Thank you for reading this Operation Melt blog update.
Operation Melt provides engaging, practical content and hands-on coaching to inspire, motivate and equip you to achieve your big goals.
Will you join me in building a world where goals never die of loneliness?
Amuse Bouche
My amuse bouche for you today is a light “dad joke” to entertain your mind before we get down to business. Like any other amuse bouche, you may hate it, but it is worth every penny that you paid for it, right?
I started using this new machine at the gym. But after an hour, I got really sick.
It had everything though: chips, Oreos, the works!
Goal Success by Choice
Do you have dreams that you are trying to make come true? Do you have a goal that you are trying to crush? Success doesn’t happen by chance. You don’t have to get lucky or win the lottery to live the life of your dreams.
You just have to choose to be successful. If you make the right daily choices, adopt good habits and behaviors, and approach life with the right mindset, you can make your dreams come true.
Goal Success by Choice helps you make the choices that will move you closer to your goals and keep you from holding yourself back.
I hope this post helps you get a little closer to crushing your goals.
Choices for a Successful New Year
Time is flying now! We are less than a week away from Christmas, and there are just two weeks left this year. You can almost smell 2022 because it is so close.
This means it is absolutely time to think about your goals for next year. Note that I said goals and not “New Years Resolutions.” As you probably know, and as I talked about in Happy New Year!?, I think the traditional New Years Resolutions don’t work. It is unlikely that January first will result in a new year and new you unless you set goals instead of resolutions.
While setting goals is a great start, that alone will not yield success. Succeeding with your goals in the new year requires choosing to be successful. Choosing effective habits is an excellent first step.
I am wrapping up 2021 by sharing five simple choices you can make that will help you succeed with your goals in 2022.
By setting goals and making good choices, you can join my fight against goals dying of loneliness.
Get a Move On
Sweat is magic. Cover yourself in it daily to grant your wishes.
Anonymous
Today’s choice you can make to help achieve your 2022 goals is no big surprise. It is exercise.
I know that I don’t have to tell you that exercise has its benefits. One quick search of reputable sources yields a laundry list of ways that exercise will help your life:
- Helps you control your weight
- Reduces your risk of heart diseases
- Helps your body manage blood sugar and insulin levels
- Helps you quit smoking
- Improves your mental health and mood
- Helps keep your thinking, learning, and judgment skills sharp as you age
- Strengthens your bones and muscles
- Reduces your risk of some cancers
- Reduces your risk of falls
- Improves your sleep
- Improves your sexual health
- Increases your chances of living longer
Those are some pretty compelling reasons to get a move on and work up a sweat, right? But, the benefits don’t stop there; choosing to add more movement into your day can have a significant impact on your goals.
Exercise for Goal Success
Once you start regularly exercising, you will likely begin seeing visible progress. For example, when I started lifting weights, I could only lift the bar (that’s forty-five pounds), but within a few months, I could deadlift my body weight. Strength can increase very quickly!
Because your progress can happen very quickly, and success is clearly measured, you can set many incremental goals. You can establish a cycle of goal-setting, goal-crushing, celebrating and then repeating with a slightly bigger goal. This will create a “success snowball” in your fitness goals. You will be motivated, feel more confident and feel like you are unstoppable.
This energy will then spill into other areas. You will begin approaching your other goals with a can-do mindset, and that is the secret to getting out of your own way. When you believe in yourself and are willing to do the work, you are unstoppable.
But wait, there’s more!
Exercise is a great way to reduce stress which helps you keep distractions in check, allowing you to focus. As I mentioned in Choices For a Successful New Year – Part 3, producing quality work that we are proud of requires us to eliminate distractions and focus on what is important to us. When exercise helps melt the stress away, our ability to focus increases, which improves our results.
Finally, there is another practical benefit of exercise, it takes time to do it. This allows you to engage in what I call “habit stacking,” or combining multiple habits simultaneously. For example, if you are going for an hour-long walk, you have choices of what to do while walking. You can just walk and pay attention to nature and your surroundings, which is an excellent choice. But, you can also use this walk to listen to an audiobook or podcast that will help you with your goals. You can use this walk to talk to a friend or coach about ideas and keep focused on your goals.
