Positivity is literally in my blood.
My positivity is reflected in all the content I share in my books, coaching and social media. I intentionally curate my feed to make sure it reflects how I want to show up in life. But, this doesn’t mean that I don’t have negative experiences. I just don’t go big with sharing them when I can reframe the story in a positive manner.
Comparing your journey to the portions of mine that I (or anybody else) choose to share could make you feel like less of a success. So, how do you avoid the comparison trap and make sure you aren’t undermining your own confidence?
Learn more in this week’s Goal Success By Choice.
Amuse Bouche
Before we get to today’s post, I offer you this light “amuse-bouche” to entertain your mind before we get down to business. Like any other amuse-bouche, you may hate my “dad joke,” but it is worth every penny that you paid for it, right?
A doctor incorrectly told me I had type A blood … turns out it was a type O.
Hello, I am Coach Tony… Welcome to Operation Melt!
My name is Coach Tony, and I am a coach, author and project manager on a mission. I am working to build a world where no goal ever dies of loneliness.
I almost allowed one of my biggest life goals to die without ever being attempted for forty years. My goal almost died, not of failure but of loneliness. But, I took a risk and leveraged a simple, logical process that helped me wildly exceed my goal.
I transformed my life, and you can do the same with the help of Operation Melt.
Operation Melt provides engaging, practical content and hands-on coaching to inspire, motivate and equip project managers and other left-brained high-achievers to pursue and accomplish their biggest goals.
Got Goals?
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. Success is a series of choices that can make you unstoppable. Goal Success by Choice helps you make these choices to move you closer to your goals.
This blog is my gift to you. I hope that it helps you choose to be successful and bring your goal to life. Are you ready to help build a world where no goal dies of loneliness?
Important Reminder: This Is Growth, You Aren’t Broken
I believe that life is hard. That we all are going to walk through things that are hard and challenging, and yet advertising wants us to believe that it’s all easy.
Jamie Lee Curtis
This week I will loosely revisit a topic that I have addressed at least once before in a 2020 post entitled Good Days and Bad Days. By “loosely” revisiting this topic, I mean I am approaching it from a slightly different angle and with a bit more vulnerability.
You may be wondering why I have decided to revisit this topic now. I am revisiting it today because several events in my life over the past few months have sparked some introspection. I have spent many hours coaching others and lots of time inside my own head, and this topic keeps floating to the surface.
As my blog readership grows, I also feel like I owe my readers a revisit of this topic to avoid some potential misunderstandings.
So… here goes!
Persistent Positive Posting
During my first few doctor’s appointments I attended as part of my weight loss journey, I learned a lot of details about myself and my health. There were things that I had never known before and things that I thought I knew but discovered that I was wrong. That latter category was where I learned my actual blood type for the first time in my life.
My blood type is B positive, so you could say positivity is in my blood.
I know, silly joke. But, those of you who know me in real life will likely agree that I generally try to be a positive person. It is one of my top strengths and how I prefer interacting with the world around me.
I also learned a brutal truth long ago: people don’t want to hear negativity and complaining. With the exception of your actual friends, most people simply don’t care. Sharing lots of negativity simply makes you an Eeyore who people will try to avoid. I don’t want or need that in my life.
My default positive attitude means that most of my blogs and social media posts are also positive.
From endorphin-fueled post-exercise selfies to tools and techniques intended to help people take control of their lives, it is usually a struggle to find negativity in my feed. This is both natural and intentional on my part. I want my followers to turn to me for inspiration and motivation and to feel good and empowered by my content.
The last thing I want my content to do is to make anybody feel discouraged or unhappy. These emotions do not help anybody achieve their goals and lead to more goals dying of loneliness. That is the opposite of my mission!
The Notes I Didn’t Play
A Miles Davis quote about jazz music says, “it’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” Meaning there are always things left unsaid, and that is part of the art of life. Like Miles Davis, there are many notes that I haven’t played in my art.
I have chosen to share my successful weight loss journey with my milestones and a few of my setbacks. With this success story, I have also shared some of the goal success and project management tools I used to achieve my success.
But what about the notes I didn’t play?
I have chosen not to share stories of scale anxiety and my body image struggles along the way. Likewise, I haven’t thoroughly shared my complicated relationship with food/calories and exercise.
Just because I haven’t shared these details doesn’t mean that my fitness journey was (or continues to be) without those struggles. I have just decided to Reframe these struggles into lessons, techniques and tools that you can use to manage your journey instead of dwelling on the negative aspects of mine. I can confidently say that the negative stories are few, and the positive stories are many.
Want a few more glimpses at the notes I didn’t play?
I have shared that I am a master at setting and achieving goals. I have succeeded with many transformations throughout my life. However, I have chosen not to dwell on being an Enneagram type 3 who tends to tie my identity to my achievements. This means I may feel a bit lost or anxious or that my worth is less if I am not accomplishing something.
Part of my secret to accomplishing big goals is to track progress every day. I can quickly figure out ways to empirically measure progress toward a goal. Then I use those numbers to evaluate whether my trend line is positive or negative (see One Thin Line Between Average And Successful). I spend less time sharing how my competitive, high-achiever strengths require active management. I try to avoid over-valuing and defining my self-worth based on these numbers. I need to continually remind myself that I am allowed to be happy even when the numbers aren’t moving forward.
