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.
Goal Success by Choice
We can choose to be successful with our goals if we make the right daily choices, build the right habits and behaviors and adopt the right mindsets. Goal Success by Choice shares lessons about the choices we can make that can either move us closer to our goals or hold us back. I hope this post helps you get a little closer to crushing your goals.
How to Boil a Frog
Do you know how to boil a frog?
I promise that today’s post isn’t a recipe and that no frogs were hurt when writing this. It is a fable about an important thing that might impact us all if we aren’t careful.
You have two choices if you want to boil a frog, one works and one doesn’t. Let’s start with the option that doesn’t work. If you toss a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will immediately jump out and you will have vegan frog stew. On the other hand, if you put a frog into a pot of room temperature water and then bring it to a boil, you will have one well-cooked frog. The frog can’t tell that the temperature is slowly increasing and he is in danger so he doesn’t protect himself?
Sound familiar? Have you ever realized too late that you are in a pickle that you could have prevented if you just felt the water temperature increasing?
Boiled frog stew, pickles … wonder if I am just hungry?
Throughout my career, I have been trained, certified and practiced many different management methodologies and skills. I have learned how to manage big changes. I have been certified in the Influencer model for influencing people. I have been trained in situational leadership. Plus I have been trained in the R Factor or E+R=O. But all of these skills depend on one thing, knowing you are in a situation where it is time to use them. Said differently, you need to know that the water is starting to get warm.
The reality of our lives is that we make it harder to feel the temperature starting to increase. Many of us have overflowing to-do lists that we are never going to get through. We over-plan our days with back-to-back schedules that barely give us five minutes to go to the bathroom. We are all trying to do more with less which keeps becoming less and less.
We are over-saturated with commitments, meetings, thoughts, problems and stress. Is it feeling warm in here?
The biggest problem with our over-saturated schedules is that it leads to over-saturated brains. We are just trying to keep up and are playing defense. We don’t have a minute to think and process the events around us. This means that we don’t connect the dots between events and we don’t appreciate the context and perspective. Don’t even get me started on what this does to our physical health and fitness.
We are all becoming boiled frogs.
We can’t control the fact that the water temperature is going up, so how can we hone our thermometers?
Think Time
I am back-to-back-to-back today, how do I even find a minute to think?
The most important first step you can take to make sure that you know how warm that water is getting is to give yourself some think time. Look at your schedule for the week and try to add some blank space between your commitments. Strive for adding one hour of free time for every three or four hours of commitments.
Just adding some blank space lets your mind decompress and process a bit.
Press Pause
Wait, what just happened and what do I need to do about it?
I mentioned the R Factor earlier which says that events plus your response to them drive outcomes or E+R=O. The first, and arguably most important, step in the R model is called “press pause.” That means stopping when an event happens to consider what response is required of you to achieve the outcome required. This is the second strategy that can help you evaluate the temperature of the water around you.
When something unusual, unexpected or unfortunate happens, pause for a second to consider the realities of the situation around you. Evaluate the facts that you have witnessed and consider what the right next step is. By pausing to evaluate the situation instead of reacting based on autopilot you have the opportunity to evaluate whether or not the water is getting warmer.
Process
Did that thing that happened today have any relationship to that thing that happened last week?
Not all events can be fully processed in the moment. When you are trying to determine what is really happening around you, you may need a little more perspective. You might need a little more distance to consider all of the facts in their totality to properly connect the dots instead of just processing everything transactionally.
If you need to process things more holistically and get out of the issue of the moment, you may want to consider journaling. By spending some time every day contemplating and writing what is happening in your life, you can get a little more distance. Journaling about the things happening around you allows you to consider the events more objectively.
Frogs don’t know when the water around them is heating up and so they turn into frog soup. You don’t have to face the same fate. By giving yourself some space and taking the time to think about the things going on around you, you can connect the dots and judge the temperature of the water.
Don’t become a boiled frog, I don’t want your goals to…. croak!
Did You Like What You Read?
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