Rocket booster friends, as Lisa Nichols calls them, who I love by the way, and if you get a chance look up Lisa Nichols if you’re not familiar with her. Also, accountability partners. That’s a word I use in my coaching and just in my daily life. What’s the importance of having these people in your life? Well, accountability partners are those people that are going to keep you on the path. They’re the people that are going to give you encouragement on your journey to becoming the author of your own story.
Remember, this is a journey. It’s not like you just get there and that’s it and you throw your hands up. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a journey and these are people that encourage you along the way. These are also the people that give you a swift kick in the butt if you’re falling off, or if you go into the excuse train, right? You go into those excuses of why you’re not doing things. “Oh well, I’m not doing the actions at the end of these daily growth hacks, because of what?” We all have time to do them. That’s when an accountability partner really comes in handy. I have an accountability partner and my accountability partner is one of the world’s highest level coaches. He and I actually coach each other. The way it works is Tuesday I coach him and Thursday he coaches me.
When I say, “Coaching,” we’re real, although we are coaching, we’re also being accountability partners with each other. It works differently for both of us, but I’ll walk you through kind of the process that I go through and maybe that can help you with your accountability partner. Before I do that, let’s talk about who you should pick. Now, if you don’t have an accountability partner now, first step is you need to get one. It’s not a should, want, you just need it. I think it is one of the most important things on your journey and your path of continuous growth is to have these people in your corner. Now, almost every daily growth hack I talk to you about building your tribe and I talk about it for a variety of ways, or reasons, excuse me, but one of the most important ones is the more people you have around you that are having conversations like you and I are having right now, the faster it is that you’re going to get to your goals and it up levels you, right?
What’s that saying? A rising tide raises all ships. The people around you, as they continue to grow, so will you. It lifts the level of conversations you’re going to be having. It also keeps you on that path. Now, out of those people you want to pick somebody who is, what I would recommend, is someone who’s equally as motivated, if not one level above you. This is the same theory we always talked about in fitness about having a workout partner, right? Do you want that workout partner who is more dedicated than you, right? Who’s not going to allow you to sleep in for your workouts or miss that set, or go, “Hey? Yeah, my arm’s a little tired. Let’s go out to the pub.” You don’t want that person. You want the person that’s like, “No, we said we’re doing five sets of five and we’re doing them and we’re going heavy.” That’s the person you want as your accountability partner too.
You also want somebody that you feel very comfortable being vulnerable with. An accountability partner is someone you should be able to not only share your wins but also your losses, right? Because it happens. We’re all human. I don’t care who you are, things happen, right? Things happen where maybe you’re not going as fast as you want to, or you take the wrong path, or you say or do the wrong things, and you don’t want judgment around that. You want someone who’s going to encourage you and gently remind you of why you’re doing what you do. See, my journey, my path should be and is totally different than yours. We may have some things that are similar. Maybe you want a mobile lifestyle that allows you to control your businesses while traveling around the world like I do, or maybe you want a great relationship, like I happen to have with my wife, but our goals are different and probably our reasons why are different because our backgrounds are different.
With that said, you want to choose an accountability partner you feel extremely comfortable with. Now, this doesn’t have to be somebody you know extremely well, right? When I started with my coach, we didn’t really know each other that well. We knew about each other, had kind of talked back and forth, and it evolved into this relationship that we have today. With that said, you want to find somebody who is extremely motivated. Someone who’s going to show up on time, every time with you. You don’t want the person that’s going to be five minutes late, one minute late to a call because that’s just disrespectful. I mean, it happens every once in a while, but you want somebody who’s going to be on time, and is in your corner, and fully supports you, and you want to be able to fully support them.
Now, your accountability partner, usually there’s some reciprocity there, right? You are accountability partners with each other. There are times when you can get, or usually hire an accountability partner, whether it be a life coach of sorts, or there are actual programs out there that you can just hire someone to keep you accountable, and that’s great. That’s a one-way street and that’s where you’re doing a transaction. You’re giving them money in exchange for them keeping you accountable. That’s fine too. I find the emotional exchange to be much more valuable than the monetary exchange. That’s just from my personal experience. This person’s going to keep you accountable and it’s somebody that you’re going to want to meet with at least on a weekly basis. Now, I know a lot of people that are very successful that have had the same accountability partner groups for decades and they meet everyday.
