How Accountability Is Key To Self-Discipline

If you’ve ever tried disciplining yourself on your own, you know just incredibly hard it can be. And it’s really no fun. You have no one to share your successes and rewards with, and over time, you may end up eschewing your goals altogether because you had no one to push you or cheer you on to continue working on your goals. So you just up and quit. Homesteading can be like that…. even if you have a partner, children… no one gets as excited as you do when you accomplish something magnificent, not matter how small or large.

Note: My six year old grandson is the only, and I mean ONLY person in my life, that squeals and jumps up and down with me when the peas start poking their little pea heads up!

Accountability is important if you want to succeed in disciplining yourself.
It comes in two forms: self-accountability and accountability to others.

The first key: self-accountability

Self-accountability is pretty self-explanatory and works great when you have a strong sense of ethics, integrity and self-control. You won’t cheat on yourself and you’ll keep yourself pushing forward and upward.

To make yourself accountable to yourself, you’d need to start off by writing down your goals and what steps you need to take to get there. Then you need to start a daily journal where you write down all the things you’ve done for the day. I cannot stress this enough. It seems tedious, but it is OH so helpful. Give it six months and then revisit what you’ve done. It will give you confidence. It will give you a sense of accomplishment that you won’t get elsewhere.

If you’ve had doubts about your abilities, if you’ve questions about your sanity or your fears, write it down. And then make sure you write the answers to your negative thoughts so that when you ask the same question again in a month or so, you’ll have the answer to look back on and you should be able to appease your doubts.
As you can see, this method is quite lonely. It takes self discipline and it can get boring and tedious. Even if you go with the second method, accountability to others, please try this one also.

The second key: being accountable to others

Accountability to others is simply letting other people in on your goals and asking them to help you reach them. Depending on your arrangement, you can ask your accountability buddy to give you a good talking to if you ever get tempted to do something that’s detrimental to your success. So choose your buddy wisely.

Pick someone you know has the discipline to actually help you out and would probably have a vested interest in your success. A spouse, parent, sibling, best friend or even your psychologist can be your accountability buddy. Someone you look up to, someone you would like to impress and someone you’d hate very much to disappoint.
Being accountable to yourself and to somebody will change your perspective about reaching your goals. You’d be more conscious of every step you take and you’d have the discipline to actually stick to the path you’ve chosen to follow.

This list can also include someone that you can go to with issues with your animals, gardening questions, disease issues (plant or animal) … anyone that you can ask questions!