I can go on and on about the benefits of exercise. I can write for hours about how exercise has positively impacted my life and goals. Suffice it to say, exercise is a key choice for goal success.
How Much?
The next question you may be asking is how much exercise you need? Right?
The Mayo Clinic recommends “at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week, or a combination of moderate and vigorous activity. The guidelines suggest that you spread out this exercise during the course of a week.”
So, that means that just thirty minutes per day will more than meet that goal. But, speaking from experience, once exercise becomes a habit, it gets hard to stop. Reviewing my data for this year, I have averaged ninety-six minutes of elevated heart rate activity per day. That’s probably too much, but it quickly became my favorite hobby once I started.
How Do I Do It?
Once you have worked out the “how much exercise do I need question,” the next common question is how do you fit that much exercise into your schedule?
Are you too busy to fit thirty minutes of exercise into your day? Ok, that was a trick question. As I said in What Would Beyonce Do, our lives, success, and happiness are all based on our choices. Nothing is pre-determined, and very little is out of our control. Is time a finite resource? Of course it is. But you are given twenty-four hours every day, and you get to choose how to invest them. Sleep, work, play, connection, gratitude, exercise… it can all fit, but you have to choose how you want to divvy up the time.
In other words, you have the time. You just need to reshuffle your commitments and reprioritize, so exercise is a priority for you. This is another time when taking a disciplined approach will be necessary instead of trusting your default behaviors (see Discipline Not Default).
Perhaps, this goal will require you to get up a little bit earlier to go for a walk before your day starts. There are many benefits to starting your day with exercise. Here is a passage from my book Operation Melt: How I Used Life-Changing Project Management to Lose Over 100 Pounds In Under a Year that shares a bit about these benefits.
First thing in the morning is usually the best time to insert exercise into your day. You may not be a morning person, but this may be the time to adjust some of those habits. First, our willpower, self-control and discipline is usually highest in the morning. As you go through the day, all of the events and stressors of the day tend to drain your willpower reserves. So as you get later in the day, you are less likely to be able to stick with your routine. Also, if your work day is like mine, the end of your day becomes far less predictable. I may try to leave the office at 5:00, but that time may get pushed to 6:00, 6:30 or later, and then I am ready for dinner. So, inserting exercise at the end of the day would have increased the probability that I would decide to skip it. Lastly, the morning is usually the easiest time for you to create more time in your schedule if needed. Set your alarm earlier and get out of bed ready to go.
There are other simple hacks to get more exercise into your life too. You can walk instead of driving for short trips. When you have to drive, you can intentionally park further away from your destination (this may make it easier to find a space). You can choose the stairs in place of an elevator or escalator.
When working from home, I like to start my morning by walking for coffee. Then I add walks in between meetings and as a reward for completing a task on my to-do list. I have also become proficient at taking walking meetings.
Importantly, exercise can help you set boundaries in your work day and keep it from never having an actual end. You can clearly delineate when the work day starts and stops if you commit to a pre-work and post-work exercise routine. This will help prevent you from continuing to work nonstop into the night. Prioritize your health and goals and set boundaries to help you get there.
Whatever your strategy, the important thing is that you choose to prioritize exercise. If you want to help ensure that this choice sticks, you might also want to hire a coach (I know a good one, wink) or a personal trainer to help you stay accountable for your choice.
So What?
This is Christmas week which means that we are in the last 2 weeks of 2021. It is time to focus on making 2022 a year where your goals will flourish. I am sharing the fourth choice you can make to ensure success in 2022. Choosing to add more exercise into your life can be a key enabler of your goals. But, you will have to make some choices to fit more movement into your busy schedule.
Do you need a partner to help you figure out how to make more space for exercise and to cross some goals off your list? I am here to help.
Click Here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
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