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?
The designer of Big Ben finally released a book on his accomplishments. It’s about time!
21 for 2021
Today is the last day of 2021, and I am sharing my blog post a couple of days early as a year-end recap of sorts.
I recently listened to the Happier podcast from Gretchen Rubin, where she and her sister reviewed their 21 for 2021 lists. Since 2017, instead of setting new years resolutions, they have been creating a list of tangible things they want to accomplish in the upcoming year. For 2021, there were 21 items on their lists.
Their recap has inspired me to share my own take on a 21 for 2021 list of sorts. My list includes 21 successes in my journey from this year.
What I Expected for 2021
In my first post of this year (see Happy New Year), I shared my Cs Every Day strategy for 2021. Instead of setting a specific goal, I chose to adopt a strategy of leveraging a set of nine daily practices to help me continue to unlock the life of my dreams. Each practice began with the letter C hence the Cs Every Day moniker. My Cs included:
- Contemplate: reflect, process and find peace with the events in my life, putting them in the proper context
- Complete: get shit done! Maintain an increasingly effective system for efficiently tracking and achieving goals and tasks
- Consume: continue to make good eating choices, including tracking and managing calories and macros
- Condition: push myself daily to perform at my physical and athletic best and to shape my body
- Create: create something to express myself daily
- Contribute: make my mark on the world
- Connect: connect with new people and improve connections with those I love.
- Control: manage my brain to give myself the moods, feelings and confidence that I want
- Construct: build new skills, knowledge and abilities every day
Fast-forward twelve months later, and I essentially stuck to the spirit of each practice. But, I didn’t do as well at sticking to the specific intentions and commitments that I initially laid out as part of each practice.
Despite not checking all of the specific tasks off my list, I am saying that my strategy and practices were a success. These practices are the habits that led to my 21 for 2021 successes. As a firm believer in not fixing what isn’t broken, I will continue adhering to these practices in 2022 as long as they keep paying similar dividends.
With that quick recap out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff. Let’s celebrate some successes (#HumbleBrag?)!
Operation Melt: My Journey
I’ll start my 21 for 2021 list by talking about the wins in my ongoing journey of personal growth. You will see that many of these accomplishments do connect back to the practices within my Cs Every Day strategy – is that a 22nd win?
#1: My Journey Continues. Throughout 2021 I stayed committed to my journey that started as a weight loss goal and evolved into a quest to live a healthy, fit and happy life. I am 1659 days into making deliberate, disciplined choices about my health instead of trusting it to default (see Discipline Not Default).
#2: Managing a Pandemic. I am grateful that I successfully stayed healthy and happy despite being surrounded by a global pandemic, a horrible political climate and a divided country.
#3: Continued Growing. I prioritized my personal growth and development through hundreds of hours of reading, listening to podcasts, taking online courses and practicing new skills. Plus, I continued working on my most important homework!
#4: Meditation. As a part of my continued growth and mind control powers, I kicked off a near-daily meditation practice. Almost every day, I spend at least ten minutes in silence, focused on my breath and quieting my mind. It has helped me become more aware of my thoughts and less distracted by the events around me.
#5: Girl, Look At That Body, I Work Out! Speaking of daily practices, I had another win associated with a new daily practice. After my weight loss journey ended and I started focusing on muscle growth, the number on the scale ticked up significantly. I know it is mostly “good” weight, but it began to impact my happiness. I have added a daily practice to boost my body positivity to combat this. I am not 100% ready to share the details of this practice yet, but it is already having a positive impact.
#6: Mission Continued. As I mentioned in What Do You Do?, I am on a mission to help individuals and companies achieve their goals. This is my calling and my purpose. This year I was able to continue progressing with that mission. I continued as a project management consultant working for a healthcare organization. I evolved as a coach. And, I continued as a trusted friend and ally who has helped lift many people a little closer to their goals.
Operation Melt: My Athletic Pursuits
Another facet of my continued growth in 2021 was my athletic accomplishments. I was a machine. I was in beast mode and set a ton of new personal records, one in almost every category I track. And these PRs really paid dividends.
#7: Getting Faster. My most surprising personal record was my new best 5k race performance with a pace of 8:21 per mile. This was surprising because my body is bigger, and I didn’t expect to set many new records. I love these kinds of surprises!
#8: Pressing Matters. My proudest personal record achievement in 2021 was my leg press strength. I set a goal of leg pressing 400 pounds by the end of the year, which was almost double where I ended last year. I achieved that goal, but I reached it in June with half a year left to go. So, I revised my goal and decided to try for 500 pounds, which happened in September. So I just kept going and achieved a 600-pound leg press in December. That is a lot of weight, a grizzly bear’s worth, and means that I more than doubled my strength.
#9: Record-breaking Performance. In all other weight lifting categories, I wrote new personal records on my “hall of fame” board. This includes breaking my prior records in deadlifts (255 pounds), bench press (165 pounds), squats (150 pounds), glute drive (360 pounds), and assisted pull-ups (60 pounds of assistance).
#10: Body Shaping. These personal records led to significant growth and shaping muscles throughout my body, including setting a new personal best for bicep size, fourteen inches. Yes, all of this muscle growth was accompanied by more pounds on the scale, but they were the “right” pounds.
