Remember getting trained in personal hygiene at the age of four? Turning up at the athletics track every day? Recollect the emphasis on task completion in school?
Your boss dangling that deadline over your head? Or your partner holding you answerable to your end of the parenting bargain? These are all examples of accountability coaching.
Take Susie’s example. She has been working successfully with a life coach to break patterns of abuse in her relationships. Still, she finds it particularly difficult to change things at work.
Unable to say “no,” Susie would often find herself working weekends. The absence of a break leaves her sapped of vitality, making her turn to comfort foods, gain weight, and lose her savings.
Susie’s life coach connected her with an accountability coach who helped increase her productivity. This eased her anxiety about the workload, enabling her to say no to working on weekends!
The process of accountability may sound a lot like “Do this. Don’t do that!” But it’s far from it.
Accountability coaches help clients with a range of professional and life issues. They play multiple roles: a supportive friend, a trusted strategist, and an ace Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) trainer to blast through old patterns and help clients stay focused.
In essence, accountability coaches nurture winning mindsets and habits.
They help people thrive under pressure, retaining the good stress or Eustress – key to overcoming obstacles – and removing the bad stress or Distress that debilitates functioning.
An accountability coach unleashes the full potential of clients who could be top performers in one area, such as an entrepreneur, but need counsel and assistance keeping it all together.
They give a different, external perspective to a problem, unleashing possibilities of new solutions.
Accountability coaches help clients with a range of professional and life issues. They play multiple roles: a supportive friend, a trusted strategist, and an ace Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) trainer to blast through old patterns and help clients stay focused.
Accountability coaches also work as secondary coaches with business and life coaches as a tag team.
In such scenarios, while the primary coach will be strategizing to address problems, the accountability coach will focus on implementation to ensure that the job gets done.
The primary coach will answer “what,” while the accountability coach will answer “how.”
Organizing tasks in order of importance towards a goal and staying focused on completing the most high-stakes jobs is the most significant advantage of having an accountability coach.
For a high-performer or anyone who’s doubling down to build their lives and businesses, focusing all their energy on what’s at stake over what’s at hand or interesting is key to ensuring that all that needs to be done gets done and on time.
Highly motivated people are often juggling a lot of projects. Unfortunately, they also tend to have the Shiny Toy Syndrome.
So, staying focused becomes a problem. They can tend to redirect all their energy into a new project, often neglecting their long-term goals or striking off a few things that should’ve been done.
But success only comes with being able to work through your priorities! Clients create to-do lists for a reason. Striking off projects to chase new dreams without taking stock can cost heavily.
An accountability coach keeps clients focused, ensures they’re on track, doing the right thing at the right time based on goals, and not frittering energy away.
Accountability coaches are distraction-beaters and direction-keepers.
Accountability coaching is about working together with the client. Not follow suit, or lead the way, but work together!
It’s a partnership and no partnership can ever succeed without mutual respect. It is based on sharing experience and knowledge to create and implement solutions.
It’s a no-holds-barred “giving experience” to achieve a common goal – the clients’!
Now, if you’re helping somebody, would you ill-treat them or encourage them? The misunderstanding about an accountability coach being “scary” is more a societal projection than reality.
Now, if you’re helping somebody, would you ill-treat them or encourage them? The misunderstanding about an accountability coach being “scary” is more a societal projection than reality.