Accountability is important if you want to succeed in disciplining yourself.

If you’ve ever tried disciplining yourself on your own, you know just incredibly hard it can be. And it’s really no fun. You have no one to share your successes and rewards with, and over time, you may end up eschewing your goals altogether because you had no one to push you or cheer you on to continue working on your goals. So you just up and quit.

Accountability is important if you want to succeed in disciplining yourself. It comes in two forms: self-accountability and accountability to others.

The first key: self-accountability

Self-accountability is pretty self-explanatory and works great when you have a strong sense of ethics, integrity and self-control. You wont cheat on yourself and you’ll keep yourself pushing forward and upward.

To make yourself accountable to yourself, you’d need to start off by writing down your goals and what steps you need to take to get there. Then you need to start a daily journal where you write down all the things you’ve done for the day.

If you have had doubts about your abilities, if you’ve questions about your sanity or your fears, write it down. And then make sure you write the answers to your negative thoughts so that when you ask the same question again in a month or so, you’ll have the answer to look back on and you should be able to appease your doubts.

As you can see, this method is quite lonely and can get boring which is why I suggest the second method, accountability to others.

The second key: being accountable to others

Accountability to others is simply letting other people in on your goals and asking them to help you reach them. Depending on your arrangement, you can ask your accountability buddy to give you a good talking to if you ever get tempted to do something that’s detrimental to your success. So choose your buddy wisely.

Pick someone you know has the discipline to actually help you out and would probably have a vested interest in your success. A spouse, parent, sibling, best friend or even your psychologist can be your accountability buddy. Someone you look up to, someone you would like to impress and someone you’d hate very much to disappoint.

Being accountable to yourself and to somebody will change your perspective about reaching your goals. You’d be more conscious of every step you take and you’d have the discipline to actually stick to the path you’ve chosen to follow.