There are many techniques to motivate ourselves, many ways to manage time and increase our results. It is easy to find a multitude of ways to gain leverage over a situation and gain massive results. Yet, none of this matters if you give up before you reach your goal. A large  part of sticking with the journey of personal development is having a clear goal and sufficient motivation along the way.

 Yet, the raw truth is that it is highly likely that at some point you will falter and doubt yourself. It certainly helps to have a variety of your tools in your personal development ”backpack” but there should always be a last line of defense.What is this last line of defense ? Accountability is the the final thing that can save your goals from ending up on a list of resolutions you later dropped. By accountability I mean the process of setting milestones, recording them and hopefully someone other than yourself being made aware of this at the start and expecting regular updates. Furthermore, they should be able to compare your success at intervals with the progress you predicted or was required to reach your goal.

Now, a lot of people would avoid any form of serious accountability  due to embarrassment and awkwardness. The thing is a lot of this awkwardness is due to the possibility of failure and even more importantly the knowledge that someone else will know you will fail. In other words, people avoid accountability in case they fail, which in some ways is allowing yourself, or preparing yourself, for the possibility of failure. Now, to my mind, the more things you do, or to be more specific avoid, comitting 100% is bound to radically increase your chances of failure.

If you are tackling a goal which is particularly embarrassing then here is a simple solution – join a forum, maybe related to your goal, and get a few other posters involved and give them  your schedule so that you can be accountable to them.The long and short of it is, that the only reason (most of the time) to not avoid accountability is the fear and  acceptance of the possibility of failure.