Enhance Your Professional and Career Development – Get an Accountability Partner
Are you someone who begins each week with clear goals you want to achieve that week?
Are you highly motivated to achieve them?
Are you also very good at knowing the steps you need to take to bring those goals to fruition?
BUT, do you then find that you lose focus easily?
Do you have an interest in so many things that you can be drawn into other things that aren’t your priority at that time?
Or, are you easily stressed, and then lose momentum?
Do things coming from out of left field throw you out of kilter and see you distracted from your goals?
If this is you, then maybe an Accountability Partner is just what you need to keep you focussed on your goals and what you want to achieve both personally and professionally.
What is an Accountability Partner?
In brief, this is someone you choose to keep you accountable for achieving your goals and creating the professional and personal life you desire.
It may be someone within your own organisation, but it is often more helpful to have someone from outside.
It can be one-sided with one person being the Accountability Partner and the other consulting with that person. It can also be two-sided with each person being the accountability partner for each other. There is no exchange of money.
You can establish your own working relationship, but generally what happens is that you will telephone that person first thing every Monday morning and have a 15-20 minute phone call. You will share your goals for that week with your Accountability Partner who will keep a copy. You may briefly talk about what may get in the way of you achieving those goals and how you might overcome those. The following Monday morning the first part of your call is about how you went with the goals of the previous week. You have to report in, and all week you know that.
Having an Accountability Partner with whom you actually talk (rather than email), is initially about the development of self-discipline. It is also about having to be accountable to someone else for what you have or have not done. You can’t get away with anything. That person, however, is not an authority figure. The emphasis is on “partner” – someone working with you for a period of time to help you ultimately to be accountable to yourself for creating the life and success you desire.
The ultimate goal with Accountability Partners is that after a short time you don’t need them anymore. You are able to keep yourself focused no matter what presents itself. You know and understand yourself better and what distracts you from your priorities and can address that yourself.
What often happens, however, is that because the two people have found the relationship so helpful, they continue it, but it is not so much about accountability then as about peer support.