Accountability and getting back on track

Day 20

I was listening to Leo Babauta’s “Zen Habits Podcast” earlier today and the today’s card comes directly from the title of that episode. That, along with the other podcast on burnout, was practically perfectly timed.

Accountability and getting back on track

I really liked how Leo talked about the word accountability because it was a reminder of the root of the word - to account. That is that we simply are tracking to understand if something happened or not, to keep a record of if an event happened that we were responsible for in some way. It is divorced from how we feel about it, but we often jump to that when it comes to having accounting.

We are human, we are fallible, we are going to get off track from time to time with regard to our goals and what we’re trying to accomplish. As I talked about on one of the previous cards this past week, this is hard, this is work, and at some point we will probably not get it done in one way or another.

That is going to happen and that is ok…

Read that line again and make sure you steel that into your mind. It is inevitable and we need to be ok with that happening.

It’s what happens next that truly matters.

It’s how we respond to the misses, it how we react to the getting off track that truly matters.

In some personal examples: I had trouble quitting smoking in the past, and early on, I failed and responded poorly because I didn’t pick myself back up and get to quitting for another 7 years. I’ve had issues with losing weight and staying disciplined about taking the steps necessary to get to my target weight, and stopped working out and tracking my calories, which means I am still not there.

In each case, it’s about what happened after the failure happened. After I had the first gateway cigarette back into smoking, I didn’t cut that shit off right there. After I had a few bad days of tracking and not working out, I didn’t up my resolve and double back down.

So when the failure happens, and it will (re-read the line again if you need to) it’s about how we react and respond to that failure, and the actions we take next to pick ourselves back up and get headed back in the right direction that matter.