Hello and welcome to the traveling introvert. Today I want to talk about accountability. It’s come up a lot recently with some of the work that I’ve been doing with clients and some of the work I’ve been doing with organizations. And it can come from things such as people saying, no one holds managers accountable. It could be, I need to do this thing, but I have no one to keep track of. Or I have a client working on a project, and I’m the kind of person that doesn’t get stuff done, unless there’s a huge time limit, or a milestone that I need to hit by a certain date. They need that external force, that validation, that accountability. And here’s thing, the way life is set up, we get toward accountability at an early age in school and University and at work, if you work for your if you work for a company, there is external accountability, because you have a manager. But if you work for yourself, or there’s some personal stuff, it’s really kind of not as easy to get accountability. And accountability is really vital for success in life.

Being accountable requires that you take responsibility for your actions and are able to answer for their outcomes. And it’s a really, really crucial trait and thing to have, not just in your personal life, but in your professional life as well. And so today I want to talk about six ways that you can be more accountable.

Set personal and professional goals. When you have defined goals, it’s far easier to be held accountable for your actions. If you don’t have goals, it’s easy to get kind of sidetracked and go after the shiny thing, and not really accomplish what you wanted to. Having realistic and achievable goals will help you stay on track. While at the same time giving you something to strive for.

And speaking of staying on track, it’s also one thing that you can do is track your progress. That way you know how close you’re getting to said goal. Right? This will help you stay accountable to yourself and see how far you’ve come. We’re really good at setting goals and not realizing the work that we’ve done to get there and sort of looking back, and we’re viewing and patting ourselves on the back that,” hey, I’m a hit this goal at this time, but I did all of this other work towards it”. You can track your progress in any way you want. In a notebook on an app like whatever works for you, but keeping track is key.

Another thing can be, tell someone about your goals. Telling others about your goals. Trick your mind and makes it a little bit more real and help you stay accountable. And it’s really helpful to choose someone who supports and encourages you. On one hand it could also be like, it could be family member or friend, or it could be good to pick someone who is very far removed, so you feel extra accountable to them. You can join a group or a class related to your goal, so that you are also surrounded by unlike mandated people. Tell somewhat about your goal, your actions.

Another thing you can do is create consequences for yourself. Now, if you find it difficult to be countable to yourself, maybe you can create consequences for not meeting your goals. Maybe you could give yourself a set amount of time to complete a task. And if you don’t, you have to do something that you’d rather not do. Maybe run a certain amount of laps or clean something. I don’t whatever it might be, creating consequences for yourself can work for some people. So, give it a try.

Another thing to help yourself, help you stay accountable, could be to set deadlines. If you want to be more accountable at work normally, someone will set deadlines for you. A project manager, a manager, manager, whoever might be, will help set deadlines. So, in your personal life, you should also set deadlines. It works. It will help you stay on track and avoid procrastination. When developing timelines and setting deadlines, be realistic and give yourself enough time to complete the task. If you go ahead and are unrealistic with your milestone setting, or your goal setting, it will help you feel kind of unmotivated and overwhelmed, and then you won’t want to do the thing. So be careful when you are setting deadlines.

And another thing you can do is find an accountability partner. This is someone who will motivate you to stick your goals and never get off track. Choose someone who has similar goals as working towards the same thing. You can meet up with your accountability partner regularly and check in with each other and offer support.

Again, accountability is a necessary trait to have to help you sort of get things done. And so hopefully these tips have been helpful and will help you be more accountable for your actions.

Thank you for listening. This is Janice at thecareerinrovert.com, helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week.