Hello, I’m 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?
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?
My local Indian restaurant has amazing flatbread. I decided to ask the cook for the recipe and he said he couldn’t share it. He had signed a naan disclosure agreement.
Happy New Year!!! How Are My Goals Looking?
In our perfect ways. In the ways we are beautiful. In the ways we are human. We are here. Happy New Year’s. Let’s make it ours.
Beyonce
Happy New Year!
Don’t worry; you didn’t pull a Rip Van Winkle and sleep through a few months. I am talking about my upgraded strategy for New Year’s Resolutions and successful goals.
A year ago, I shared a blog titled Happy New Year!?. In this blog, I explained several reasons why the traditional New Year’s Resolutions approach sets you up for failure. I presented two key tactics to flip resolution-setting on its head and help you break free from this certain failure.
- Choose a different date: you don’t have to arbitrarily choose New Year’s Day to update your goals; you can choose a more meaningful date. I recommend selecting your birthday to start your new year. This is the day you begin a new year of your life; it is a much better date to complete a life retrospective and update your goals.
- Don’t set resolutions: instead of setting vague “resolutions” for the year, ones you likely won’t achieve, set intentions instead. Intentions are directional and become themes for the upcoming year. You can use these themes as your guardrails when setting/revising your goals. But remember, intentions are NOT goals. You will still want to create effective goals you can pursue to bring the intentions to life. Download my free Goal Success Quick Start Guide to help with your goal-setting.
These two simple New Year’s Resolution upgrades can set you up for a year of success. Otherwise, you might be resolving to fail.
The Year of Tony
Ok, let’s transition a bit. I will recap my plan for the year that is ending this week. Then I will share my assessment of how I did. My hope is that my personal example will help you in several ways. First, it will illustrate how my New Year’s Resolution upgrades work. Second, by publicly sharing my progress report, I am enlisting you as a partner to help keep me accountable for achieving my goals. Most importantly, because I faced some challenges with my intention, I hope to demonstrate that success is not always a straight line. It isn’t always smooth sailing.
My new year starts on my birthday, November 1. It’s my birthday week, whoop whoop!
My intention for this year was profit-taking (see Taking Some Profit). I intended to spend this year taking “profit” from my extensive past investments in self-improvement while still making intentional investments in my future. Here is how I explained it last year:
Where does it end? Where is the finish line? What if, instead of automatically setting new goals as soon as the last goal is achieved, this person takes a different approach? What if he (or she) pauses to be content with their accomplishments? What if he (or she) decided to accept their body and be happy with their progress before setting that new goal? What if the new goal was simply an enhancement and not an effort to fix another problem?
Choosing to be happy with your accomplishments before rushing to pursue that next goal is an example of taking some profit from your self-improvement investments. If you don’t do this, what is the purpose of your investment?
So, that was my plan. A significant portion of this plan focused on how I talk to and think about myself. While it applied in many areas of my life, my mind and body were my two most prominent focus areas. Those are the areas where I will focus my progress report.
Personality Assessments: Harvest Time
I want you to picture the life of a farmer. Each spring, he spends time preparing his soil, planting and caring for his crops as they start to sprout. He spends the summer continuing to protect and care for his crops as they grow. His goal is to ensure a bountiful future harvest. Then, when harvest season arrives, he harvests his crops and survives the cold winter with the results of his hard work.
Many of us are farmers, and our crop is self-improvement.
For at least fifteen years, I have been caring for my self-improvement crop. I have spent thousands of hours learning, trying new things and discovering more about myself. Personality assessments are one of the most frequent tools I have used to fertilize my crop. I have tried almost all of them and have completed some more than once.
My goal each time I completed a personality assessment was the same, I wanted to figure out who I really am. But, my result was that each of these assessments essentially said the same thing in different ways. They confirmed that I know who I am despite my continued effort to reconfirm.
For this past year, my profit-taking intention for my mind was to harvest those well-tended crops. Instead of continuing to try to figure out who I am, I was going to lean into what I already knew and live in alignment with it.
