The Most Effective But Unspoken Motivator
It’s the driving force behind your most productive behaviour, and yet you’ve never deliberately taken advantage of it
The Most Effective Motivator
You’ve experienced it your whole life, the primary motivating force behind your most proactive behaviour. It’s the reason you find it so much easier to get out of bed to go to work, than it is to get out of bed to workout. It’s always been present in your life, and yet it probably hasn’t crossed your mind to deliberately use it to your advantage.
Accountability
One of the keys to success you’ll find people shouting from the rooftops, is consistency. And I would wager that over your life the areas in which you’ve had the most reliably consistent behaviour has predominantly been areas in which you’ve been accountable to others. School, work, friends, family, etc. So, it appears there’s some relationship between accountability and motivation. Why is this, and how can you take advantage of it?
Why Is It Such a Good Motivator?
Let’s say you agree to meet a friend at the gym at 9am to do a workout together. You’re much more likely to show up on time (or at all) than if you told yourself to be at the gym at 9am. Why? For one, when accountability is involved, there are real consequences to your actions. Your ‘word’ is on the line, and therefore your reputation. If you don’t follow through it could harm your image in the view of people whose opinions your genuinely value. You don’t want your friend to see you as untrustworthy and unreliable. The accountability works as a motivator to be where you said you would, when you said you would be.
How about a less trivial example involving people whose opinions you don’t necessarily value. You show up to work on time and get your assignments done, because you’re accountable. Once again, this is because there are real consequences if you don’t fulfil your responsibilities. Maybe being reprimanded in some way, but more importantly your reputation would suffer in the view of your superiors. You might not value their opinion but being viewed as untrustworthy and unreliable isn’t likely to aid you in consideration for your next raise or promotion.
Those examples make sense, but what’s the mechanism behind accountability working as a motivator? It all comes down to your internal dialogue. It’s infinitely easier to talk yourself out of doing something when no one else is involved. Only you are affected by the consequences of your actions, and it’s pretty easy to win an internal debate with no opposition. When you get up in the morning dreading going to the gym alone, there’s no consequences to simply changing your mind; no consequences you can’t self-justify at least. But when you know your friend is waiting on you, all of a sudden there are real consequences to changing your mind, and that forces you to act.
Furthermore, if you’re accountable you might be part of some working system. A partnership or group of people who all take on responsibility to achieve some collective goal. Simply feeling like part of a team aids in motivating you. You have people around you pushing you on and encouraging you, motivating you when your personal motivation tank is running dry.
In summary, accountability puts your reputation on the line, and introduces real consequences to your actions. You’re likely to be motivated to act to avoid those consequences, or to protect your reputation.
How Can You Harness It?
Realizing this means you can now use accountability as a tool to be used as a motivator. To use it, simply think of how to actively implement it into areas of your life you struggle to stay motivated in. This applies from the smallest level of accountability to the largest. Struggling to go to the gym? You can use bigger accountability by agreeing with a friend to go to the gym x times a week together. Or you can use smaller accountability by simply agreeing with a friend to send each other your progress every couple of weeks (I know people who have done this for this reason). I also of people who have pledge publicly that if they don’t do ‘x’, then they will donate ‘y’; simply to motivate themselves.
Now knowing this, ask yourself if there’s any area of your life you struggle to stay motivated in. If you really want to change, then ask yourself how you can build accountability into that area.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this piece, I hope you gained some kind of insight from it. If you enjoyed it and want to see more, give me a few claps and a follow. It really encourages me to keep doing what I love. If you agree or disagree, leave a comment and let’s talk about it.
If you want to read some more thought-provoking work from me, why not try out: Why Life Seems Harder The More Competent You Become?
That’s it for now, have great rest of your day.
