What is an Accountability Partner?
Accountability Partners are great for keeping you on track, but what exactly should they be doing?
When working on your goals, staying accountable is vital for overriding the peaks and troughs of motivation. An accountability partner can help you make consistent progress towards your goals.
Some days you feel full of energy and you can ride that wave of motivation and accomplish anything. On other days, you need to rely on something else to get you through the day successfully.
Here’s where accountability helps.
In the Practising Productivity Planner, we discuss several ways you can stay accountable to yourself - this is called intrinsic accountability. You can sign a contract with yourself, display your goals somewhere prominent, and reflect regularly.
However, intrinsic accountability is only one side of the coin. Extrinsic accountability is also a powerful ally. You might get a friend to witness you sign your goal achievement contract. You might sign up for a commitment platform like StickK that financially penalises you for not hitting your goals.
Or you might decide to get an accountability partner, coach, or mentor.
Accountability partnerships are highly effective ways of keeping yourself on track to achieving your goals. They are so effective because by involving an accountability partner in your process, you're introducing an active human element into your goal-setting practise. This builds extrinsic accountability in a way that you just can't do with financial penalties, or the passivity of a witness to your contract.
So what does an accountability partner do?
And why are accountability partnerships so effective?
Simply put, an accountability partner is someone who will hold you accountable to achieving your goals. But there is much more to accountability partnerships than that.
An accountability partner is an active participant on your journey to achieving your goals. An accountability partner has many duties, including:
Regularly checking in with you and your progress
Helping to keep you on track when you get distracted
Helping you to identify challenges and ways to overcome them
Celebrating successes, and helping you to learn from failures
Remind you of your commitments and important deadlines
Most importantly though, an accountability partner is another person to whom you are accountable for achieving your goals - however else they support you, when you commit to achieving your goals, you also make this commitment to your accountability partner. This builds a huge amount of extrinsic motivation. Nobody likes to let down a friend or someone they respect, especially one they see every week!
How often should I speak with my accountability partner?
Depending on your relationship with your accountability partner, you will stay in touch more or less often. Some people do best with a small text check-in every day, whilst other people need less frequent contact - a meeting every week can be enough to correct course.
But really, when we look at this, there are two dimensions here:
The intensity/duration of the contact - is it a text checking, or a face-to-face meeting?
The frequency of the contact - do you get in touch daily, weekly, monthly?
Accountability partnerships are most effective with multiple levels of contact at different frequencies.
For example, you might have a text or email check-in every few days, or a short, ad-hoc video call if you're facing a specific challenge.
You can then supplement this with a longer review every week - a 15 minute video call is usually sufficient to review the week and set a plan for the next.
Finally, you can set aside 45-60 minutes for a more in-depth review every month in order to look at specific patterns you've noticed and make a detailed plan for the coming month.
Every person has different needs, and it might take some time to find a cadence and level of contact that helps you the most. So experiment with different approaches - you might find that you get a lot from daily check-ins, or that it's the weekly in-depth calls that really motivate you.
Congratulations, you can now start looking for your own accountability partner! Check back for more information on how to find the right accountability partner, or you can try Accountability Coaching with Practising Productivity for free.
Get in touch to book your discovery call and learn how accountability coaching can help you to achieve your goals.