If you’re a goal-oriented person, having someone to keep you accountable for your personal and professional goals may seem trivial. Why would you do that if you are able to keep yourself accountable for your own goals?
However, the best way to keep yourself on track with goals and actually make the journey through your goals more meaningful is to have some partners in crime to keep you on track no matter how focused and motivated you are.
That’s why the Power of 3 Worksheet points to establishing three accountability partners to help you live your mission.
An example may be helpful to illustrate the value of accountability partners. You may have seen when I went pubic with my goals at the beginning of the year (Go Public with Your Goals) that my first goal for 2013 is to maximize my mornings.
Maximizing my mornings wasn’t going so well after the newness of New Year’s resolution time wore off around the end of January. But, with a friend and neighbor of mine, we committed to running the Nashville half-marathon in April. Because of her schedule and mine, this required 5:30 am training runs. There was no other time to do it. Two to three mornings a week, we rose before the sun to get that training run in. If she had not been waiting on me those mornings, I doubt my feet would have hit the floor. This sprung into action my whole day, and helped me maximize my morning time in the ways that I had sought to at the beginning of the year, but wasn’t quite able to do on my own.
You see, establishing an accountability partner isn’t a process where you necessarily have to go up to someone as ask, “I need your help, will you be my accountability partner?” Oftentimes, accountability partners come in the form of friends and family or professional colleagues that help keep you on track, and they may not even know they are serving this purpose.
Even though the half-marathon is long over, we still meet 2-3 times a week for that 5:30 am run, and my mornings and days have gone a lot better because she is waiting on me bright and early. This doesn’t take into account the time we get to spend talking while we run which, through her listening and wise council, keeps me accountable and grounded in many other ways. My dad has also served this purpose on morning runs for many years as well, and he joins us often.
Accountability partners are valuable for the habits and behaviors they can help you create. But more importantly, they are valuable because of the relationship. Nothing gets done, or anything of true meaning really gets done, in my opinion, without lasting relationships.
Who keeps you accountable?
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