Thank you for reading this week’s Operation Melt update.
Operation Melt started as a blog to share my personal transformation and weight loss story. After achieving success with that goal, Operation Melt has evolved into a platform to help inspire, motivate and equip people to achieve their own personal and professional goals so they can live their best lives.
I am trying to build a world where no goal ever dies of loneliness.
Throughout my journey, I have learned that many life lessons can be learned by getting fit. This week I am sharing another installment of Fitness Lessons are Life Lessons.
I’m A Certified Coach Now
This week I achieved a new big milestone and the start of a new exciting step in my journey.
This week I achieved a certification as a Goal Success Life Coach. This certification and the associated coursework provides me with an enhanced set of tools and processes I can use to help people achieve their big goals. This will help me in my writing, my project management, my consulting and in direct one-on-one and group coaching sessions.
I have big ideas about how I would like to leverage this certification, but nothing concrete that I am ready to announce quite yet. Suffice it to say that I am excited about the potential opportunities this provides me and the new doors it may open.
Reflection
When I achieve any big milestone or accomplishment, I like to look back and reflect on how I got here. What are the steps and events that led me to this moment? This is something that I started doing while standing in Celebration Village after finishing the 2018 Columbus Marathon (read about that moment in Week 71: 325 Pounds to Half Marathon) after completing my first half marathon.
As I was completing the courses to achieve my coaching certification I really started reflecting on my journey. Then, after completing the process, I paused to reflect on my path.
Spoiler alert: a big lesson emerged from this reflection, as I am sure you figured out because this is a Fitness Lessons are Life Lessons post. I will share that lesson after I share some of the steps in my story that came up during this reflection.
I appreciate your patience in advance with a slightly more vulnerable and transparent post than normal, if you can believe that. I will also try to be brief as not to bore you too much with the details of my path.
That said, if you don’t care about the specific moments, feel free to scroll past them and jump right to the “so what” at the end.
My Path
Like many people, my story is pretty unique and has taken many unpredictable twists and tuns. But, as strange as the journey has been, it has definitely prepared me for here I am today. I am going to share a few of the steps on my curvy path. I am definitely leaving out a lot of my path and a lot of the joy and pain along the way, I am just including some highlights.
- Grew up poor and overweight with very few friends and was essentially invisible to the world until one of my first big turning points. I joined junior ROTC in high school and this is where I started building my achievement focus. I was constantly seeking the next recognition (awarded in the form of ribbons worn on your uniform) or promotion (we all had air force ranks). This experience built enough confidence that I knew I could go to college, but I had no idea how I would pay for it.
- I got accepted to Ohio Dominican College (now University) and learned a lot of valuable lessons that helped set me on this path. I was no longer happy being invisible to the world and I got involved in everything: student activities, working for the school, running my own freelance IT business, honors program and much more. I learned to talk to people and some of my influence skills. This is where I learned that I could do things my own way and completed most of my computer science curriculum as independent study because I wanted to learn different things. I really learned to set goals and to make them into successes.
- College was a great experience because I became best friends with Liz. This friendship eventually grew into more and now we are married. Our friends who know us know that we had an unconventional story and we did things our own way.
- I graduated from college in debt, comparatively small versus many of today’s students, and applied my achievement focus and belief that I could do everything my own way to a new target, moving up and making money. I was constantly focused on next and more. The next job title, making more money, taking on more responsibility. Along the way, I also had some tough lessons in humility, including being laid-off from my first job for wanting to follow my own path.
- As I moved up in my career, I started taking on leadership roles where I was able to help people grown. I also started serving as a mentor to lots of people; at one time I was mentoring eight people at once. I was also active in other pursuits including being a volunteer on a nonprofit board. These experiences helped build my passion for helping people.
- Through all of this, there were some things that weren’t going as planned. I was not at all focused on my health and wasn’t taking care of myself. Plus, I was so focused on my career path that I identified myself very much by my work and internalized every success and failure. This, combined with a couple of difficult bosses and terrible work situations, started to shake my confidence. I got quiet, stopped speaking up and wasn’t sure where I fit in anymore. I didn’t even know what my own way was anymore, but was still getting promoted and moving up, just aimlessly.
- Then I had my moment when I decided to start my weight loss journey. My weight was something that always bothered and embarrassed me and it had reached a scary point that I have talked about for a while. Plus, looking back, I was ready for change in a number of ways so I took control and started fixing things. It was also the perfect combination of doing things my own way, achievement focus and humility and I got hooked on setting goals, accomplishing them and repeating with bigger goals.
- As my body started to shrink, my confidence started to grow. People wanted my input on their own weight loss and I was happy to share it. I wanted a bigger platform for this, so I launched my Operation Melt blog. My confidence and voice just kept growing and I was using it to help other people. Even being laid-off from a company where I had worked for 10 years didn’t shake my confidence. Quite the opposite actually, I used my months of severance as a sabbatical to re-find myself.
- I decided to write my Operation Melt book as a way to tell my story in a more formal way to help people. I didn’t know how to do it, but it was a goal now and I wasn’t going to fail. I was going to succeed and do it my own way. And I did. I wrote the book in about two months and, with the help of my wife, edited, prepped, revised and self-published it in about eight months afterward. While it wasn’t a phenomenal success, it did sell and it did help people.
- Through the blog and book, a personal mission started evolving and I wanted to help people decide to try to achieve their goals and to empower them to be successful. This is what I am doing professionally as a project management consultant and digitally through my blog and social media. But I felt like there was a missing element. I wanted to be able to more directly help individuals and groups build goals, plans to achieve them and to make their dreams come true. For this, I needed some additional tools, training and processes and I really thought a formal credential would help too. So that brings us to today and my new chapter as a certified coach.
Through this path, there are a few consistent themes that have emerged. First is my achievement focus which has led me to a love of goals. Next up is my constant focus on wanting to do things my own way, often through impatience. Then there is my appreciation of humility which manifests itself, in part, in my quest to use my talents and skills to help others.
Don’t Follow In My Footsteps
I am very proud of my path complete with all of its twists and turns. As proud as I am of what I have done, I do not recommend trying to follow my path. I can assure you it isn’t the right path for you. How do I know that?
Every one of us is a unique individual. We have our own dreams. We have our own experiences. We are wired in a way specific to us. That means we all need to live our lives and create the path that is right for us.
You have to be yourself and create your own path if you are going to be successful in life.
We all have role models who inspire us and make us want to be more like them. We all see experiences that other people have and we think we want to have similar experiences. This is completely normal and fine as an inspiration, but never use your perception of somebody else’s life as a template for your own.
Trying to mirror somebody else’s path will be unfulfilling and keep you from ever getting to know your true self. There is no predefined “right” path for any of us. The only “right” path is the one that you choose to live and the one that brings you joy and happiness. If you achieve that, nobody can ever tell you, nor can you tell yourself, that you made the wrong choice.
I Need Your Help
Before you go I would like to ask you for a favor. I can’t build a world where no goal ever dies of loneliness on my own. Please consider helping your friends find today’s post by following me on Facebook, on LinkedIn or via Instagram and share today’s post to your feed.
While you are at it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s post, your goals or anything else on your mind. Send me a note via my Contact Me form,
Thanks again for reading today’s post and here’s to achieving your most important goals!
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