External Accountability

Hi there. Today we are talking about external accountability. Let's go. If you think about it, external accountability is the secret sauce in so many service industries. For example, when you hire a personal trainer, , it's not necessarily the knowledge that they have about how to exercise in your form, even though it's quite helpful. The main reason why personal trainers can be so successful at giving you results is because they serve as external accountability. When you have an appointment with your personal trainer, you show up. You can't really come up with an excuse not to show up because otherwise you'll get charged for the session and you just don't want to do that, and you know that another person is waiting for you at the gym. The same applies with life coaches, for example, or therapists. When you have an appointment with them, you need to show up and most of the time you need to do some sort of homework or do some journaling, or at least think about some of the difficult questions that they ask you. I also gave you an example in one of my previous podcasts episodes about how I was able to finish my Masters earlier. I joined the writing group that professors formed. So for me it was external accountability. I knew that every Tuesday from, I think it was from 10 to 12, I would have to show to this room and write. In theory, yes, I could just stare at the screen and not write, but because everyone else around me was writing, I felt like I had to write as well and it was very helpful. But more importantly, every Tuesday from 10 to 12, I knew that people were waiting for me and I had to show up, and that was very helpful in getting me results, in terms of the writing process on my thesis. Also, if you think about the whole university system, nowadays with the internet and libraries and Amazon, you can pretty much create your own degree. You can educate yourself in any subject possible. You don't really need to go to university, but in my opinion, universities are much more effective at delivering education because again, they serve external accountability. There are professors that are waiting for you to show up in class. There are assignments with deadlines. There are exams and you can't really procrastinate for a long time compared to if you decide to do the same degree by yourself and just read books and do assignments without having actual deadlines that are imposed by someone from the outside. Same with work . A lot of us find working for someone much easier than working for yourself because you have external deadline, external accountability in the form of your manager or maybe in the form of launch dates for certain projects, and it's much easier to get yourself to work when you have this external accountability. When you work for yourself, it's a lot harder. Because all the deadlines are self-imposed, and you can always find a way to renegotiate some of those deadlines and find, many excuses for why you are not able to meet that deadline. When you have someone else to report to, it becomes much more difficult and you are more likely to stick with the deadlines and deliver the work of high quality and on time. also, if you think about filing taxes, none of us would voluntarily want to file taxes. It's an incredibly frustrating, time consuming, boring activity. And if we didn't have a deadline every year, if we didn't have the CRA or IRS keeping us accountable, none of us would file taxes. So that's another example where external accountability actually makes you do difficult things that you don't want to do. And speaking of working for someone else and working for yourself, or even just working on a project where you don't have a manager, you don't have a boss. I know it for myself. It can be very difficult and that's why I created the monthly method in the first place because a lot of us have this projects that they want to do - be it started in a new business or maybe it's writing a book or maybe it's launching some local initiative. It's something that we want to do, but we lack some sort of structure, accountability group and kind of the same dynamic that we have in the workplace. And that's why we find it incredibly difficult. I had the same issue when I was working on a lot of my own projects. Every time I was thinking if only I could have kind of the same structure and support and accountability as I have in my job, I would be so much more effecti at this project. And that's when I realized that we were using Agile at work and I can do the same with my own life. And then when it comes to support and accountability, that's when I launched the monthly method and I had people sign up. At first, I worked individually one on one, and people had very good results. I had lots of happy customers who wanted to come back month after month because they wanted to work on some different projects and they liked the results that they were getting. And then I just didn't have time to do individual coaching with everyone. So I decided to launch the group coaching. And I haven't been doing it for long, but what I've noticed is that even though I'm teaching the same principles, I'm following the same agenda, I'm following the same curriculum. I'm teaching the same principles in the same order. I'm asking people to do the same homework. So basically whatever I was doing in individual coaching, I'm doing it with the group coaching but what I've noticed is that somehow the results are not the same. And when I was thinking about it and doing my sprint review where I analyze every sprint and how it went, I realized that the main reason why I'm getting much better results from individual clients than I do from group clients was the external accountability. With individual clients, they had to submit their homework. They had to send me their Sprint goals before our calls. They had to show up for the calls and they had to do all of their homework. And go through all the agile processes and rituals with me. With group coaching, what I thought was okay, was just to explain people how to do this rituals, how to do the sprint planning, how to pick goals, how to do the sprint capacity calculation and all of that. But then I didn't really ask people to send me the results of their sprint planning. I was thinking that, you know what, I will be nice. I'm not gonna force people to share personal details, personal goals with me. And because I was trying to be nice to every. I just realized that it was very counterproductive because when they would read the instructions on how to set goals, they might say, Okay, that's nice. I'll do it tomorrow. And then tomorrow comes, they forget about it, and then next week they should already start working on their spring goals, but they haven't even finalized the sprint goals. So going forward, I decided to focus not on being nice and polite and , all of that, I decided to use the benefits of external accountability and enforce deadlines for assignments for when people have to submit their sprint goals, do daily check-ins and all of that because that's for their benefit. And I'll also get to review their goals and that will help me to keep them accountable, with the daily check-ins to check on their progress. And I think adding this ingredient of external accountability should help a lot. I also