Goal Accountability: The Key to Accomplishing

Goal accountability is the hardest part when it comes to achieving goals. You heard me right: being accountable to your goals involved more heavy-lifting than actually achieving goals.

Goal accountability includes all the tasks that you really really don’t want to do in order to reach your end goal.

It’s waking up an hour earlier to hit the gym when all you want to do is sleep in – for more than just a week! A summer beach body doesn’t come from one week – or even one month – of effort. The only thing that will get you beach ready is goal accountability.

How You Can Create Goal Accountability:

1. Find a Partner:

One of the best ways to be accountable to anything is to have someone to keep you on the right track. Accountability partners are great because you get to help each other complete goals. In fact, according to The American Society of Training and Development, you have a 65% greater chance of completing a goal if you commit to someone.

To stay on the right track with your accountability partner, make sure you schedule reoccurring meetings where you touch base and manage each other’s progress. This will increase your likelihood of achieving a goal by 95%. Goal accountability partners are such a great tool that we use the practice in our training and in our very own internal work at CFS.

2. Track Your Progress:

This is especially important for long term goals. It’s extremely easy to get caught up in the granular details to the point where you forget about the big picture. You can track your progress in your Sales PlayBook, in your CRM, or in your own, personal accountability journal.

3. Be Willing to Change:

You’ve heard us say it before: willingness to change is a crucial part of success. You need to know when to change a process if something isn’t working. After tracking your progress, maybe you’ve come to realize that you aren’t as far along towards your goal as you thought you would be. Analyze what isn’t working and tweak it.

4. Be Honest with Yourself:

The easiest part about goal setting is doing just that: setting them! We can all dream up ideas of where we want ourselves in a year, a month, or even a week! But for goal accountability to be possible, our goals have to be realistic.

Now I’m not saying goals have to be safe and boring. I’m just saying, if you’re planning a trip to Mars, it probably won’t happen in a week. Building a great client book and adding to your pipeline take time. Make sure you’re giving yourself enough of it so you can value quality and not quantity.

5. Don’t Give Up:

Goal accountability means that you are 100% committed to completing the tasks necessary to achieve your goals. Even if you have to completely change the route you take to accomplish your goal, do not give up on it. Giving up sets you back farther than where you started. Not only will you not reach your goal, you just wasted however much time working towards something that will amount to nothing.

It’s harsh but it’s true. Giving up will always have more negatives than positives.

At the end of the day, goal accountability is the biggest chunk of the effort needed to accomplish something. If you had to look at it like an essay, setting the goal is the introduction, accomplishing the goal is the conclusion, and goal accountability is the extensive, research-filled body.

Do you have any ways that you stay accountable to your goals? Let us know in the comments!