Get an accountability partner

- So you set your goals, but the truth is it's hard to achieve them on your own. Willpower only goes so far. You need to enlist external mechanisms to help you succeed, and one of the best is identifying an accountability partner. This is someone who you check in with regularly in order to ensure you stay on track. In many cases, though not all, you'll have a reciprocal relationship where you hold them accountable for meeting their goals as well. This is powerful for a couple of reasons. First, there's comradery. It's just more fun to accomplish your goals if friends are supporting you along the way. Second, there's social pressure. It's a lot more embarrassing to admit to someone else that you didn't write that blog post or practice your Spanish exercises. And third, the regular check-ins draw attention to your goal itself. Over time as your excitement about your new ambition fades, it's easy to start slacking off, and eventually, you might even forget to do it, but having a reminder on your calendar forces you to remember and take action. So the first step is, of course, finding an accountability partner. One easy way to identify candidates is simply to start talking about your goals, whether you're out with friends or at a casual gathering with colleagues. If you say I'd like to start running 10 miles a week or I've decided to learn Mandarin, you're likely to find colleagues who say, I want to do that too or tell you about their own goals. Any person who you like and is genuinely excited to talk about goals is probably a good possible candidate. Their goal doesn't have to be the same as yours. When you check in, you can report about your running progress while your colleague can tell you about how many hours she practiced her foreign language skills. Next, experiment with a frequency and method of your check-ins. Some of my students have created a writing support group, and every single day, they share online how many words they wrote that day. That's one great way to do it. Others may prefer less frequency, such as weekly or biweekly, and online forums can be fantastic if you and your accountability partner are geographically dispersed, but if you're in the same town or work for the same company, you might prefer an in-person debrief. Test it out, see what works best for you. Finally, if you really want to lock yourself into good behavior, at least as you're defining it with your goals, you might consider making your boss your accountability partner. What I mean is that depending on your goal, you might actually suggest writing it into the performance metrics for your job, so that if you don't do it, your performance evaluation will suffer. That's obviously less relevant for some goals like working out more often. But if you're on track to run the Asia office, you might really need to learn Mandarin, and one way to force yourself to do it is to make it an official part of your job. Obviously, that's a high stakes move, but sometimes the best way to achieve your goals is by forcing yourself to do something. Accomplishing meaningful goals can be time-consuming, arduous and frustrating. That's why it often works a lot better if you have an accountability partner on your side.