The Accountability Method for Goal Setting

It’s likely that you have heard of mastermind groups and things of this sort. You may question whether they are useful. Part of the problem with a mastermind group is that you assume everybody has the same level of commitment to reaching their goals.

Let’s say you assemble a mastermind group of bloggers. People have different levels of motivation. You may not all know each other and you don’t know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result the benefits of participating in the mastermind group actually go down.

I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve had a friend who started this whole personal development journey with me.  A few weeks ago we decided that we would have a weekly 15 minute call to discuss our goals. It was not to be anything too serious, too long or too formal. This is how the process worked

1. We email each other a list of goals for the week
2. We complete everything on the list
3. We have our 15 minute call to check in with each other every sunday.

Why this works

For some reason there is a psychological need not to be a flake. If your boss had a weekly review with you, then you would always want to be ahead of the game. When somebody else is relying on you to get things done, it’s kind of the same thing. You feel a sense of obligation because otherwise it’s just a waste of this other person’s time to get on the phone with you.  But, rather than throw info at you, I’ll share the results with you:

The results of the accountability method:

• Finish reading think and grow rich (done)
• Outline my book proposal (completed a 13 chapter outline)
• Surf as much as possible (weather didn’t permit this so I couldn’t)
• Write 2 new guest posts (I wrote 6, and 2 have been accepted for publication)
• Finish the launch of LifescapeArtists (since you are reading it here on our new blog you know it happened)
• Review my top goals daily and condition myself (I do this religiously)
• Come up with 2-3 ideas for monetization (I landed my first paid client  after writing this down)
• Write 3 articles for my blog (I wrote 5)

Goal setting doesn’t have to be rocket science. For some reason we like to overcomplicate the hell out of things.  Try out this method for goal setting and let me know how it turns out.

1. 

   Internet Banking says:

   February 4, 2010 at 8:54 am

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