Your accountability partner may very well your best asset in your quest for success.
Why do we say this? Because a good accountability partner (or accountability buddy, take your pick) holds you true to your word.
They share your struggle and can give you solid input on where you’re at with your goals. They significantly increase your personal accountability and help destroy your bad procrastination habits.
We’ve discussed accountability partners before, and now we’re going to discuss them again. Accountability partners are an incredible help to increase your personal accountability. Thus, they help you tremendously with goal setting and achievement.
Goal setting is absolutely essential to achieve your goals, and an accountability partner becomes the person you never want to let down. Believe us when we say you feel a lot worse if you have to tell someone else that you couldn’t achieve your goals instead of only yourself!
Now, before we start in detail: if you haven’t yet read our article on Goal Setting Theory, you should. We highly recommend it unless you have a lot of experience setting goals and you already have your goals set out. This article is essentially part two of a series on setting goals.
How Accountability Partners Help You Maximize Your Personal Accountability and Destroy Your Goals
The reasoning for developing a relationship with an accountability partner is simple. They will dramatically improve your motivation toward accomplishing your goals.
According to the world-renowned Goal Setting Theory, an important factor of goal setting is that you must have clear feedback on your goals. This is one of the five essential elements of setting proper goals, according to the famous psychologist Edwin Locke.
An accountability partner gives you clear feedback on your goals and thus increases your personal accountability.
So how do you go about finding an accountability partner, and what traits should they have? Let’s discuss.
The Required Traits of an Accountability Partner
When you’re looking for a good accountability partner, they should be the following:
- A go-getter. Someone who is very industrious and goal oriented.
- Ideally, someone in the same field as you or who is trying to accomplish a similar goal. If you’re trying to succeed at a sport, they should ideally be doing the same sport. If you are trying to become a successful blogger, they should be a blogger as well.
- Selfless enough that they legitimately want to see you succeed.
- Someone who cares about their own personal success.
- Somebody who will hold you accountable if you don’t reach your own goals. “Tough love” is the buzz phrase. At the very least, they shouldn’t just brush things off if you weren’t able to accomplish what you set out to do and should offer suggestions for improvement.
- Somebody who is available enough that you can talk to them relatively frequently. This depends on the relationship you two want to develop, but on average, several times a week works best for most people. If you rarely talk to each other, it’s very difficult to for them to help you develop your personal accountability.
- Someone who has seen at least some success with what they’re doing. Don’t become accountability buddies with people who don’t seem like they’re going to go anywhere.
- Someone that you personally get along with. There’s no sense in developing a relationship with someone you don’t click with very well.
You want them to have as many of these traits as possible.
So in short, you just need to find someone who is goal-oriented, available, ideally in the same field, caring about your success, and someone who you get along with well personally.
Other traits of the relationship can be encouraged. For instance, you may have to encourage them to hold you accountable if you fail. Even if they don’t have these at first, traits like this can often be developed over the course of the relationship.
Where to Find Your Accountability Partner
There are two primary ways to find your partner: through your social circle and online. We will discuss both methods.
1) Your Social Circle
Generally, it is best if your accountability partner is already a friend of yours or in your social circle somehow. This is because in most cases, you already know them well and you can make face-to-face contact with them.
Pick a friend who meets the above criteria as much as possible, and who you can talk to as much as you think is necessary. For most people, this will be several times a week.
Some of your friends will not be good accountability partners, and that’s fine. If they don’t have the traits listed above, don’t pick them as a partner. Some friends are simply better for hanging out with than trying to help you increase your personal accountability.
So pick your company wisely. As they say, you’re the average of the five people you hang out with the most!
If you can’t figure out anyone who can do this in your social circle, you can look online instead.
2) Online
You can absolutely find an accountability partner online.
This is doable when you are achieving goals that can be measured and shared either online or on the phone. Since your partner is probably not going to meet you in person, it is crucially important that you are open and honest with them.
You can start your search by publicly posting on Facebook, Twitter, or a message board on a site about your interest (such as blogging, bodybuilding, overcoming stress, etc).
State that you’re looking for an accountability partner, and state what your criteria are. Mention your goals and why you want a partner to help achieve them. In fact, you should link them to this article so they know what you’re looking for.
Depending on how many people are interested, it’s likely that you’ll get a handful of “applicants.” Go through the list of applicants to see what kind of person you think is best to be your accountability buddy. You can even interview them.
Then, figure out how you’re going to contact them. Ideally, you should give them your number and talk to them on the phone to touch base with them.
Most life goals can be shared by someone online. This might be a little worse for certain athletic goals. You may want to share pictures or videos as proof of your accomplishments or talk on video chat through a program such as WhatsApp or Viber.
Overall, finding an accountability buddy online is a great alternative if you have nobody in your social circle willing or able to help you.
The Next Step: Lay Out Your Goals
After you’ve touched base with your accountability partner and made the criteria clear, you must both lay out your goals.
Go over your goals for the time period. We generally encourage monthly goals as a good start. They can be broken down into weekly goals as well.
Then listen to their goals. Provide input on how they can best achieve their goals based on your own experience. Encourage them to set challenging, measurable, and attainable goals, and help them as much as needed.
If you’re both looking to accomplish a goal in the same field, then help them with what you know about the subject. In most cases, the closer you two work together, the better.
The most important thing is that by the end of this, you both have set challenging, attainable, measurable goals and you have a clear idea of what each other’s goals are.
Develop and Maintain Your Relationship
After you’ve laid out your goals with your accountability partner, you have to actively develop and maintain your relationship.
Any relationship based on personal accountability requires commitment, honesty, and good communication. You must make sure that these elements are a strong part of your relationship.
You must also add value to the relationship. Add whatever knowledge you can to what they’re doing.
It doesn’t matter if the knowledge is related to the subject you’re setting goals on, or if it’s related to motivation and goal setting, or something else. Just make sure you’re legitimately adding value. You should be able to clearly state what they are getting out of the relationship.
A good accountability partner will discuss your goals with you at the end of the goal period. You should always have this conversation! At the end of your goal period, you should discuss:
- What goals you achieved.
- Which goals you haven’t achieved, if any.
- What you learned from the process.
- How you could do better in the future, and possibly set even more challenging goals.
- What goals you plan on setting for the next period.
- Anything else the accountability partner wants to discuss about their own goals.
If you do this, you and your accountability partner will have an excellent relationship.
As a final note, we will say this: if something isn’t working out, such as your accountability partner just isn’t responsive or helpful, then politely end the relationship and look for someone else.
There’s absolutely no shame in this. You want to make sure you’re spending your time and energy on the right people.
But if not, feel free to enjoy the relationship and continue to achieve your wildest dreams!
Conclusion
Seriously, everyone, we cannot say enough about the importance of accountability partners. As we’ve said plenty of times, they dramatically enhance your personal accountability and help you achieve your goals.
So get out there and find your accountability buddy. Let this article be your guide. Be sure to bookmark it and refer to it as many times as necessary. And if you think you know someone who you should send it to, make sure you share it with them!
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