How Did You Lose Your Accountability In Your Life?

“Personal accountability is accepting the results you are receiving through your repeated actions to specific commitments.”

How did you get here?

• Are you frustrated with the results you are receiving in your life? Do you constantly procrastinate about what must be done? Do you clearly know what your next steps are? Are you stuck in an endless cycle of non-productive activities, letting others dictate your use of time and determining what your priorities are?
• Do you wonder how you lost total control of your life and how you are going to get it back?
• Are you chasing the mythical work-life balance equation, only to discover that it doesn’t exist? Or at least it doesn’t exist for your right now?
• Are you constantly stressed out about everything that you have to do, not only for yourself, but for everyone else in your life?
• Do you constantly move from one activity to the next without pausing to analyze the results of your actions? Does it appear that no matter how much you do, you never seem to accomplish much in your jam packed day?
• Do you sit down at night and wonder where the day went? Do you analyze the use of your day? Do you have the systems and processes in place in your life to ensure that you are doing the right actions to move you in the right direction?
• Are you constantly designing and crafting ‘to-do’ lists and checking as many activities off as possible in the shortest amount of time only to fill it back up each day? Do you get the feeling of fulfillment when you check off these items, but a sense of overwhelm when you just add more items back to the list?
• Are you under the impression that by multi-tasking in life you are accomplishing more? Is there a sense deep down that you are spinning your wheels and not using your energy and efforts to the best of your abilities? Are you constantly doing more than one thing at a time and taking three or four times as long to get something accomplished?
• Do you sit down to start a project or task and just go blank? Are you unsure of where to start or what will have the most impact? Do you start doing low level tasks that have no real impact on improving your situation while other bigger impact tasks keep coming in an d piling up on you, only to keep you in this state of paralysis?
• Is your mission in life clearly defined or are the waters murky? Have you taken the time to identify what you are actually going after? Is this in alignment with what you really want deep down inside?
• Are you constanlty frustrated with your own forward progress, or lack of forward progress no mattter how much you clear off your plate?

Are you accountable for the results in your life?

The bottom line, how do you know that what you are doing each and every day is what you should be doing? How do you ensure that your time, energy and efforts aren’t being taken over by someone else’s agenda?

Before you can start to make more sense of your life and reclaim every inch of it that you deserve and desire, we have to take a few steps back and clear the decks – that is we need to start from ground zero and work our way out.

Personal accountability is all about owning up to the results you achieve in your life through your stated commitments, whether these commitments are conscious or subconscious.

My mission is to show you how to achieve more efficiency, productivity and clarity in your life through the systematic designing and implmentation of personalized systems and processess to correct the path in your life.

Where do I start with personal accountability?

The first step on the road to becoming a more accountable person is to identify what you are currently doing in life and determine if that is in alignment with where you want to go.

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Clear the decks: What we want to do is hit a mini-reset button in your life. That isn’t to say that you stop doing everything in your life and focus only on finding what is important to you. Instead, we are going to start working on methodically and systematically identifying what works for you, and what moves you closer to where you want to be spending your time and energy and the person you want to become.

When we hit that reset button, we want to start measuring and experimenting in your life, and initiating your own personal growth. In this growth process, we need to discover what you are doing and how that impacts your life by measuring and refining your actions.

Each action that you undertake impacts your life in some manner. Some of these actions are critical in building the future accountable you, and some actions are detrimental.

Without the correct systems and processes in place that allow you to measure and refine your actions, it is unlikely that you will determine which side of the fence they sit on.

Declare what is truly important in your life

As you start to become more accountable for the results in your life, you also need to establish what areas are truly important to you, and what areas don’t excite you or you don’t want to spend the time or energy focusing on them.

The only way to truly gain control back in your life is to know where you should be investing your time and energy.

In your busy life, there is no reason that you should be investing your time and energy in areas that don’t excite or push you towards your objective.

SEE ALSO: If you want to get more from your life, and are looking for concrete action steps to get you there, check out our Request a Coach page. It’s a “cut the fence-sitting and take action” way to tackle your issues and actually find success. You’ll be matched with the coaches most suited to you to get you from where you are to where you want to be. To get off the fence and start to take action, click or tap here.

Identifying what ares of your life to focus on

It’s time to start planting your flag and deciding where you want to put your focus, time and energy in life going forward.

Here is a list of nine common areas most of us focus on, some areas are more important to us than others. We want to rank each area and determine where it fits within your life.

You don’t have to put a lot of thought into this initially, take your first reaction. The intiial list is highly generalized and as you gain more control in your life we can distill it down to more meaningful terms.

Action:

Find some place to write these down where you will have access to it every day, once in the morning and once in the evening. I use a paper notebook that I carry with me everywhere. but if you are more into the digital note taking methods there is an endless supply out there to choose from. The key is to find one system that works for you and to stick with that system.

