{"id":559,"date":"2009-10-18T17:49:52","date_gmt":"2009-10-19T00:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/?p=559"},"modified":"2009-10-18T17:49:52","modified_gmt":"2009-10-19T00:49:52","slug":"holding-yourself-accountable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/career\/holding-yourself-accountable","title":{"rendered":"Holding yourself accountable"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve noticed that a lot of people tend to shy away from being held accountable.\u00a0 They seem to worry about the penalties which might be imposed if something goes wrong.\u00a0 But that&#8217;s the wrong thing to focus on.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Think of accountability as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Maturity<\/li>\n<li>Taking responsibility for who you are and what you do<\/li>\n<li>Being a reliable person<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Would you like for others to be able to rely on you?<\/p>\n<p>And more importantly, <em>do you want to be able to rely on yourself?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So mature accountability shouldn&#8217;t really be such a scary thing.\u00a0 When it&#8217;s founded on reality and reasonableness, it&#8217;s one of the key things that makes a mature society work.\u00a0 You wouldn&#8217;t entrust your money to a bank if no one held that bank accountable for giving it back to you.<\/p>\n<p>You wouldn&#8217;t entrust your friendship to someone who didn&#8217;t hold themselves accountable for returning that trust.<\/p>\n<p>Now, on to the important conclusion:\u00a0 Holding yourself accountable.\u00a0 Besides my best intentions, I tend to back-slide on my commitments to myself.\u00a0 The key trick is incredibly simple:\u00a0 <strong>Declare your intention to someone you respect.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s why it works:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It clarifies the goal and commitment in my mind, because I have to put it into words.<\/li>\n<li>It builds my confidence when someone else also believes that I will follow through.<\/li>\n<li>It increases the odds that I <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">will<\/span> follow through, because I always have the internal motivation generated by knowing that person might come back and ask me about it.\u00a0 Because I respect them, I don&#8217;t want to disappoint them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I find that people are quite forgiving when I run into barriers and need to change direction.\u00a0 So it rarely imposes extra constraints on my actions that I didn&#8217;t already have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve noticed that a lot of people tend to shy away from being held accountable.\u00a0 They seem to worry about the penalties which might be imposed if something goes wrong.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/career\/holding-yourself-accountable\" class=\"more-link\">[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15,6],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-carl","4":"has-more-link","5":"post-559","7":"format-standard","8":"category-career","9":"post_tag-career-coaching","10":"post_tag-coaching"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":561,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}