I don't make or force my kids to do anything.
On the weekends, they stay with me because I'm divorced. That, “Daddy's getting up at 7:00 in the morning, he's going for a walk, then he's going to the gym, and then he's going to make breakfast. If we want to do any of those things, then we need to wake up and do it with him.” If they want to sleep in and don't even bat an eye until I get home, that's fine, but they know what I'm doing while it is that they're still sleeping. I don't guilt them or shame them. I let them figure that out.
Funny enough, when you give them that autonomy and that freedom, and then you model those things, they see the pride that I have in what I do. Slowly but surely, now that they're getting older, they're starting to opt into those things a lot more than they used to. It's not because I'm forcing them or making them. That's just the path that they're slowly going down.
Closing Remarks And Key Takeaways
Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to make sure you close out with or the readers walks away with?
No. This was so much fun. I do a lot of podcast interviews and this went in a completely different direction than most of the interviews I do, which was very refreshing. You got me talking about some things that I don't talk about a whole lot, which felt good. No, this was a blast. I'm glad we connected. Anyone reading, if you ever need anything from me, I'm very responsive and very easy to get a hold of. My website is AlanSteinJr.com, and I'm @AlanSteinJr on all the major social platforms. I'm good about getting back to folks. If I can ever be of further service or if anyone who is reading has a question or a story they want to share, I would love to hear from them.
Thank you very much for being on and sharing your story, Alan.
It was great to see you again. Thank you very much.
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For my Mindful Moments with this interview with Alan Stein Jr. Hopefully, you were able to take a lot of his stories and be able to apply them to your own life. I thought it was just fascinating how his parents were more on the traditional path in life with being teachers and being in the same job their whole career and Alan taking this path of being an entrepreneur.
We came back to a couple of key concepts that taught him how to navigate this world of entrepreneurship without him even realizing it. One of them was the purpose. One of the things that he saw with his parents is no matter how hard a student was, the year was, or the fact that they weren't getting paid as much as maybe other professions, they loved their work.
They were all about being responsible for these young people's lives and wanting to see that impact. I think it's important that we talk about personal purpose because personal purpose is one of those things that often gets ignored because we spend time on the titles we want or the career we want, but not why we want it and what drives us.
That purpose can shift decisions that you make in your career, sometimes going backward, sometimes going forward, because you believe much in the work that you are doing. When we can get ourselves centered around what our purpose is, it becomes a very important thing in driving our happiness in the work that we do.
One of the things that we talked about was his purpose because we talked about the fact that this was important to his parents. It was his love for basketball, that he loved performance training, and seeing the results that you got out of that. He also loved teaching kids and pouring into them something that he got from his parents and watching his parents. He also had something different and unique from his family.
One of the things that we talked about that is interesting is his love of things. His parents being on a finite budget drew him to understand how he had to earn money to get the things that he wanted. His parents taught him the value of hustling, which I think a lot of times when we think of entrepreneurs when we think of the higher level in organizations, I know I get into this conversation a lot where people in accounting firms that move from senior managers to partner or directors to partner, how different it is once they become a partner because there's hustle.
There is business development that has to happen. When you own a business or you're a CEO of a business, your biggest focus is sales because, without sales, the business cannot survive. This lesson that his parents taught him early on of we can give you a finite amount of money. However, you've got to figure out the gap and how you're going to get the things that you want.
I think a very important lesson no matter if your parents are teachers or your parents have the means is, what is it that we can do to instill that value of goals that we have that they aren't just a given and we're not surprised once we get there that something is going to be asked of us that we're not prepared for? It is because he was prepared for that as a child, and it helped him eventually build into that as an adult when he decided to go his course and be an entrepreneur.
Which I thought was an interesting twist in being an entrepreneur because most of the people that I interview or talk to who are entrepreneurs have come from that family, they've seen it in their family, or they've seen some struggle that has helped them understand what it's like to be an entrepreneur and have to drive that for yourself and be a 100% responsible for the income coming into yourself and your family.
Another important thing that we talked about is, that you can look at a speaker and you can look at people on stage and think, “They're probably an extrovert.” What you heard him say was he identified as an introvert. One of the reasons he liked basketball so much was the time alone by himself, the dribbling, the practicing, and just doing the reps so that he could get better and better. He could go try things that he couldn't try and fail at in front of other people.
Things that he saw Michael Jordan do, he could go do by himself. I think that's an important lesson in everything we do, that we have to have that alone time to plan in business. It isn't just in a hobby or a sport that we need that time to do the reps, to practice, to make sure that we are doing the right things in our business and analyzing that or even in our careers, that if we want to get from here to there, what are the things that we are practicing preparing for?
All the things that we need to learn to get to that level that we want to get to. I think it's important that we understand where we're going to find that time to practice, where we're going to find that time away from others to put in the time to think and to be still. He also talked about how basketball is the one place where he can think that it's the time that he gets the ideas because he's just allowing himself that time to process.
Finding that time to be still as uncomfortable as it can be sometimes is important to achieve the things that you want so that you can process it and you can process why certain things are important to you. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation I had with Alan. I think there were so many great takeaways. I love going back and thinking about what those things are.
One of the things that we talked about here is the importance of performance coaching and that is something that we do at the B3 Method Institute. It is important to have that outside person and community that can help support you. When Alan talked about the things you need to do at an individual level, when we do coaching, we're helping you understand what you need to do at the individual level.
We also create communities where you have accountability and people there to help you and be right by your side to keep you accountable for those things that you are doing individually as well as have the support of people who are going through the same process. If that type of work is interesting and important to you to be doing and taking that time to put in the reps, definitely go to our website and we have a link directly to where you can learn more about these programs right on our podcast page.
If you go to AmyVetter.com/BreakingBeliefsPodcast, you will see it right there with a link that drives you right to it and also with special offer codes. We would love to have you as a part of it and to help you on this journey as well as we all take these journeys. One thing, then it's time for the next. It's these small changes that make those pivots and shifts in our lives. Thank you very much for supporting this show, and I hope to see you in a future course and continue to listen to these great interviews. Hopefully, they are inspiring to you, and you're able to take some actions away for yourself.
Important Links
About Alan Stein Jr.
Alan is a world-renowned coach, speaker, and author. He spent 15+ years working with the highest-performing basketball players on the planet and now teaches audiences how to utilize the same strategies in business that elite athletes use to perform at a world-class level.
Alan specializes in improving individual and organizational leadership, performance, and accountability. He inspires and empowers everyone he works with to take immediate action and improve mindset, habits, and productivity.