What I Learned from One Month of Accountability Meetings
It’s now been officially one month and 10 days since my friend and business partner, Arlene, asked if I wanted to be her “accountability partner.” Like the start of many great interactions, this began as a text, to which I replied:
“What is that?”
So it turns out an accountability partner is just like it sounds. A person to keep you accountable. Specifically of the sh*t you say you’re going to do. Neither Arlene nor I can take full credit for this. It’s an idea she gleaned from Darren Hardy’s book, The Compound Effect. If I’m being totally honest, reading his book is something I still need to add to my “goals list” (more on this later), but the idea is that success happens in small increments, rather than in one big epiphany like so many of us are led to believe.
The way it works is each week, you and your accountability partner set three goals for the following week. Obviously they would be different for each of you. You’re accountability partners, not conjoined twins. That’s it though. Three goals. Then you meet up by phone at an agreed date/time each week for 30 mins. You each get 15 minutes to discuss:
3 Wins
3 Losses
3 Fixes
3 AHAs (These are epiphanies large and small from: “Paying my bills before the due date is so much better!” to “So, I think I want kids.”)
And that is pretty much all there is to it! Then you lather, rinse, repeat for the following week. At just a mere 30 minutes per week, I was astounded at the impact. For example, I’d been dragging my feet on launching my online publication for the past year (by that I mean two). Even though I knew it was something I deeply wanted to do, I had the hardest time mobilizing myself. The powerful combination of adding it to a list AND having someone hold me accountable got my site launched in a little over a month. Each week I added another task to my goals list. As you can imagine, some of these crossed off tasks turned into Wins for the week. These were some of the other things I noticed after a month of this simple but effective “compound effect” habit:
I Care What Other People Think (more than I thought)
I’d always considered myself someone who doesn’t mind going against the grain, especially if it serves my interest. Maintaining tradition or an accepted lifestyle has never been high on my to-do list. Now all of a sudden with an accountability partner I was required to meet with each week, I became hyper-aware of what she would think of me! Do I really want to show up and NOT have cleaned out my closet? Come on, how hard is it to clean out your closet? I found myself checking back on my list of three goals and starting with those things first, making sure I got done with them early, so that by next week I could say: “Yes, I did these. That was a win.” However, unlike social conformity,
These were goals that I set for myself.
They weren’t set by society, or family, or friends. Here was an instance where caring what another person thought of me worked in my favor. The positive flip side of this that I discovered was:
Staying true to my word.
Epiphanies Are Actually All Around
Are you hearing the opening line of the famous Love Actually airport scene? Just like Hugh Grant’s claim in the movie, I found that similar to love, AHA moments were actually all around.. However, UNLIKE love (and lucky for me), the more I looked for these moments, the more they started to appear. I’d always thought these bolts of clarity would strike as hard and rarely as lightning. Not so.
Most of them felt calmer, like the realization of a truth I’d always known.
I personally found myself becoming more investigative, trying out things I had an inkling might have an impact on my life. Part of this was due to what I mentioned previously. I wanted to have something to bring to the table at my next accountability meeting. An example for me was paying my bills early. I used to wait until the last day, partially out of necessity when I was living paycheck to paycheck for a time. Fortunately, since then my finances stabilized and I was able to actually make my payments on time, if not early. This small but significant change was huge for me! I felt I had a clearer picture of my bank account and this relieved a stress I didn’t really need to give myself anymore. Simply not seeing the red “payment due” warning for two weeks alleviated a bit of anxiety that I had unknowingly been carrying around.
Some AHA moments were bigger - like when I realized I was born in order to fix my parents’ failing marriage (SPOILER: they divorce one year later). But that’s another blog post! Point is:
The opportunity to be inspired, enchanted, and wow’d is everywhere. You just have to look for it.
I’m Really Hard on Myself (and you probably are too)
A funny thing happened after our second week of accountability meetings. Both my partner and I were zoomed in on our losses and fixes, and not enough on our wins and AHAs. Maybe it’s the Virgo in us, I’m not sure. Either way, we weren’t realizing that time spent towards a win for example in one area, may result in a loss in another area. It may lead towards a fix, but not necessarily. In short:
Something’s always got to give.
