accountability Archives - Personal Power to Heal, Lead, Grow, and Live Your Best Life

If you had to write your own eulogy to be read at the end of your long life, what would you want to say?

Would you fill it with work accomplishments? With remembrances of fantastic vacations? With stories of great friends and family? Would it be happy and joyous, or would it be filled with regrets of wasted time and wasted opportunities?

Using an average of 75 years, we have approximately 27,400 days to live our best life. If you consider that a third of that time is reserved for sleeping, you have roughly 18,300 days to create and live your reality.

Do you live life fully? Do you make it a point to be aware of and thankful for each moment? Do you value your time? Or do you waste those precious moments with activities that don’t serve you?

What activities do you regularly waste time on? Watching TV? Playing games on your phone? Staying in a dead-end job that doesn’t fulfill you? What about these time-wasters:

Allowing yourself to become surrounded by negative people who suck the happiness out of the room. Maybe your time would be better served by spending less time with toxic people. When all of that negative energy isn’t taking up space around you, you free up space to let positivity and joy into your life.
Complaining about things you have no control over. Take control of what you can to make your life better, but stop complaining and worrying about those things outside your control. Spinning your wheels won’t move you forward, and won’t improve your life.
Being afraid (or too independent) to ask for help when you need it. If you know help is available but you don’t ask for it, you can create feelings of isolation and aloneness. You slow down your progress. And you deny someone the joy of helping someone else – you!
Chasing success, money, or happiness of the moment, rather than moving toward your ideal life. Do you know what you want? Have you decided what your ideal future looks like? Are you living your life on purpose, or just flowing along someone else’s river? Are you taking active steps to build your perfect future, or wasting precious moments?
Letting someone else dictate how you live your life. Are you living someone else’s dream? Are you taking actions that lead you toward someone else’s dream, or toward your own?

Are you living your best life? Isn’t it time you made it a priority? You – and your family – will be glad you did.

10 Tips to Focus on Success

Courage. Heart. Acumen. Accountability. All incredibly valuable traits, and all necessary for the success mindset.

Whether you want to experience serious changes or you’re looking to fine tune your reality, here are 10 tips to focus on success.

1.Redefine Accountability

Life, and business, will often place us into circumstances that are beyond our control. Your success doesn’t rest in the hands of others. It depends on you taking responsibility for your actions, your plan, and your follow-through. Yes, sometimes you have outside constraints, but in those situations YOU decide what is possible, and what is right for you. Take charge of your circumstances, whatever those may be. And don’t hold yourself to a standard that is impossible to meet. You shouldn’t feel that being true to your goals, and yourself, is impossible. If that feels true for you, it might be time to make some changes in your life. You are human. Cut yourself some slack.

Accountability is your gift to yourself. It is a mindset that you create and accept voluntarily – and it’s a way to help ensure your success.

2. Plan Your Success

You need to actually sit down regularly and work out the strategy you will require to achieve that success. Consider every detail, every step that will lead you to success.

Those plans may need to change from time to time, or be altered to adjust to current realities. Course correction is a necessary part of any journey, and being prepared by reviewing your project often can be a smart strategy to reach your goals.

With every dream, must come a plan. If you desire success, understand that it won’t just happen.

3. Believe in Your Success

If you don’t believe that you can attain success, how will you stay motivated?

Having giant dreams is tremendous, and your dream of success may seem as though it is beyond what you are capable of, but you must believe in the dream. Heart is key for true success.

4. Set Realistic Dreams

The goals of success and working towards a dream must be set in some basis of reality. Ask yourself, is the success truly achievable? Can it be done? This goes beyond believing, it goes to reality. If your dream is to prove that the sky is green and that grass is blue, how realistic is that?

Here’s an excellent example – A person without any education beyond high school has a dream that he can build a multi-million-dollar company. That’s a huge dream, but it’s believable – it’s happened before.

Now, here’s a terrible example – A 95-year-old man who suffers from arthritis and asthma decides to run a marathon tomorrow without his walker – and he hasn’t run in 25 years. That’s an immense dream, but also an impossible one!

5. Be Patient

Instant gratification is rarely an element of real success. Real success takes time, effort, and patience. When a seed is planted in the ground it needs water, sunlight, and the right environment to sprout, flourish, and bear fruit.

Yes, someone wins the lottery every day. But how many people bought a ticket? Winning is a slight possibility, but buying a ticket isn’t really a plan with a high chance of success.

6. Don’t Allow Circumstances to Control You

Life can throw all sorts of circumstances at us. We can sometimes fall victim to being left powerless, believing we don’t have the strength to change our reality without someone swooping in to fix things for us. Taking on the victim mindset leads to blaming the world for all our failures and our current circumstances. It can also lead to people living below their potential.

We look to others for help when we need a hand, but to let our circumstances define us – what we do, or who we are – is to willingly give away our own personal power. And then we are stuck living a life of weakness. Don’t fall into the trap. Take responsibility for your actions (and lack of action). It’s amazing what taking that first step can do for your self-esteem.

7. Ask for and Accept Feedback

Asking for the advice (and criticism) of others is a wonderful way to create and instill accountability. An important aspect of feedback is convincing people that you need honest feedback. Whether you’re asking your friend, significant other, mentor, or a colleague, give them the space to be honest in their opinion.

Anonymous feedback is better, because people are more inclined to be honest when they don’t have to worry about hurting your feelings. You’ll eventually learn what type of feedback is helpful and what you should disregard. No matter what you hear, process it non-judgmentally and decide how best to apply it.

8. Courage

Taking risks requires courage, and courage is needed to achieve success. Be brave, be bold, and reach for success as if your life depended on it.

9. Work for It

Those who achieve success work for it, and they work towards that success every single day. Are you working for your success? Do you focus on taking at least one single action every day no matter what?

You’re certainly not going to succeed by sitting on the couch watching Netflix, so the only way you’re going to succeed is by taking action. Now you have to decide what action to take next.

10. Perfect Your Decision Making Skills

The ability to make quality decisions is key to success. You are the master of your own life and your dreams, and the decisions you make move you toward your goals, successes, and dreams.

Spend some time regularly evaluating your decisions. Are they moving you toward your goal, or away? Maybe you need to make some new decisions. Set yourself up for success.