Holding Yourself Accountable

At the end of the day, you are responsible for living your life. And while most people can agree to this and jump on board with this concept, there’s an aspect to it that most people don’t like getting behind and prefer to not think about. We’re also responsible for our mistakes.

It’s easy to take accountability when we do things right and succeed. It’s a great feeling to take ownership of your accomplishments, but how many of you can own up to a mistake just as easily? Holding yourself accountable for your mistakes is crucially important in your growth, but can be one of the hardest things we can do.

So why is holding yourself accountable so important? Well for starters, let’s look at it at a more surface level from the outside. How many people do you know will hold others accountable for the mistakes they make and expect them to do something about it, but when that person drops the ball, instead of owning it they always have and excuse for why it’s not their fault, or they blame someone else for it and will gaslight you until the sun comes up. They’ll even point out when other people do the same thing they do, but refuse to admit they’re just as guilty. It’s annoying right?

But even more importantly. The reason you have to hold yourself accountable is because all things will ultimately fall on you. Your boss can only hold you accountable to a point before it’s easier to just replace you. Same with your spouse. If you’re making mistakes, not following through with what you say you’ll do, and just making excuses instead of repairing ruptures, no one will trust you.

How many of you have done business with a company or ordered something and things didn’t work out because of something on their end, and they keep beating around the bush and making excuses for it to be your fault that a product didn’t work despite a defect? Frustrating isn’t it? But when they admit a mistake and fix it or replace it, you respect them more and are more likely to recommend them because they didn’t jerk you around.

What’s even worse is when you don’t hold yourself accountable, then your subconscious won’t trust you either. Why would it if you never follow through? So when you’re making excuses for yourself your subconscious sees this and it embeds the notion within itself that you’re not trustworthy.

But holding yourself accountable will help you build trust with others, but only if followed by actions that help repair ruptures you’ve made. So if you make a mistake, you admit it then follow up with asking questions and learning how you can prevent such mistakes in the future. This could be making sure you know the proper way to process an order at work, or communicating with your partner to find what you could have done differently in the scenario to prevent an issue from becoming an issue again. Then with this information you can move forward knowing what not to do.

This is how you learn. If you’re spending all your time making excuses for when you drop the ball, you never learn. But holding yourself accountable allows you to learn lessons you needed and as a result, you grow as a person. It allows you to be more effective and see things from other people’s perspective and not just your own.

You also need to hold yourself accountable with yourself and not just others. If you want to get in better shape and say you’re going to go to the gym, then you have to go even when you don’t want to. Everyone you know can encourage you to get in shape, but that means nothing if you’re not taking action. You might start your own business, but that business will fail if you’re not doing the work to make or sell products, do marketing campaigns to attract new customers, or figuring out where to cut expenses. You’ll go out of business fast when you only do these things when you “feel like it.”

The man who makes excuses his entire life will never achieve anything great and whatever they do achieve won’t last long. But the person who holds themselves accountable continues to grow in ways they never expect. No one’s perfect, but when you can admit to your mistakes and do what you can to fix them, not only will others respect you more, but you’ll respect yourself.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you all have an enlightening day.