How To Become a Pro in Self-Accountability and a Successful Business Owner

Learn how to become a pro in self-accountability and achieve any goal you set for yourself. 

In her book, I Am Enough, Marisa Peer talks about how there is no shortcut to goal setting and accountability, but there is a guarantee. Marisa explains:

“I always get asked: ‘What makes a successful business owner stick to their goals?’ The answer is that there is no single shortcut.”

We live in a culture that’s obsessed with life hacks and quick fixes, but when it comes to the path to success, there really isn’t one outward trick. However, in place of that, there is a kind of guarantee: if you show up to something each and every day, you’re guaranteed to get closer to it. If you don’t, you won’t.

Marisa has worked with a lot of Olympic athletes and they always serve as a good role model for this. Viewers at home see the moments of glory as they compete and win medals. The athletes, meanwhile, see the years of pain and sacrifice it took to get there. As Olympic swimmer Matt Biondi is quoted as saying, “Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement.” The same is true for your business.

A great example of the power of consistency is what usually happens around Christmas and the holidays. We can enter the month with a solid workout or health routine and say, “I’m just going to take four days off.” And then, all of a sudden, it’s mid-January and we haven’t been to the gym in three weeks.

If you allow yourself to remove the guarantee of “showing up,” the habit very often falls apart and ceases to be important to you. But when you take action every day—even if it means just going for a brisk walk or doing some stretches for example—you continue to move closer to it with ease. Once again, there is no shortcut, but there is a guarantee: show up and you’ll see results. For example, every day, say to yourself over your morning coffee that you’ll spend 30 minutes responding to Facebook friend requests and comments.

As You Move Closer to Your Goal, Your Goal Will Begin Moving Closer to You

Doing one thing every day, without fail, in service of who or what you want to be is a guaranteed way to improve the reflection you see of yourself. Once you do that, everything improves, as you begin to believe in yourself and your own capabilities—and it then becomes far easier to move towards everything in life that you want.

It’s Not “too Good to Be True”

“Can just five or ten minutes a day doing something really make me successful?” I can hear your doubts from here. The answer is yes, it can.

It’s not too good to be true because the effect of this practice multiplies across your life, business, and, more importantly, your attitude towards your life. When you feel better about yourself, you start to conduct yourself with the air of someone who is successful, which in turn makes you successful.

It doesn’t matter how big or small the daily action is, what matters is that you’re beginning to act like a winner.

Self-accountability: Make Your Mind Accountable

You should really begin to think of your mind as a goal-seeking laser. Just as it listens to the words and pictures you tell yourself to inform how it thinks, it also loves to have concrete goals to work towards. The more specific you can make these, the better. So, it’s not, “I want to be successful,” but rather, “By next year, I want to have quit my 9-to-5 and be practicing therapy full-time,” or, “I want to have gained 10 new clients by February,” or, “I want to commit to speaking at two corporate events this year.”

You may think, “Well, I’m not the kind of person who can stick to anything; I always give up,” but that’s just a story you’re telling yourself.

What Stories Are You Telling Yourself And How Do You Show Up?

If you go to the finish line of any marathon and ask the runners if they’ve always loved running, a stunning number of them will insist, “NO!” They went from couch potatoes to marathon runners because they began to form a habit of action that they showed up for.

They changed their minds about who they are and what they want to achieve—and you can do the same. It just requires being specific and relentlessly showing up.

Start Small

When you are first getting started in establishing this habit of action, you should think carefully about what the one thing you’re going to start with might be.

It doesn’t have to be an extreme commitment. Too often, you see people take on overly-ambitious goals and set themselves up for failure. Just as with a client who wanted to get fit and lose weight, you wouldn’t instruct them to start running 10K every morning; you would tell him to simply walk around his neighborhood every day. Once they did that, the motivation to do more begins to appear. One of Marisa’s favorite sayings, because it’s so true, is…

 

“Movement Manifests Motivation.”

This is all about choosing to commit to something that is going to make you feel like a winner and move you towards your goals.

In the best-case scenario, you should choose to do something every day that takes you closer to your goal, be it writing, meditating, exercising, or working on your business plan.

 

Accountability Mechanisms

Another way to set yourself up for success with your new habit is to have an accountability mechanism. This can really help people stick to a goal.

Tell your family or partners (so long as they’re supportive of you) about your new goal and ask them to encourage you. Utilize the Practitioner Marketing community where there are like-minded people who share the goal of becoming successful business owners. All of these will increase your chances of sticking to your new goal.

Whether it’s a career goal specific to your business or a self-care goal that will help you with your business mindset, pick one thing you’re going to commit to doing every day for the next few months.

Believe in it and enjoy watching the consistency play out in your life in beautiful and unexpected ways. And remember, as Marisa always says, “What you want wants you. What you are moving towards is moving towards you. You just have to take the first step.”

 

Make Time—book Out Your Diary As You Would For Anyone Else

Schedule time in your diary to focus on your goal and stick to it. Everyone else schedules your time, so why shouldn’t you?  Prioritise yourself—you are the boss of you, and you have a job to do. As Marisa says:

“The habit of action is so essential: Do one thing each day in the direction of your dreams…”

Once you do that and begin doing one small thing a day, you will see how powerful the practice of habit and repetition really is.

 

Do the Things That Successful People Do and You Will Become Successful Too

When you do the things that very successful people do, you unknowingly become more and more like them. This is very true when it comes to this habit of action. You see, committing to a small task every day in service of your dreams of success makes you feel like a winner.

Once you feel that way, you begin to act differently. You begin to take on the air of a successful person and believe that you are successful. This can have an effect on how other people treat you, how you treat yourself, and what you attract into your life.

If you are interested in adopting the mindset and habits that successful people have, you can download Marisa’s free audio hypnosis.