#11: I Would Walk 500 Miles. Despite my weightlifting performance, my most frequent forms of exercise are still walking and running. Through 2021, I walked and ran more than 3000 total miles, which is more than the width of the United States. Of those 3000 miles, about 500 were running miles.
Operation Melt: My Blog & Business
In the final section of my 21 for 2021 list, I will review the wins that you get to see. These are successes I had with my Operation Melt blog and my business. It’s hard to believe that this whole thing started as a blog to track my weight loss journey, and now it is so much more.
#12: Strategic Performance. For the first time, I started 2021 with a strategic vision for Operation Melt that I called “from hobby to side hustle.” My intent was to grow from a hobby and passion project to a “real” business helping “real” people. With the year coming to a close, I am happy to say that all of the items I planned to achieve with this strategy this year were checked off my list.
#13: It’s Official. After achieving my first coaching certification at the end of 2020, I successfully took the next step in 2021. Over the summer, I achieved certification as a Health & Nutrition Coach. I learned so much during this training and, combined with my first-hand experience in my journey, it helped reinforce the value that I could provide as a coach. To take this a step further, I began work on my third coaching certification in December and plan to have it completed in early 2022.
#14: Coach Tony. After completing my second coaching certification, I was ready to embark on phase one of launching my coaching practice. I crafted an initial business plan, started openly advertising my services through my blog and social media posts and took on my first client. I am happy to say that I am already on the path to becoming a great coach!
#15: One Hundo. As I kicked off my coaching practice, I continued publishing posts to my blog that started it all. Throughout 2021 I published approximately one hundred posts.
#16: Quantity AND Quality. I focused on more than just the quantity of my posts through 2021; I also significantly improved the quality of my writing. Beyond the technical quality, I focused my posts in 2021 on more broadly relevant topics versus just my own journey.
#17: Choose Carefully. One of the steps I took to improve the relevance of my blog posts was that I launched my Goal Success by Choice blog series. This series aims to explore the choices that each of us can make to help us achieve our goals. We can choose success, or just hope that we find it. I know which approach I prefer.
#18: New Arrival in 2022. The writing accomplishments didn’t stop with my blog. I also achieved another significant milestone and finished the first draft of my second book. Further, my brilliant wife finished her first round of edits. I plan to incorporate these revisions and launch the book in 2022. Stay tuned!
#19: Making a List, Checking it Twice. My Operation Melt email list grew by more than fifty percent this year. This means that more people see my blog posts, and I don’t have to depend on social media algorithms.
#20: Strong Foundation. I added a variety of new tools and processes to help build a strong foundation that I can build on for the future of Operation Melt.
#21: Failing Forward. Most importantly, I took some risks and tried new things. I tested a variety of improvements in my blog, my emails, my social posts and many other areas of Operation Melt. Some of these new things worked well and are still in place now. But, some of these things failed to produce the intended results. Every failure means that I had the courage to try, that I learned and that I am failing forward.
Setting the Stage for 2022
This would usually be when I set my goals for the new year. But, not this time. I am already two months into my New Years’ intentions.
As I explained in Happy New Year, I am breaking free from setting poorly conceived resolutions on an arbitrary day. Instead, I used my birthday as the date of my new year, and I set an intention instead. An intention is more broad and open-ended and is direction-setting for the year instead of a specific goal. I think of an intention as the strategy that drives all of the year’s goals.
In November, I shared my intention for this year (see Taking Some Profit). This year is about personal profit-taking.
I intend to take “profit” from my past investments in self-improvement while still making intentional investments in my future.
Two months into my new year, it is going great so far. But that’s a conversation for a future blog.
Your Turn
Want to know a secret? Writing this made me feel good. No, seriously, big smile on my face after reflecting on my big wins from the previous year. All too often, we just roll right into the next year and never take an inventory of all the ways we are killing it in our lives. Then, because we haven’t provided our brains with evidence to the contrary, we convince ourselves that we are stuck in neutral, in a rut and not achieving anything.
Our brains convince us that we need to be more before we can be happy because we have forgotten about all we already have and have achieved.
Let’s start this new year off on the right foot. Spend a few minutes today reflecting on the year coming to a close. What were your 21 wins in 2021? Remember them and write them down. Refer to this list when you feel like you aren’t achieving anything in life.
You are killing it!
Pro tip: want to make it easier to recap your accomplishments at the end of 2022? Keep track along the way, and you’ll have the facts at your fingertips. See Choices For a Successful New Year – Part 1.
So What?
Pausing to celebrate successes is an essential part of a fulfilling life journey; and, what better day to do this than the end of a year. Inspired by Gretchen Rubin, I want to share my take on a 21 for 2021 list. Mine is a list of my 21 wins in my Operation Melt journey from 2021. It wasn’t exactly the year that I had expected, but it exceeded my expectations in several important ways.
Do you need a partner to help you celebrate your successes from this past year? I am here for you. Click Here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
Beware of the Robots!
Was this post helpful or interesting to you? Do you want to read more? Don’t trust it to the social media algorithms.
Defeat the robots by joining my email list below and get these posts delivered directly to your inbox every week.
