I get asked all the time, how do I hold my clients accountable? In the end, I can’t hold someone accountable. I’m working with adults and even though I know something is in their best interest and it will help them in their business and in many cases their life, if they don’t want to do it, I can’t make them. Remember that old saying of you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
I find the best way to hold people accountable is to get THEM to hold themselves accountable.
Yes, there are many strategies for doing this from charts to goals to plans, but in the end, we are all human and as humans we can make excuses or rationalise ourselves out of anything. To be accountable to yourself is a decision. It is to make the hard calls on yourself and not let yourself get away with stuff. It is to stop making excuses. Sometimes things will happen that are realistic excuses. That is, for example, you couldn’t complete a job outside because the year’s greatest storm going on – that is a real situation. But if you didn’t do something really important because it was kind of spitting with rain, then I’d suggest you were making an excuse.
It is time to get real with yourself. What are you doing that is stopping your progress? Where are you not holding yourself accountable?
Sometimes we can trick ourselves away from accountability with really great stories. I do it. I am more willing to do something for someone else than for myself. I’m very loyal to those closest to me (and sometimes even those not close to me when I think about it). I’ll put their needs above my own. I will often put aside a task I’m working on that will greatly benefit my business to help someone else. Now, I don’t stop helping others – that’s my very nature – but I do have a step involved now. I simply ask people when they need a task done by so then I can prioritise it. What I was doing was dropping everything of mine to work on their task, even if it wasn’t a priority. Down there somewhere for me was a fear of success, of doing what I knew would help me get to the next level in my business. I wasn’t being accountable to what I needed to do. Now it was a pretty elaborate strategy that was hidden well under the disguise of helping others, but at the same time, it was an excuse not to do what I needed to do.
We have to get honest with ourselves and find the things that are truly stopping us from being accountable to ourselves. I had to start being as loyal and helpful to myself as I was to others. What do you need to do?
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