thought about online courses, right? So we've been through the era of online courses, you can find a lot of them on the internet. You've probably taken a lot of them. It kind of became this, another type of entertainment, passive consumption where you watch a video, you watch a recording of someone tell you smart things, and you're like, Yeah, yeah. That's nice. That's useful, that's smart. I'm gonna implement it in my life. Yes. And then you don't really have any system in place to actually enforce you to implement this new change. I watched so many online courses and. Almost never, I had done any of the homework because there is no downside of not doing the homework, right? No one is checking in you, no one is forcing you to do anything. There is no deadline. So going forward with the monthly method, I really want to embrace this concept of external accountability because I think with the personal projects or the side businesses, people lack external accountability, and that's what makes it incredibly difficult. First of all, they lack the structure of how to go about launching projects in this uncertain times. And that's where Agile comes into place. But actually doing the work, I think that's where external accountability can help incredibly. So going forward with the monthly sprints, what I want to start doing is to, have a deadline for when people are required to submit their sprint goals. And then I'll review the document and leave my comments on how it can be improved. But basically there is a deadline for when you need to decide on your sprint goals and lock them. and you're not allowed to change it after that. that avoids any question of, I'm confused. I don't know what to prioritize. I don't know where to focus. So the confusion will end during the first few days when you deciding on your sprint goals. After that, there shouldn't be any confusion. I will require to submit daily check-ins. It's a basically a very short, sentence. or two. It literally takes three minutes to do. I will also have a deadline for when people need to submit their weekly plans and also a deadline for when they need to submit their sprint. . So that's kind of the change that I will implement starting with November sprint. Also I want to give you some examples of how you can use the concept of external accountability in your life. Because maybe that's the missing element in your journey of achieving your goal, whatever that goal is. So if you want to clean the house, invite the company over, just send out the invitation to your close group of friends and invite people over for. , believe me, you'll get your house cleaned. If you want to organize a really nice, get together with your friends, maybe go do something together. You can send out save the day invitation. Maybe a month ahead. You don't really need to share details yet, but having this date in mind will force you to come up with an interesting plan and activities. And this date will serve as an external accountability That's how the weddings actually work. In my opinion. Weddings get planned because the first thing you do is you set the date and that date is the motivation to actually start working on all the wedding prep and all the things that need to. Let's say you are working on building a side business, you can start with creating a sales page first before even having a product maybe even allow people to buy the products. Of course explain them when the product will be shipped. So people have realistic expectations. But nothing really motivates you to create a product as actually having, sales and people waiting for you to ship the product. If you want to plan a really good vacation, I recommend you start with booking the flight tickets and having the flight tickets, finalized and paid for is a good, external factor that can force you to actually sit down and plan your vacation. Also another external accountability hack that I've used in my job. When I was working as a product manager was to, uh, whenever I would get an email, and people would ask me to do something, I would respond back with something along the line. Hey, thank you for reaching out. I just wanted to let you know that I have received your email and I will get back to you with this information by the end of the day Thursday. I always provided the timeframe for when I will get it to them. First of all, it. F acknowledged that email, it assured them that it'll get done. And so they don't have to follow up every day on that email. But the main reason why I did it was because when I gave this promise to. , it served as an external deadline. It's like having a deadline back at university for an assignment. So the same thing here, and it really helped me avoid procrastination and actually get it done because I promised I would get it done by the end of the day. So here you go. You can use the same technique. It also, helps you look professional because it shows people that you know how to manage your time. You deliver on your promises and in other people's eyes, you become very reliable and very professional. So highly recommended. There are some people who need to have external accountability for working out, and one of the easiest way to do that is to sign up for some crazy marathon or race or some event that is, In the future, you know that it's gonna be hard, it's gonna be impossible if you don't train for it. But having this race serves you as a motivation to actually work out every day, every other day for the next few months leading to that event. So you can do that as well. You can hire a personal trainer if you want to get in shape. You can hire a coach, like a career coach if you want to change a career. I've done it myself. I've recommended this coach to other people, and they all had great success. Mostly because she was that external accountability that, meet people, show up for the appointments, do some homework, work on their resume, and basically, you know, have a schedule on how to transform their career and change their job. Of course there are many other examples of what you can do, but basically, if you are procrastinating, if you're struggling building consistency, with your project, with your goal, then I highly recommend. Looking into external accountability because this will make the whole process a lot easier. And if you need to pay someone, like really consider that as an investment, it's like, yes, I will pay a little bit of money now, but it'll save me like a year of time getting to my. Right, So what's more expensive? A year of my time, a year of struggling and procrastinating and all this mental chatter or this financial investment. And most of the time the financial investment doesn't seem as bad when compared to what you would have to go through if you were to do it on your. . That's all I wanted to share with you today. Again as I mentioned, I will be increasing dramatically the amount of external accountability we have within the monthly method. I will be that external accountability partner. that sets the deadline, reviews your work, and kind of enforces, progress on your goals. So if you want to have that in your life, go to monthly method.com/enroll and I'll see you in November, Sprint, and we'll also have a new sprint every month. But for now, have a fantastic week. I'll talk to you next time. Bye.