They can get on the phone at like 5:00 in the morning and meet every day and just say, “Hey, how’s it going? Checking in. Where are you?” Boom, boom. They have a whole system. Now for me, it’s about the five to thrive, of course. I talk about that every time. If you’re new to Author of Your Own Story and to the daily growth hacks, we talk about the five to thrive. Specifically, that’s your mind, your body, your soul, your relationships, and your business. In my experience of doing this for over 20 years, it’s a holistic paradigm looking at every aspect of the existence of the human, right? Obviously, we lump things into together the best we can. What happens is, we get on and for the first five minutes it’s just kind of shooting the bullshit, right? We go back and forth and we’re just kind of catching up, giving some jabs, making fun of each other, as guys do. We’re both very sarcastic guys and so we just talk.
“What’s going on with you?” “I don’t know. What’s going on with you?” Just a quick catch up. Then we go right into it. We talk about what your numbers are. Again, you want to go over to Author of Your Own Story and look at the Seven Days to Becoming the Author of Your Own Story, so you can see the 30 day game. Now, we do a real quick intro to the 30 day game and if you’re in the Author of Your Own Story University, you’re going to get a chance to see the 90 day game. That’s actually really what I play with myself and with my high-end clients. It’s a little bit more complicated, but that’s how I set my goals. I set my goals quarterly, so every 90 days I have a goal. Now, I have longterm goals too. These 90 day goals are smaller rocks and components of these two-year goals and visions and longterm visions. With that 90 days, I break them down to those things that I want to do on a weekly basis or a daily basis.
For example, for the body, one of mine is a workout. I want to workout six days a week and four of those I want to do heavy weights. When I get on with my accountability partner, he’s … “Doug, what’re your numbers?” The numbers are kind of like basically you do it or you don’t. If you don’t … If you do it, it’s a great job, keep moving forward. “How’s that feeling? Go in.” We move forward pretty quickly if you’re hitting your numbers. Then if you’re not, then it’s, “Why?” A perfect example is I have a 17-week newborn, so if you’re watching this you can see the bags under my eyes and if you’re listening to this, just imagine. I can get really tired. It’s sleep deprivation times 10. My alarm goes off, I’ve been up all night. My wife luckily takes care of our newborn, but I still wake up, so I’m still up.
When my alarm goes off, it goes off at 5:15, you hit the snooze and or actually hit stop and roll over and just feel the warmth of those sheets and I’m just tired. I might cuddle my wife or she might roll over and put her arm around me and I start thinking, “You know what? Hmm? It’s much better for me just to sleep in today, because if you don’t sleep cortisol increases.” I have all these facts. I have almost the disadvantage of doing a lot of scientific research early on in my career in the fitness industry, so I can come up with all these stats of why I shouldn’t wake up and I should get sleep to justify those. In this instance, let’s say I missed that. Usually, if I miss one workout, I miss two. For some reason, I miss the next one too. I sleep in again. That same reasoning keeps continuing regardless.
If I’m getting on with my accountability partner, what he might say is, “Okay. That’s great. You chose to do that, no right or wrong. Does that serve you? Is this serving you to the higher being of who you want to be?” Sometimes that answer’s, “Yes.” Sometimes it’s like, “You know what? I was just exhausted and I needed to sleep.” For me and my quest in my life, fitness is very important, but so is holistic being and if I don’t sleep, certain times, I can’t have that holistic relationship with my wife, my child, my friends, family, etc., and that’s really important to me. There are other times when I’m saying, “No. You know what? I made an excuse up, I just didn’t hit the workout,” and we’ll talk about why, and what are those reasons. We are at the point where we can get vulnerable and deep pretty quickly. I coach a lot of people and so I require them to come deep quickly and I pull it out of them and he does the same.
