Who holds you accountable?

Accountability

What does it take to get up at 5am, every work day?  Let me tell you.

You hear the term accountability used a lot in business settings; something to which the company holds its employees or teams.  Where you don’t hear it much is in personal settings or relationships with friends and colleagues.  I find accountability to be a very valuable and underutilized tool to attain your goals.  One of the most effective ways to keep yourself or your team on track is through holding yourself accountable to each other.  When you know someone else is watching or that you have a responsibility to other to complete a task, event or goal, you tend to get it done more often than not.

Case in point.  I challenged one of my bright young colleagues to join the 5am club with me and rise and shine early every work day for three weeks.  They say it takes 21 days to form a habit.  Its 5:30am as a write this and I am on work day 17/20.  It’s great to go 1:1 with another on a challenge like this, it’s even better to let know others it’s happening.  So we let six other work colleagues know the challenge is on.  Some of them partook in this challenge last year.  A morning email goes out at first light (or lack thereof in this town) as the day starts giving notice that you are up and accomplishing something for the day.  It’s funny how you lay there in bed sending out your note, contemplating hitting the alarm again, thinking maybe he/she is not up and I should go back to sleep.  Then an email comes through saying “I am up, have my running shoes on and am heading out the door, see you in the office.”  Of course, then it’s on and you have no choice to get up.  While you do, but you don’t need any more motivation and you easily rise.

Other comments come from your community you put the challenge out too…..they congratulate you on accomplishing your challenge, something they can’t or have not taken on yet….or they join.  All of a sudden you have motivated a couple others to start rising early as well.  If they can do it, why can’t we.  Then you slip one day or think, maybe they are not getting out of it what I am?  Of course the message comes, hey, “were you not up early today, I always look forward to those emails, and it motivates me to get up earlier than I have been or taken on another challenge I have been contemplating.”  Your reward is there…and the feedback loops reinforces your own challenge to yourself in the first place.

Now I challenged some of the same people this month to get up for a 6am workout once a week for “Spring Cleaning”.  It stems from one of them (Daryl Mason) challenging a larger group last summer to get in shape with twice a week boot camps.  Yesterday morning we had 8 people and our exercise coach Yuri Elkaim http://www.totalwellnessconsulting.ca/ out doing circuit training at 6-7am.  What a start to the day!  This year it’s easier for me to get up for the work out than last…but I could not have the motivation to do so without the other guys showing up, challenging each other and holding me accountable.