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.
Ask Me Anything…
In Ask Coach Tony, you can put my Operation Melt coaching to the test by asking me questions about how to achieve your goals.
Because a question asked by one is often a question had by many, I am regularly sharing these answers via the Operation Melt blog.
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 you paid for it, right?
Oktoberfest time is starting around the country so I thought about making a German sausage joke today. But, I will resist because German sausage jokes are the wurst.
Ask Coach Tony: Why ‘Dying of Loneliness’?
Coach Tony: I have a question about your Operation Melt vision: building a world where no goal ever dies of loneliness. What made you describe your goals as ‘dying of loneliness’? Why not another adjective?
Interesting question… I have never shared how I chose these particular words for my vision statement. I also haven’t really done a lot of deep thinking and reflecting about it myself. So I am grateful that this question forced me to pause and evaluate both.
What does it mean?
Before I dive into parsing the specific words, I will start by recapping what I mean when I say that I want to build a world where no goal ever dies of loneliness.
America is plagued with an epidemic of unhappiness.
Unfortunately, much of this unhappiness is created by choices that people make (or don’t make). Here’s what I mean:
- People are increasingly unhappy with their lives. Research has shown that an increasing number of people are unhappy with their lives today. Before COVID, only 31% of Americans rated themselves “very happy,” and this stat dropped to just 14% over the past two years.
- Happiness is a choice within our control, and you are happier when pursuing and achieving goals. The secret is that your happiness is within your control. One way to help improve your happiness is to pursue goals. Pursuing a goal that you believe is attainable leads to higher cognitive and affective (mental and emotional) well-being, leading to increased happiness. This is true even if you never actually achieve that goal!
- A small minority of people set goals to help unlock their happiness. Despite the happiness impact of goals, approximately 80% of people in the United States have set none. People often cited that fear, uncertainty and lack of belief in themselves as the leading causes of their goalless lives.
Regardless of whether somebody actively sets goals, they have dreams and goals inside them.
We all have things we wish we could accomplish, but some of us never act on those desires. Instead of actively pursuing their goals, they coast through life, live day-to-day, play the lottery and hope to achieve the lives of their dreams.
When somebody has an unpursued goal trapped inside them, that goal dies of loneliness.
Sadly, far more goals die of loneliness than ever die of failure.
Through Operation Melt, I am helping change the world by helping people decide to pursue their goals and ultimately achieve them. This is going to make the world a happier place.
Now, let me explain why I chose these two specific words: dying and loneliness.
Why dying?
As I achieved my hundred-pound weight loss goal, I started setting my sights on some additional goals unrelated to the number on the scale. I had just started running and decided I wanted to train to run my first 5k race on the anniversary of starting my journey.
While training for my first 5k, I had to run a lot to build my endurance. I had to keep myself focused and motivated to achieve my goal, so I used my mind control powers. In addition to listening to music and talking to other runners, I found a one-hour motivational video that I repeatedly watched or listened to as a pump-up video.
I have shared this video before, but I will share it again here… it is worth watching!
Amongst the many motivational speeches included in this video was a sound bite from a Les Brown speech that resonated with me. In this speech (included in the following video), Les talked about being on your deathbed and having all of your unfulfilled dreams standing around you and dying with you.
This idea of dreams and goals dying with you was powerful and has stuck with me for nearly five years!
Making this concept even more meaningful was that I kept being reminded of it everywhere I looked. For example, I started listening to a podcast by Todd Henry, the author of the book Die Empty. In that podcast, he shared the following quote:
The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. In the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, never-launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all of the other things that people thought, ‘I’ll get around to that tomorrow.’ One day, however, their tomorrows ran out.
Todd Henry
And it didn’t stop there. I saw or heard references like these in multiple other places. That’s when I knew that it was more than a coincidence. This was clearly something the universe was trying to point out and make important to me. I needed to pay attention lest the universe hit me with a brick (see Whispers, Voices, Screams, Bricks to learn more about my Oprah moment).
Saving unfulfilled goals from dying was important and part of my calling!
Why loneliness?
While the “dying” portion of my vision is pretty straightforward, the loneliness portion is a bit more complicated and doesn’t have a specific story.
I believe in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which states that every human has certain needs to survive. These needs have a priority and build on top of one another.
At the bottom of the pyramid/hierarchy are our basic physiological needs like food, water and air. If we don’t have those, we cannot maintain life.
Next, we need safety and security. If we aren’t safe, we cannot focus on anything other than becoming secure. Security is second only to physiological needs to function as a human.
Third, and most important for this conversation, is love and belonging. Humans are inherently social beings, and we cannot live our fullest lives without companionship. This includes friendship, community belonging and love. Companionship is required if we are to achieve our highest levels of self-esteem and the peak of the hierarchy, self-actualization. Essentially, we cannot achieve our full potential without companionship and belonging.
It turns out that, as the hierarchy of needs says, isolation and loneliness are hazardous to our health. According to the CDC, these factors significantly increase a person’s risk of premature death from all causes. People can literally die of loneliness!
How many stories have you heard about spouses that die within weeks of each other? Quite a few, right? In many cases, the second spouse dies from their new-found loneliness.
Without going deep into a sad personal story, I believe loneliness contributed to my father’s death.
Bringing the subject back to goals…
When you have a goal or dream inside you that you are ignoring, it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. It just sits there waiting for you to breathe life into it. That goal, without companionship, love or attention, gets lonely.
Eventually, you ignore a dream or goal for so long that you forget about it, and it just disappears. It dies inside you from the loneliness. Pretty sad, right?
An even sadder situation is when these goals stay lonely but don’t disappear on their own. There is always that voice in the back of your head reminding you of this goal, and you continue to ignore it. At the end of your life, as you’re lying on your deathbed, this goal is still there. It dies lonely and unfulfilled inside you.
Both of these ideas are so disturbing to me that I have dedicated myself to helping you give those goals the attention they deserve. It is never too late!
Ask Me Anything!
Do you have a question you would like to submit for a future Ask Coach Tony post?
- Do you want to know more about me?
- Do you want to know more about my weight loss journey?
- Do you want to know more about my books or my creative process?
- Do you have a question about how to achieve your goals?
- Do you want to know more about coaching?
Whatever your question, I am here to help. Ask Me Anything!
If you want to have a deeper conversation and get more one-on-one help, click here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
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