This is the final post in a series of guest articles on accountability by Robert Gowland. In addition to the tips and techniques given by Robert in these posts you might want to consider these accountability questions.

You’ve got your team. You’ve got your plan. You’re ready to start making change. However, to make the most of the effort you’re about to expend, you need to add one more thing.

Planning for the Imperfect Case
For some goals, a yes/no question at the end of the week is sufficient. “Did you call your mom this week?” is a good example; you know for sure whether or not you did that. But some goals are trickier.

For those day-by-day goals, the ones where you want to make a difficult change daily,
a yes/no question at the end of the week (or after two weeks), doesn’t really indicate your success.

Let’s say I’m in my first week of trying to not eat after 8pm, and let’s say I didn’t do very well. That’s OK, it’s a start, and I’m further ahead than if I didn’t start working towards my goal at all. In fact, that’s worth celebrating a bit. Still, at the end of the week, my accountability partner asks me if I stopped eating before 8pm every day. The short answer is “no”. But “no” is misleading. Answering with “I didn’t do very well,” or “I missed most days” isn’t very helpful either.

Tracking Your Progress
The fact is, I succeeded two days. Two out of seven. How do I know it was two out of seven and not one or three out of seven? I wouldn’t unless I was daily keeping a record of my success. Does it matter? Absolutely. Let me explain.

We use a goal tracking spreadsheet to keep track of our daily success. Each row holds one goal, each column holds one day. If succeed at a goal for a day, I put a check in that box. But what will that buy you? Get your tracking spreadsheet.

Let’s say you’ve set your mind to exercise for five minutes after supper each day. On your first week you succeed three times. Good work. At the end of the week you can tell your accountability team that you succeeded three times.

If next week, you succeed four times, that’s progress. If you’ve been tracking your progress, your accountability team can celebrate that with you.

As you keep track, week-by-week, you’ll be able to catch it when you start to slack and you’ll be able see yourself improve with time. If you were not tracking, you would have a somewhat accurate picture of how well you did for the previous week, but you would have, at best, only a fuzzy notion of how well you were doing overall. And if you’re in it for the long haul, that’s what really matters.

If you weren’t tracking, when you got to 5 or 6 times a week, you might say “good enough”, if your accountability asked for a simple “yes” or “no”, but by keeping track you have the leverage you need to get yourself all the way to 7.

That’s not all, though. Tracking gives you an additional advantage.

Identifying Recurring Roadblocks
Let’s keep looking at the “no food after 8pm” goal. Suppose you’re doing pretty well; you succeed about 5 days every week. That is awesome, and you will be moving towards your weight loss outcome. However, 7 out of 7 is your ideal.

By keeping track of which days you succeed and fail, you can see if there is a pattern to your failures. Perhaps you almost never succeed on Thursdays. By keeping track of your success you can observe that pattern and start asking yourself why.

Perhaps you’ve got a meeting in the early evening every Thursday and you don’t have time to eat a full meal before the meeting, so you have a light snack when you get home.

You’ve got two options at this point.

First you can figure out how to make it work. Maybe you need to show up to work a few minutes early and leave a few minutes early on Thursdays so you have time to eat properly. Maybe you need to prepare your Thursday night supper on Wednesday night when you have more time.

Maybe you just need to make up up your mind not to snack after your meeting and go to bed a bit hungry on Thursdays. Be creative! You can plan to beat that area of temptation by telling someone at the meeting about your goal or by brushing your teeth before the meeting so you’re less likely to want to eat afterwards.

Alternatively, you could decide that Thursdays don’t count. Relaxing a goal is a perfectly acceptable course of action. You need to be cautious and check your motivation, but making your goals too demanding at the outset isn’t good for your long-term success. You can always come back and tighten this goal up later if you feel the need to, but you may achieve your weight loss outcome just fine with only six out seven days a week.

If you take this route, just block off Thursdays for the “no food after 8pm” goal on your spread sheet, and neither mark it as success or failure.

The Take-Away
In short, if you cannot measure and track a goal, you cannot expect to achieve it.

However, if you do have accountability, you do have a clear plan and you are tracking your success, you have set yourself up to achieve your goals and produce your desired outcomes. The results are still up to you, but you’ve built a strong foundation on which to move forward.

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This is the third in a series of guest posts on accountability by Robert Gowland. In addition to the tips and techniques given by Robert in these posts you might want to consider these accountability questions.

Having someone in your corner is foundational to making change, but you will need concrete steps to move from where you are to where you want to be. That’s where 95% of New Year’s resolutions break down.

Moving from Outcomes to Actions
When I think of goals, I often confuse actions with outcomes. For example, if I say I want to lose weight, that’s an outcome. The problem with outcomes is that you can’t simply make them happen; they are the result of following a process.

That’s why outcomes make horrible goals.

If I tell my accountability team that I’m going to lose weight, and then just hop on the scale each week before group, hoping that the needle is going to rise just a little less high than last week, what would happen? My weight would keep doing what it had been doing every week before: slowly rising. My group would say, “That’s alright, Rob. Keep trying,” but next week would be more of the same. It would not be long before I gave up, even with the encouragement of my team.

Losing weight is a good desire for me, since I am overweight, but it is not an action I can take, it is an outcome that is achieved through a series of other goals: increasing exercise, lowering the intake of calories, and getting enough sleep.

It is only when I am performing those actions that the outcome of losing weight begins to occur. Being held accountable for outcomes achieves nothing but frustration; being held accountable for actions brings those outcomes into reality.

Clarity
So let’s say instead of being kept accountable for losing weight, I asked my group to keep me accountable to exercise more, eat less, and sleep more. What would happen? Nothing. And here’s why: those are weak questions.

When I would be asked, “Did you exercise more this week?”, how would I know? I’d think to myself “Well, I walked to work that once, and took the stairs after lunch on Wednesday…” and respond “Yeah, I exercised more!”. Then I’d get a pat on the back and everyone would leave happy. Then next week when asked again, I’d think “Hmmm, I didn’t walk to work this week, but I took the stairs twice, that’s something” and respond in the affirmative. The question lacks teeth, it lacks specifics.

To start moving towards your goals, you will need to turn your goals into concrete, measurable actions. “Sleep more” becomes, “Be in bed by 10:30 every night”. “Exercise more” becomes “Walk to work”, “Ride my stationary bike for 30 minutes once a week”, and “Do 25 sit-ups 3 times a week”. “Eat less” becomes “Dessert only once a week” and “No food after 8pm”.

When I am asked if I rode my stationary bike for 30 minutes in the last week, I immediately know whether or not I did that. There is no grey area. When I am asked if I went to bed every night by 10:30, there are no maybe’s; I either did or I didn’t.

Driven vs. Scraping By
Specific questions push you to succeed. I found that even though I may fail to be in bed at 10:30, the act of trying to get to be by 10:30 meant that even when I slipped, I was still in bed by 10:45 most nights. While that’s not the goal, that’s 15 to 45 minutes earlier than I had been going to bed, and that’s a win regardless.

A weak goal like, “get more sleep” would not have that same effect. Even if I succeed at that goal, “Get more sleep” would result in me maybe going to bed 5 or 10 minutes earlier just so I can tell my group that I did it. That’s better than nothing, but clearly, a “win” with the weak goal doesn’t take me as far as a “failure” with the clear goal.

Something Missing
Understanding the difference between actions and outcomes was groundbreaking for me, but there was still something missing.

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