It is twelve months later, and I am happy to say I had a bountiful harvest. I have completed no additional assessments this year. I have spent my year in alignment with my known personality type and strengths. This included using my brain and an ally through affirmations, positive self-talk and other tools, and the result has been great. I feel more at ease with who I am and lean into who I am to achieve results.
One place where my profit-taking has yielded significant benefits is in my coaching business. Instead of dipping my toe into the coaching waters while fighting imposter syndrome, I took a different approach. I jumped into the water! I embraced a strategy called “coaches gotta coach,” and I did the work. I took on clients, paid and unpaid, and I grew my coaching skills while helping people.
While I made mistakes along the way, I had way more success and helped many people. I achieved this by leveraging my wiring and accepting who I am instead of constantly trying to change myself.
Today, I am “Coach Tony,” and I know I can help people achieve their life, health, career, leadership and business goals!
Body Positivity: Late Harvest
While the “mind” portion of my profit-taking was a big success during the past year, the “body” side was a bit more challenging. Yes, I made progress, but it took longer and was harder than I anticipated, plus I needed a little help. It’s time for some real talk.
As I explained in Taking Some Profit, “I have invested at least six thousand hours of effort into improving my body in less than five years. These investments have yielded significant gains, so It is definitely time to take a little profit. It is time for me to be happy with my results and stop focusing on my remaining flaws.”
For the first half of the year, I continued my semi-obsessive focus on calorie consumption, calorie burn, weight and every other number I was measuring. I also disproportionally focused on my “problem” areas in the mirror and often ignored the progress and the areas I liked.
This excessive scrutinizing of myself peaked in early summer with a big disappointment. I visited the OSU sports medicine clinic and got a DEXA scan, a low-dose x-ray scan of my body to measure body fat, lean muscle mass and other details. The results were nowhere near what I had expected.
I couldn’t figure out why this all unfolded the way it did. So, I took action and got a coach (yes, coaches need coaches!). I evolved my relationship with my personal trainer (and friend) for many years to focus more holistically on my health and nutrition.
Our initial conclusion was that I was eating too few calories, insufficient carbs, and too little protein. I was also exercising too much. This had been the case for so long that my metabolism was likely impacted and needed a reset. We created a plan:
- Eat more, with a specific focus on macronutrients
- Exercise less and maintain 1-2 rest days per week… real rest days
- Stop weighing myself
- Stop focusing so much on my app-estimated calorie burn; it isn’t accurate
- Focus on body positivity exercises
I embraced this plan, or thought I did, for about eight weeks, and we checked back on my progress. I had successfully increased calorie consumption a bit, including increased carbs and fiber. But, I hadn’t materially reduced exercise and was still too focused on calories in vs. calories out.
This meant it was time to take more dramatic action. I decided to do something that I thought was completely off-limits: I stopped tracking for the first time in over five years!
For the past twelve weeks, there has been no logging of food, nutrients and calories. I have committed to trusting myself and my new habits while breaking free from the numbers and my “diet culture” focus.
The transition has been more challenging than expected, but I am doing great with it. It feels great to sit down to a meal and enjoy it without logging everything. Surprisingly, seeing the dust accumulating on my food scale makes me smile.
I am fit. I am healthy. I appreciate what my body can do, especially what it couldn’t do a few years ago. Yes, there are areas of my body that I don’t like, but I love and appreciate my body in its entirety. I give my body the food, love and rest it needs, and it serves me well. I am a work in progress, but I am not broken, and the numbers don’t define me.
I would consider that a bountiful harvest and a big jump into profit-taking!
So What?
Happy New Year!
It’s New Year’s week, and it is time to check on my “resolutions” from the past year. Yes, I understand it is still October. I am talking about my upgraded strategy to break free from resolution failure.
In this week’s Goal Success By Choice, I review the choice you can make that will help you stop resolving to fail. Plus, I am sharing a real-talk recap of how I did with my goals for the past year.
Do you need a partner to help you break free from the New Year’s Resolutions cycle and start building life-changing goals? It’s time to call Coach Tony! Click Here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
Before you go… please consider purchasing one of my books to help you achieve your goals.
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.