We have this pull and respect of a relationship. That’s what your accountability partner should have for you. We also check-in with each other, so we’ll ping each other every once in a while. For example, if there’s a big project. For him, he’s launching part of his business and he’s really hoping to grow it and he’s got a lot of little things that need to be put in place to make that happen. For his 90 day vision, for him to get there, there are all these things that need to happen in order for that to occur when he wants it to occur. I might ping him. I might send him a Facebook message. That’s usually what I do for him, a quick little ping, “How’s it going? What’s happening?” We actually run it all on the Author of Your Own Story project management, so it’s called … You’ll see that. It’s a project-based camp. Author of Your Own Story University members that are listening to this or watching this, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
It’s a sophisticated software system that monitors all of this and keeps it all on track and reminds them. I might send him a quick message, or put a task on there for him. Just a gentle reminder to make sure he’s on the right path and that’s critical. We’ll have this discussion and during this time, right? Knowing your numbers from the five to thrive could only take five minutes. Then we go deeper, right? “What’s the next steps? What’s your vision? How are you feeling about your vision? Do you feel aligned? Where is it going?” We can end there, but often times we’ll go a little deeper and we’ll say, “Is there any area, or one area that you’re struggling in the most?” There usually is, right? Sometimes it’s relationships. Sometimes it’s business. There might be something coming up. Then we go back and forth and talk about it and have a discussion.
Really, the other person is almost like a sounding board and by just saying what my problem is in say, my business while talking I might come up with an idea. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, it’s now so clear in talking to you. Thank you so much.” Then we go about our way. Now, we decided to do these an hour, so again, I coach him on Tuesday, he coaches me on Thursday. That’s how we do it right now. We go about an hour. Although, if something’s going big in somebody’s life, we might just go, “You know what? This is all about you. I know it’s supposed to be my day, but I’m doing well and we need to dive deep into you.” That’s really, to me, that’s how accountability partnerships really work. It’s not just a horse trade, it’s really a relationship. You might consider doing the same thing and finding this for your accountability partner.
Now, if you don’t have an accountability partner, go over to the Author of Your Own Story community, right? It’s a Facebook group. It’s a closed group. We’ll get you in if you’re not in there already and we’ll assign you to an accountability partner. Just raise your hand in the group, introduce yourself, and say, “Hey look, I’m looking for an accountability partner,” and we’ll help match you with somebody else in the group. Of course, we don’t really do a lot of investigation on who’s who. We’re just really trying to … It’s like a dating service for accountability partners. We’re just trying to set you up with other people who are on their journey. The great thing about that is there’s some anonymity to that if I could talk, about you don’t really know these people, so you can share your soul. Also, know that these people that are joining the Author of Your Own Story community are people who are dedicated to the journey that you’re on as well.
They’re also going to be vested in their success and into yours. If anything you get out of this, what I’d love for you to do is right now if you don’t have an accountability partner, grab your journal and write out five people. Five people, that you think would be great accountability partners and go big, right? When I wrote mine down originally, I was like, “Hey, Tony Robins,” but I also wrote down my brothers, friends, family, etc. Now, my wife and I are lifetime accountability partners and I wouldn’t go there for what we’re talking about because with accountability, you also want to include intimate relationships and be able to talk about them with somebody else. Although she is my accountability partner, I also want somebody else that I can talk about too, or talk to.
With that, write down five people. These are five people that you think would be fantastic accountability partners. Take this, this video, or audio, or whatever you’re doing, and share it with each of those, all five of them. I had a friend of mine do this to me. He just … He was like, “Hey, listen to this podcast.” It was a podcast from somebody else and it was all talking about having brothers in your life, like men, and having this group of solid men and he shared it with me and I got the hidden message. Really, what he was wanting … Asking, was for me to be on his team with his group of men and they called it, I can’t remember, it was like a war tribe, or it was something around war. All the men things happen to be around war. I reached out to him and we have conversations like this on a regular basis.
That’s exactly what his intention was, but instead of directly asking me, he just shared a podcast with me, which was great. It worked out really well. You can do the same thing, so share this with five people, the five people that you want to be possible accountability partners with. You don’t have to be accountability partners with any of them, but just share it with them and it opens that conversation. If you get anything out of this conversation, is get an accountability partner as soon as possible and get on board. If you need any help, tips, tricks, how to run it different ways, I’ve done it a million ways and I’ve run mastermind groups for years, and years, and years, as well as, coaching people, I’d be happy to help you out the best I can.
We have other amazing coaches in the Author of Your Own Story group that run their own programs, so you don’t have to join the Author of Your Own Story University or anything, just go over to the group. It’s free, it’s free and it’s only there just to supply information, just to help you out. There are no strings attached, so take advantage of it right now. That’s it for me today. Remember, go out and be the author of your own story.
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