Accountability

When you have a goal having an Accountability partner is a great motivator. You are less likely to procrastinate or give up. When you have to report back to someone else, there is an added incentive to achieve. We don’t want the other person to think we are lazy, not true to our word, weak or any other number of things that we might guess the other person thinks of us. (because how could we ever know what others truly think).

An accountability partner is someone who supports another person to keep a commitment to achieving a desired goal. The person could be a family member, friend, or colleague. Or maybe a group or a professional in some capacity (depending on your goal). If your goal is to give up smoking, you can utilise local services such as regular meetings with health coaches and stop smoking advisors. For smokers professionals are great as accountability partners. The NHS website itself says that when you get the right support and with professional help, you're 3 times as likely to quit for good.

Having an Accountability partner is simple and effective. You find a partner; you need to meet up regularly – usually once a week until the desired goal is achieved.

Each week a new action plan can be agreed, you might be taking action on something you want to do (for example writing a book, running a marathon, getting up at 7am each day) or your goal might be to stop doing something (for example smoke, drink alcohol, watch TV) – where your weekly goal would be to abstain until the next week.

You could formalise it even further by writing yourself a contract and signing it. You could consider adding the consequences of not completing the Action.

There doesn’t have to be a consequence, sometimes this is will be required to help certain people achieve, for others having the accountability partner is enough – you just don’t want to tell the accountability partner that you have not completed your action for the week.

So meeting up with your Accountability partner might be enough or you can state your own consequences – something that will really drive you to achieve.

I have an accountability partner at the moment. Actually we are both accountable to each other as our goal is to finish a 1000 page book and each week, we set a goal of how many pages we will read and we are accountable to each other.

The consequence of not completing this is that we can’t then discuss what we’ve read and we can’t move on. If we continued like that every week, the process would just stop and we wouldn’t get the book read - which is what we want to do. But we spur each other on. I don’t want to let her down, she doesn’t want to let me down and we both want to read the book. We make that extra effort; we go that extra mile just by having an accountability partner.

Do you have a goal or intention that you have been struggling to achieve?

Do you need an accountability partner?

I also offer 1 to 1 Accountability Partnering and mentoring sessions.

Or join an accountability group?

I hold monthly accountability groups to help others achieve their goals. Groups are small, on-line, and for 4 weeks participants work on achieving a goal. In a supportive and friendly environment, we meet weekly to discuss, review, set new targets for the following week, and so much more.

Each month is a new opportunity to join a group.

Please get in touch for more information.