I’ll use my partner as an example. One of her wins was that she’d worked out 5 times one week. But one of her losses was that she didn’t make as much headway on another project she was working on. I pointed out that spending more time exercising means she had less time to devote to other things, i.e. her other project. She can’t expect to magically gain more time just because she worked out. Instead of viewing this is a pure loss, it was an opportunity to reevaluate how realistic her goals were. A good “fix” in this situation would be to make smaller goals in either her workouts or her project, or both.
The amount of hours we have in a day is finite. But the ways we use them are infinite.
With this in mind, she ended up shooting for exercising four times and devoting the leftover resources to her other projects. I used my partner as this example, but this same thing happened to me (and continues to!)
What we as accountability partners also do is remind each other that we are humans, not robots.
Part of this method is research. By listing out what you set out to do each week, you get a clearer idea of what you can and cannot accomplish. How much rest you need. How much exercise you need, etc. The idea isn’t to beat yourself up over your losses and propose big fixes. It’s to figure out those few things you can get done, and limit yourself to set you up for success.
Success is SO NOT Linear
I love a good list. That’s partially what got me to agree to this exercise. It was four tiny lists that I could number and color code if I wanted to. Nice categories with which to reign in my scattered brain. Theoretically, your goals should translate to your wins. And your losses would be the result of unmet goals. Then the fixes would ensue. THEORETICALLY.
Despite best efforts to keep things tidy, I found that my goals, wins, losses, et al. were all over the place. Sure, sometimes they fed into each other in a nice little assembly line. But lots of times, unexpected wins, losses, and definitely AHA moments came up all the time.
Something you might have been working on may not show up as a win until years later. This is especially true with matters of the heart and emotional healing.
If you’ve ever gone down this dark road, you know it’s a lesson in blind faith that you will come out the other end as a better person.
Unlike work or body goals, many times there is no tangible marker of your efforts.
And don’t even get me started on the unexpected losses, aka. Life. Many of us are all too familiar with these. Death. Illness. Taxes. This accountability method does two things:
It lets you acknowledge something as a loss. So many times, we feel like we just need to power through and problem solve without giving ourselves a moment to say: “Yeah you know what, that really f*cking sucked.”
It explains why you didn’t accomplish all your goals that week, and forces you to reassess. If your rent went up (loss), you need to adjust and take “invest $10K in rap career” off your goals list (for now). And probably add a different goal, i.e. figure out how I’m going to pay my rent OR get a side hustle.
Starting is So Hard
My accountability calls shined a light on one of my biggest flaws, which is feeling so disproportionately overwhelmed and anxious about something that I never start. This perpetuates a cycle where assignments (both personal and professional) start to pile up, only adding to my anxiety. As a result, I stay in this state of self-inflicted paralysis and don’t get anything done.
It’s maddening.
Because I started doing the weekly calls, I was motivated (by embarrassment...er, accountability) to at least start what I set out to do. That’s when I found a trick that works really well for my brain and might for yours too. I tell myself:
Do the tiniest fraction of the task possible.
Honestly, sometimes this was something as pathetic as: open Photoshop (when I have an entire website to design). Ninety percent of the time, I would get so engrossed that I’d finish or get significantly more done than what I anticipated. After a month of force-starting myself, it’s become a much easier process and instead of pulling teeth, it’s more of a conversation between my self and my brain, that goes something like this:
SELF: We gotta write this article.
BRAIN: But I don’t wanna! It’s too hard. It’ll take too long. I’ll just do it later when I have 6 solid hours of uninterrupted free time.
SELF: How about you just open Microsoft Word? You can do that can’t you? It’ll take less than a minute. If you still don’t want to after that, we can stop. Deal?
BRAIN: Yea OK, I can do that. Oh … I like writing! (Writes 1,500 words).
SELF: (Smug look of content)
I experience far less stress over starting and getting things done now because:
I know what I have to do to start.
I’ve had enough success that I know I will get it done!
So on that note, if you’re considering using The Compound Effect’s accountability partner method, I recommend it! Or at the very least … just start!