I know I am a good coach with many proven successes, resources and processes to help people make their dreams come true. But, knowing this logically doesn’t stop the emotional side of my brain from experiencing imposter syndrome, which shakes my confidence in my abilities. Plus, being a good coach doesn’t prevent me from ignoring my own advice and best practices, causing me to occasionally get side-tracked.
Similarly, I am a good project manager with decades of experience managing projects of varying types and subject matters. I can break major initiatives into bite-sized chunks of work appropriately sequenced, prioritized and assigned to resources. Yet, this doesn’t stop me from procrastinating, getting distracted or avoiding tasks I don’t want to do.
One final example comes from being a writer. I have two published books that you can buy on Amazon today and one eBook you can download for free. Beyond the books, I have written and published nearly 500 blog posts and multiple articles. This high volume of content I have written and published sometimes gets overshadowed by my lower volume of readers and purchasers. When I don’t reach vast numbers of readers, I tend to consider myself less of a writer. Though I know, it isn’t true.
Am I Lying to You?
Though the content I share with my readers is almost entirely positive, this isn’t necessarily a fair representation of my life. Every one of us has a life filled with both positive and negative experiences, ups and downs. None of us have lives filled with entirely positive events and emotions. That isn’t human.
This fact of life may introduce a bit of tension in my writing.
As I said at the beginning of this post, the blogs and social media posts I share are nearly entirely positive. However, like you, the events and emotions in my life are not always as positive.
Am I lying to you by not sharing the negative parts of my life?
I do not believe I am being dishonest… here’s why.
Every human has a very active brain. Scientists have conducted many studies to determine how many thoughts we have each day. Conservatively, we each experience more than six thousand thoughts daily during our waking hours. However, some scientists estimate that we may have as much as ten times this many thoughts. This is especially true when dreams and other subconscious thoughts are included in the estimate.
Conversely, best practices for social media sharing suggest a maximum of one or two posts per day is ideal for follower engagement. Some brands may post as many as five times per day, but more isn’t necessarily better.
Contrast my average of one post per day with the six or more thoughts we each have per minute, and I have to make choices. I have to choose which one thought to share and which 5,999 thoughts not to share.
I know how I want to show up in the world and for my readers. And, as I alluded to in You Don’t Need Permission and What Do You Do?, I get to choose how to show up and who I want to be. And, choose I will!
I will unapologetically continue making a disciplined choice (see Discipline Not Default) to curate my feed. I will focus on positivity, inspiration, motivation and practical tools. I will not be yet another voice of negativity on the Internet.
Choosing Wisely
Every one of us tends to compare ourselves to others. These comparisons are the genesis of terms such as FOMO and “keeping up with the Joneses.” But, as Teddy Roosevelt said, “comparison is the thief of joy.”
Comparison is dangerous because your journey is unique to you and not the same as anybody else’s. When you compare your experiences, progress, achievements or setbacks to somebody else, you don’t celebrate your uniqueness and may undermine yourself. Comparison tends to cause nothing but sadness.
The comparison trap gets even more risky with social media.
As I said, I choose to curate my message to focus on positivity. But, I am not the only one making a choice. Every social media account you follow, blog you read and podcast you listen to chooses what content they will share and not share. Every source of information you encounter is a curated one and not the full, unabridged source of truth.
Comparing your real life to somebody’s curated feed of content is a recipe for disaster.
When you use somebody’s curated highlight reel as your comparison to evaluate success, you will likely always feel like a failure. Sometimes, this is intentional when unscrupulous companies want you to feel like you are failing, so you will buy their products.
Avoiding The Trap
If the comparison trap will make you feel like you are failing, what is a better choice? How do you avoid the comparison trap?
An obvious option to avoid the comparison trap is to stop comparing, but that won’t work. It is human nature, especially in the US, to compare yourself to others. Attempting to completely change this behavior is unlikely to succeed. It is also an unnecessary step.
You don’t need to eliminate comparisons; you just need to tweak how you do it. Here are three steps you can take to slightly adjust your comparison tendency.
The first step is to apply a new filter to social media… I am not talking about your photos. Remember that you are seeing intentionally curated content when viewing your social media feed (or otherwise consuming media). Applying a critical filter to what you see will help you avoid immediately trusting that content as the complete, unabridged truth.
Next, while you are comparing yourself to others, it is time to broaden your comparisons. This means ensuring you are not just engaging in upward comparisons to those who are further along in their journeys than you are. Downward comparisons to people not quite as far along as you will help provide a more realistic context. It will also be a great reminder of how far you have already progressed.
Finally, it is time to understand how to use comparison wisely. Comparison is a good tool for inspiration, direction and motivation because it lets you see that somebody else has achieved what you want. This means you can do it! However, only one comparison matters when you are trying to evaluate your progress: you! As explained in The Gap And The Gain, progress is judged by looking at the person you were yesterday versus the person you are today.
So What
Positivity is literally in my blood.
My positivity is reflected in all the content I share in my books, coaching and social media. I intentionally curate my feed to make sure it reflects how I want to show up in life. But, this doesn’t mean that I don’t have negative experiences. I just don’t go big with sharing them when I can reframe the story in a positive manner.
Comparing your journey to the portions of mine that I (or anybody else) choose to share could make you feel like less of a success. So, how do you avoid the comparison trap and make sure you aren’t undermining your own confidence?
Need some help applying a healthy comparison filter? Want help showing up the way you want to in life? I am ready to be your partner.
Click Here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
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