Alright, forgive me! What a way to start this post on accountability….
Last week, I did not post a Mindset Monday post… so I was certainly NOT accountable with my word. I did not hold to my standards, and fell on the back-end of keeping up with my blog.
Now, accountability is something that has fascinated me for some time now. Just recently, since getting involved with my mentors, did I see the magnitude and importance of this word in my vocabulary.
So what is accountability? How does accountability relate to our day to day lives?
YOUR WORD IS YOUR WORTH, AND YOUR WORTH IS YOUR WORD
Very crucially, I started to realize what it means to say true to “your word”. This means being honest with whoever you are working with, and saying things to. This can be as simple as telling your mother that you will do the laundry. If you do not do it, then your word has been compromised, and your trust level went down as well as your credibility.
I have learned that saying something, means that it MUST be executed, and not just for others… but for ourselves. It really sets the tone for our psyches, to either lie to ourselves or be true to ourselves through our word.
IT CAN MAKE OR BREAK YOU
Our levels of accountability can have an impact, either negative or positive, on how we tend to trust ourselves and others. As aforementioned, our psyche will be greatly affected by our execution and staying true to our word.
If we do not stay true to ourselves and our word, then we can often being inner dialogue like “wow, you are a bad person… just about everyone is more accountable than you. If you can’t even follow through with something you said, how could you ever do anything for anybody?”
See, by lacking accountability, we sabotage ourselves into thinking that nobody can trust us… and that is not a good way to begin to cultivate relationships with others.
BEING ACCOUNTABLE MEANS SUBMITTING SOME EGO
When we commit to being accountable with anything in particular, it takes a certain level of humility to say, “I will stay true to this person, because he or she is counting on me.”
Most others would say, “ah, they won’t mind… its not a big deal! I can always make up for it later anyway.” This is a crucial decision that is very easily made by most who are not accountable. If they cannot hold themselves accountable, they more often than not won’t allow others to hold them accountable either. That is a dangerous person….
The humility game, is one we will discuss in later posts, but I thought I would touch upon it because it is a crucial ingredient in creating the right mindset to develop ourselves in any facet of life. Humility has helped me see what it means to submit to someone who knows more than me, and could potentially help me see things about myself that I was not able to see myself.
Overall, being accountable is a critical part of having a partnership of any kind. If you have a business partner, you would never want them wondering if you would get the work done in time. This would begin to break trust… and trust can not be easily rebuilt.
In any type of relationship, not just business… this is true. If your friend tells you to come to their birthday party, and you end up not going or forgetting… then that immediately drops your accountability levels and credibility. It will be hard for your friend to count on you for anything else in the future, if you forgot something as simple as their birthday!
Being accountable means being present and ready to take action at the most crucial of times.
I am not perfect, and am still working on myself to get to the level where I would like to be, for example with my procrastination… but once this is worked on, I know I will be in a much better place!
Jonathan Echavarria 