How to Double Your Results Every Week

My personal development journey has taught me this very clearly: if you want to make ongoing, significant progress, you need to find an accountability partner.

What does an accountability partner do?

The role of an accountability partner is to be the person that you give a report to each week on how well you did for the past week. Ideally this should be a quid-pro-quo relationship, so that you are doing the same for that person. It works best if you have a formal system, such as Darren Hardy’s “Living your best year ever” program, but it can be done by simply stating what you’re going to focus on and plan to achieve for the coming week, and then reporting on the results in the next accountability session.

Here are some guidelines and a recommended process for accountability sessions:

Accountability sessions should be about 30 minutes long, but not longer. (They can be shorter, but you have to make sure it doesn’t turn into a social event, or an excuse session).

Your partner should be someone who will expect the best from you, and help you push yourself beyond your current levels of performance, but will still encourage you when you have a less-than-stellar week.

You don’t have to be face to face. Phone calls work fine. (You don’t even have to be in the same time zone). I have recently started using video conferencing on my computer as my accountability partner lives 50 miles away.

There are three things for each of you to cover:

How did you do at accomplishing your plans over the past week? What things are you going to focus on during the coming week? Share any insights you have as an observer that will help your partner succeed.

As you review those items with each other, an accountability partner should be thinking about how they can help their partner be successful. The biggest way is perhaps to be consistent at the weekly accountability session, but a mid-week text or email to follow up is a good effort booster.

Here’s why accountability partners and accountability sessions make a difference:

For the first two years that I employed this strategy, I worked with a high school friend of mine as my accountability partner. I reached out to him on social media when I learned of this concept and was serious about applying it. He very willingly accepted, and after a couple of face-to-face meetings we set the appointed weekly time to have our weekly accountability phone call. On occasion one or the other of us was not going to be available on a given week for vacation or other scheduling conflicts. If I knew that in advance, guess what? I didn’t push myself as hard during the week, because I knew I wouldn’t have to give account to someone else. When we have to report our results to someone, we expect more of ourselves.

Accountability Partners vs. Mentors

Note that there is a difference between an accountability partner and a mentor. An accountability partner doesn’t have to be someone with particular expertise in an area that you are working to improve in. In that case, you want to seek out and get the support of a mentor.

It’s been said that a mentor can shave decades into days. For those reasons you should seek out mentors to help you in targeted initiatives that you have. If you want to be a world class public speaker, it’s not the job of your accountability partner to help you get there. For that, you find out who is considered the best or near the best at public speaking and find a way to get their help coaching you on a periodic basis.

An accountability partner’s role would be to follow up with you on a weekly basis to see that you are engaging your mentor and doing what they are telling you to do.

Both roles are important and crucial to success, if you want to go beyond your current levels of performance.

When you have an accountability it’s like giving your willpower a shot of adrenaline. When you’re faced with a decision between overeating or skipping your workout, or whatever behavior you are working to establish (or abolish), knowing that you are going to have to report on your results to a live warm body on the other end of a call can have a tremendous impact on your ability to resist or persist as the need calls for.

When it comes to accountability partners, take the advice of Woody in the movie Toy Story, “If you don’t got one, get one!”

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