Accountability is a scary word. Personal accountability is even scarier. It doesn’t just mean accepting responsibility for your future, it means accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
People who hold themselves accountable show great integrity. It’s also been demonstrated that individuals who show this skill are more likely to be successful and, more importantly, they are more likely to be happy.
Stress Free Is Not Plain Sailing
It is fair to say that a large amount of effort people expend in modern life is spent trying to “destress” their workplaces and their careers. After all, without stress we’d be free to be our best selves, right?
Sadly, this isn’t true. While endless stress is completely detrimental to our wellbeing. A certain amount of stress is essential to developing ourselves as human beings. You can’t be a better person if you don’t overcome challenges and taking on a challenge (even if it appears easy) always comes with a certain level of stress.
Holding yourself accountable means being willing to accept a certain amount of stress in your life and recognize it as a necessary part of your personal growth.
So, What Goes Into Being Accountable?
If you want to develop your self-accountability, then you need to take into account for personal factors:
Your Commitment
Do you have goals? What are they? Do you revisit them on a daily basis? If you don’t have goals it’s impossible to commit to them. So, before you start “doing anything to get results”, it’s a good idea to decide what those results should be.
Once, you have a clearly defined vision for your success – commitment is the tenacity to keep moving towards the goal no matter what life throws at you. Sure, some days will be easier and some days will be harder but successful people realize that even on the worst days, you have to take action to see results.
Your Resilience
It’s easy to push ahead when there are no obstacles in your path. Anyone can do that but how do you react to life’s setbacks?
Do you take the time to appreciate that while it’s not your fault things went wrong (as long as you acted with the best intentions in the first place), when things do go wrong you can learn from them and do better next time?
Resilient people aren’t afraid to review their setbacks and commit to getting it right in future.
Your Desire To Own Your Actions
Taking ownership is tough. It’s the point where you start to truly hold yourself accountable and when you can start holding others accountable for themselves too.
It means you have to embrace the good, the bad and the ugly inside of yourself and seek feedback and guidance to harness the good, work on the bad and try to eliminate the ugly.
When people see you own your life, they’ll start to value your feedback on their input to your life too.
You Learn Continuously
It sounds obvious but it’s amazing how many people don’t commit to learning. It’s not just learning from your mistakes that is important but also learning to meet future challenges.
If you proudly boast that “you haven’t read a book since college”, you might want to think what that says about your current learning attitude.
If you want to succeed, there needs to be time in your life to become better at what you are and to enjoy the challenges of developing new skills, talents and abilities to equip you for the journey to come.
Conclusion
It’s not always easy to hold yourself to account but if you want to be a success in life, you must. You can’t rely on other people to mold you and prepare you for the road to your goals – you must take ownership, be resilient and committed and learn something new every day.
By Andrew Hackett
AUTHOR BIO
In this life, Andrew Hackett’s mission is to help the beautiful souls of the world, free themselves of their daily fears so that they not only find their own purpose for being on this beautiful planet, but also so they can find the courage to take action on their destined purpose.
Through creating a repeatable process, Andrew can now guide anyone from unconscious living, through their own awakening and into a world of limitless possibilities.
The tools and strategies within this process can empower anyone to create the life they have always dreamed of, through never allowing Fear to influence their daily lives ever again.