Rate nine key areas of your life

1. Leading a healthy life (fitness, diet and eliminating unhealthy habits).
2. Organizing your command center (creating productive, efficient home and work spaces).
3. Developing your growth strategy (what you want and need to learn, how you will systematically go about this process).
4. Identifying and commanding actions to your side projects (hobbies and business ideas).
5. Developing your professional and personal growth strategy (enhaning your career or switching careers).
6. Devoting your time in community to create a better living environment.
7. Dedicating more time to your family and friends (creating a robust family and social life).
8. Identifying time for yourself outside of everything else that is going on around you (planting your flag for personal reflection and identifying your greatest wants and needs). 
9. Becoming a world explorer.

Go through the list above and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, with a 1 representing areas that don’t interest you very much or cause you to feel lukewarm, a 10 represents an area that puts the fire in your belly. The areas that you rate as a 10 are where you want to focus your efforts in life.

This rating systems is totally subjective, it represents how you feel about the area, not what others think or tell you how you should feel.

If you feel that you want to spend some time investigating an area, go for it. Your choices today will change as you learn and grow more, what you are doing today will more than likely not be what you are going to be doing in the future.

Once you have completed this exercise, go ahead and share your responses with those closest to you, I would be interested in seeing what you came up with.

Becoming more clear in your actions

As demonstrated by the above examples, if you are like the majority of people out there, you’re trying to do it all at once. This results in each area not getting the attention that it deserves and you end up with a sense of frustration and un-fulfillment in your life.

Being extremely specific in what you want in life is the fastest way to achieve more personal accountability in your life.

SEE ALSO: If you want to get more from your life, and are looking for concrete action steps to get you there, check out our Request a Coach page. It’s a “cut the fence-sitting and take action” way to tackle your issues and actually find success. You’ll be matched with the coaches most suited to you to get you from where you are to where you want to be. To get off the fence and start to take action, click or tap here.

When you know where you are going and why you are going in that direction, each decision that you make during the day becomes extremely easy. The amount of time you spend procrastinating and focusing on less than high value tasks diminishes.

When people ask to use your time and energy, you can immediately determine if it is aligned wth your strategy. Identifying those requests that aren’t in alignment with your strategy in life can either be refused or placed on the back burner with a specific time to commit them, this decision is entirely based on your available time and wants.

Reclaimining your life from the brink of chaos

Identifying what you want to focus on in your life to increase not only the quality, but your ‘zest’ for life is the first step in a marathon. When you spend years chasing after areas of your life that have no color or flavor, it takes time to realize that there is more.

It’s time to plant your flag and march to the beat of your own drummer. Crafting a life that is truly yours, one that you spend time dreaming and designing. One that is specifically suited to you and only you. This is one of the best activities you can do in your life. Having that sense of direction, purpose and creating a meaningful existence all through becoming more accountable for your results, committments and actions is my goal.

At the end of the day, you want to feel fulfilled and accomplished in what you do each and every day. Each moment of your day doesn’t have to be action packed, that is contrary to what your life needs to become.

I’m confident that this is the way you run your life right now, filling up every minute of your day with ‘to-do’s’, constantly running from one activity to the next, not spending time to reflect and analyze the results you are receiving.

After all the old saying is:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results”

Does this apply to your current life?

Accomplishing accountability starts by building your personal map

When explorers started out on their unknown journeys, all they had was a rudimentary map. One that was great at identifying where they started, but as they moved about their journey they had to create and define this new map, one that started out with no real details, no markers, no pathways. It’s time to become the explorer in your life.

1. Now that you are starting on your journey to become a more accountable person, mark your starting point out on your map.
   Where are you right now in life? How do you feel about the results you are receiving, what are those results you are receiving? What commitments do you tell yourself you have to meet each day? Are these true commitments, or are they dictated by others?
2. Next, let’s define where our horizons are, what are we searching for to put our time and energy into? Grab your notes of the nine areas of life and determine which ones you are actively moving towards. What will you specifically focus on each day to bring more of that into your life?

With these two steps alone, you are farther ahead than ninety percent of the people out there. You know where you are today and you know wht you are going to bring more of into your life. This alone is extremly valuable itself, in that it allows you to determine when an activity pops up into your pathway that isn’t aligned with what you want, how you will handle it. Not having to spend the time or energy to analyze if it fits into your life and what you must do about it beforehand is priceless.

In closing…

In your journey to become more accountable in your life through specific commitments and actions, you need to start working your strategic plan from a baseline. Before you can move forward from here, having these baselines in place, what is most important in your life and where you want to spend your time and energy, what creates that sense of excitement and zest for life, all play into setting up your day to create that sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.

SEE ALSO: If you want to get more from your life, and are looking for concrete action steps to get you there, check out our Request a Coach page. It’s a “cut the fence-sitting and take action” way to tackle your issues and actually find success. You’ll be matched with the coaches most suited to you to get you from where you are to where you want to be. To get off the fence and start to take action, click or tap here.

Yours in accountability

Next steps

Ready to get accountable? Check out our qualified accountability coaches.

If you want to get more from your life, and are looking for concrete action steps to get you there, check out our Request a Coach page. It’s a “cut the fence-sitting and take action” way to tackle your issues and actually find success. You’ll be matched with the coaches most suited to you to get you from where you are to where you want to be. To get off the fence and start to take action, click or tap here.