Taking Accountability as en Entrepreneur, Business Owner, and Leader
Posted on May 05, 2019 by Don Markland, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
Every leader, entrepreneur, and business owner has to better understand accountability. It starts with your mindset and how you attack it every day.
There is a misconception regarding accountability. Somewhere along the way, individuals, leaders, entrepreneurs, and sales leaders got the idea that accountability was negative. Perhaps it was because it made us feel uncomfortable, and that change is hard, but accountability is always positive; it is purely dependent upon your mindset. As I’ve written about with the 4Cs of Accountability, our ability to understand and improve our own accountability, is the single best determining factor of our success.
The Accountability Mirror
Consider for a moment one of the most common items in your home: the bathroom mirror. According to one study by the Huffington Post, people look into the mirror on average 8-10 times per day. For many, it is how we start every morning, i.e. while brushing our teeth we often stare into the mirror. It’s here that I want to provide insight into an underutilized tool that I believe we can all use as an entrepreneur, leader, and sales person to accomplish your daily, weekly, and long-term goals and push ourselves out of our performance ruts and become better.
Task 1: Post Your Goals on Your Bathroom Mirror
In Napoleon Hill’s seminal classic book, Think and Grow Rich, he pushes the concept of daily repetition that instills personal belief. It is through this daily repetition that you begin to shift your mindset, and then in turn your behaviors, towards your goals.
Your Assignment: Taking advantage of Napoleon’s genius, take your monster goals, write them on a simple Post It™ note, and stick them to your bathroom mirror. Put them where you can see them every single day.
Gretchen Schmelzer brilliantly recaps on her blog the three ways in which we learn: Urgency (the need to act now), Repetition (daily practice or ritual), or Association (emotional connection). The Accountability Mirror hits all three.
• It drives urgency every day through your daily tactical action plan
• It repeats daily
• It has association through your short and long-term goals
Task 2: Look into your Eyes to get Real Commitment
Making eye contact with yourself is akin to keeping your eye on the ball. According to Psychology Today, they cite studies where eye-to-eye contact is essential for focus. Further, they suggest that making strong eye contact helps people drive intensity and purpose, similar to how athletes focus on a target.
Your Assignment: Just as you would with a stranger at a networking event, look into your eyes, focus on yourself and your goals every morning for two solid minutes.
Author David Goggins recent bestseller book, Can’t Hurt Me, refers his own version of “The Accountability Mirror” which helped inspire him to completing a 100 mile ulta-marathon in 24 hours as well as setting the World-Record for pullups in 24 hours.
As Goggins said in his book, “You can never avoid suffering. But self-fulfillment through achievement is essential to happiness.”
Task 3: Change the Internal Dialogue
Carol Dweck suggested that having a growth mindset is much more than effort. Having an Accountability Mirror allows you to start changing your mindset every day.
Remember how one defines the word mindset: “a set of assumptions or methods” which are so powerful to you that they force you “to adopt certain behaviors, choices, or actions” in your life.
Plain and simple: one cannot or will not change their life until they change their mindset. And to change your mindset, you’ve got to change your internal dialogue.
Michael Cenovich said, “If you talked to your friends like you talk to yourself, you wouldn’t have any friends.”
I’m sure If you recorded yourself how you talk to yourself, many of you would be locked up for personal abuse. Your internal dialogue, also referred to as to as self-talk, refers to the conversation we have with ourselves about ourselves.
For years, I struggled with self-talk. When I would make mistakes I would say to myself, “You always seem to mess things up” or “You never get this right.” This negative thinking reinforced an unconscious belief that I was completely incompetent. It was utterly harmful, destructive, and didn’t help me achieve my long-term goals. Further, it didn’t help me feel any better. In fact, I felt lousy.
My self-talk was crushing me. I realized I needed to change how I spoke to myself to really change.
Because I make mistakes constantly, I learned my mistakes are not a reflection of my character but a reminder that I am normal. Each mistake gives me an opportunity to improve and grow. Better self-talk changes my internal perspective and enhances the way I work with other people.
Further, it changed how I look into my Accountability Mirror at who I saw; I started to like and appreciate who I really was.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” William Dyer
I remember as I used to struggle with negative self-talk, I would say be flooded with questions like:
• Why does this always happen to me?
• Why is it I always suck
• Why am I always so fat?
• Why don’t I have any money?
Author Tony Robbins says, if you want to change your life, ask better questions.
Your Assignment, to help you achieve your goals, and really drive success, change the questions in your head while you look into the mirror. Try these:
• How can I become happier right now?
• What can I do today that will bring me closer to my first goal?
• What can I do today that will be a healthy choice?
• What can I do today the helps me earn money?
• How can I help something else today?
To really change, it’s not about a new app, or a something you are waiting to download. It really is as simple as looking in the mirror. You can start today, post your goals, start to change your mindset, and get started.
