Why do I struggle to hold myself accountable?
Because the commitment is to something you still think you shouldn't be doing. Accountability to a client or a boss is attached to serving someone else, and a plan that only serves you isn't, so it gets dropped the moment anyone else needs something. What changes this is deciding the thing is allowed, then letting someone see you do it.
A man I coach asked me this near the end of a long conversation, after we had been through what he wants and what is in the way of it.
"So how do I hold myself accountable?"
Twenty minutes earlier he had shared with me what the thing he is building for himself feels like.
"Selfish is the word that keeps coming back. It feels like I'm just doing this for me."
Those two sentences belong together and he said them without connecting them. He says honest work, honest days, and he has shown up like that for two decades without being able to remember letting a client down. But the commitment he made to himself is the one that keeps getting dropped, and he reads that as a problem with his discipline.
Why can't I hold myself accountable?
Because you can, and you do it all week, for everybody who is waiting on you. What fails is a commitment without being attached to serving someone else. A commitment you half believe is selfish is competing against every person you provide for, so it loses, and from the inside that looks like something wrong with you.
You can't hold yourself to something you still think you shouldn't be doing.
A lifetime of providing, and then the thing he does for himself feels like taking from the people he provides for, because the time and money he's put into it haven't paid him back yet. Selfish and guilty at once. No amount of structure gets through that, because the structure is carrying a decision that hasn't been made.
A group member described the same split from the other side: they keep every commitment they make to other people and break the ones they make to themselves. Another said the thing they were building was "not breaking promises that I make to myself."
One of the easiest ways to build self-trust is following through on the things you say you're going to do. The danger is making promises to yourself you can't keep, because that erodes it.
Daniel Lawson
Why do I need someone to hold me accountable?
You don't need it forever, and a lot of the people I coach only needed it at the start. Every commitment you already keep has a person attached to it, which is a lot of why it sticks. So borrow that on purpose, point it at the thing that is yours, and after a while you keep it going without them.
I said this to him about the fourteen weeks he invested in working together.
I think you're going to show up here for the next 14 weeks regardless, because you're feeling like you'll let me down if you don't. What I want to show you is you're going to show up because it's for you.
Daniel Lawson
He said that is exactly how it is. Borrowed first, then earned for him.
A man in a group I run described what the group gives him as "that extra bit of accountability to show up as best I can for the group. Be that little bit extra prepared in my weekly life." The preparing happens during his week, days before anybody sees him, which is the transfer already starting.
One participant had already tried using an app to keep themselves accountable. "I would get a notification like an event, but I just didn't feel like sitting and responding." What they wanted was a phone call from a person, and they were ready to pay a stranger online to ring them every evening with three to five questions. They were not short of a system. They wanted somebody there.
It's not about trying to do it for anyone else. It's about bringing accountability to yourself and being seen in it.
Daniel Lawson
How do I hold myself accountable for my actions?
Three things change this, and none of them is more force. The commitment has to be yours rather than handed to you, somebody else has to know it exists, and it has to be uncomfortable enough that finishing it means something while staying small enough that you finish it. Then the same again next week. These are the reps build in practice.
| What a commitment to yourself needs | What happens without it |
|---|---|
| To be yours, not a routine somebody else set | It runs while they are there and gets dropped the week after |
| To be told to someone else, with a time in the calendar | It gets forgotten inside the hour, and nothing was broken because nothing was ever said |
| To be uncomfortable enough to count, and small enough to finish | Too easy and it proves nothing, too hard and the stopping becomes evidence against you |
One. Make it yours. A routine a mentor or a programme hands you will carry you while they are there. I said to a client about the daily hour he had run for months, well, that was somebody else's structure, it wasn't your structure. Same hour, different owner.
Two. Tell someone else, with a time in the calendar. A man in one of my groups forgot his action item inside an hour of committing to it. But I was there for him. Trying harder to remember doesn't fix that. He needs it written down rather than spoken, and sent to someone.
Three. Pick something you don't want to do. Small challenges, deliberately uncomfortable, sized hard enough that getting through means something. Side quests on the way to the main one, the way you'd build up with shorter runs before a marathon. I did an ice bath that way. It was cold and it sucked, and once I got out, yeah, I did that. The man I started with said about his, "I really didn't want to do it." The resistance is the point, because what you get at the end isn't the cold water, it is something you did that you can draw on next time.
Why does it feel selfish to prioritise myself?
Because looking after everybody else is what many of us watched growing up, and looking after ourselves wasn't in it. The idea gets learned in your nervous system a long time before your mind tells you something is off, so you can agree with it and still drop it within the week.
I offered him two things for the guilt. The oxygen mask, and whether putting yours on first is selfish. And the ball of wool, where it is all knotted together and loosens as you pull it apart to make better sense of it all. His answer predicted the next three months.
"I know that's there. But I forget about it."
Then I gave him the word for what was missing. Self-prioritisation.
"That's a foreign concept."
And straight after it, "So how do I do that?" Which is where I said to him, it's about putting as much into you as everything else.
What stops it feeling like theft is being clear about what it is for, and he had that already. "That's not the goal. That's just the tool. The goal is to be able to spend quality time with people that I love, people that mean something to me." The thing that feels selfish is how he gets to the thing that obviously isn't, and he hadn't put those two next to each other before to see that connection.
What changes this is repetition, which is the dull answer and the true one. He understands it already. Understanding it was never what was missing.
Common questions
Why do I struggle to hold myself accountable for my actions?
Because accountability needs the thing to be allowed before it needs a system. Many of the people who ask me this keep commitments to other people all day, and what falls over is the commitment they have privately decided is indulgent. Settle whether you are allowed to do it first.
Do I need an accountability partner, or will an app do?
An app gives you a reminder, and a reminder is not somebody noticing. A participant told me they had tried that already and the notification arrived and got ignored. What they wanted was a person on the phone. Start with the person and let the app do the admin.
What if I already do everything I say and still feel like I am failing?
Then it is a different problem, and worth knowing which of the two you have. A man in one of my groups keeps his routine going regardless of what is happening in his life, the showers, the meditation, the prayers, the gym, the jiu-jitsu, and none of it registers as something he did. His reason: "I just expect myself to follow through on what I do." Doing the thing and getting something back from doing it are two separate skills, and the both are learnable.
How big should the first commitment be?
Small enough that you finish it this week, and uncomfortable enough that finishing it means something. Start under what you think you can manage, because a commitment you stop halfway through adds evidence in the wrong direction.
If this is you
If you've been the person everybody counts on for years, you already know how to keep your word. What comes next is giving that same word to a commitment that is only for you, one that has never had anybody else in on it, where you have been the only person voting on whether it was allowed. Somebody else knowing about it, and asking you about it next week, is what turns it from selfish into regular. And then the people around you get somebody who is into something, rather than somebody getting through another week.
The Reconnected Man and The Reconnected Woman are the group where we have these conversations together.