The importance of accountability
Updated: Sep 6, 2022
Why is accountability so important when it comes to improving your health?
In our recent blog we talked about the benefit of breaking down big goals into incremental steps to maintain motivation, focus and energy. We also briefly mentioned accountability which we'd like to explore further in this blog.
Often, when we set ourselves personal goals the only person we are accountable to is ourselves. This can have varying degrees of success for different people. For example, lots of us join the gym with the ambition of making full use of our monthly membership by attending several times a week. We join with all good intentions but then your day doesn't go quite as you planned, work was super busy, time got away with you, and well, perhaps you could just go tomorrow instead? Sound familiar?
This is reason that people often switch from a gym membership to working with a personal trainer – because it makes them accountable to showing up. It's in the diary and someone is expecting you to attend. And once you're there, it even makes you work harder during your session.
There are also some tactics you can use to help you to become more accountable to yourself if you don't have the resources to access the support of a professional third-party. Such as, setting a fixed time to going to the gym, going first thing in the morning before interruptions to your day can happen, or arranging to go with a friend so you're not able to just cancel. In a similar vein to arranging to go with a friend, check out our recent blog about the power of communities to understand how surrounding yourself with people working toward a similar goal can also help you.
Working with a health coach to improve your accountability to health and wellness goals is like working with a PT to achieve fitness goals. You can work with a health coach on a range of health and wellness goals. They can support you to:
set boundaries
set achievable steps towards your goal
be accountable
be consistent
reach your goals
Working with a health coach helps you to create the new habits to move you from where you are now to where you want to be. As I always say - you know what it is you need - a coach and accountability partner helps you remember, listen and create steps towards achieving it.