Question: What are some strategies I can use to hold myself accountable in my life?
Dr. Kevin Skinner: The first thing when it comes to identifying what I need to—you know, I wanna be accountable—is actually identifying what you wanna be accountable for. And there's an interesting strategy here to identify what's happening. I want to accomplish something, so am I holding back or am I not holding back?
If you wanna start this process, you can use what we call the WOOP method. This is something that I've been learning about and studying about: What's my Wish? What's the desired Outcome? What's the Obstacle? And then creating a Plan.
So, what the researchers have discovered is that when we do just positive self-talk, rarely does that motivate us. Instead, if we're willing to pay the price and go through this process, we're more likely to have success. So, what's my wish? If I find that I'm avoiding things or I'm not getting things done—I'm not being productive, I'm not being accountable—what do I want? What's the outcome of that? If I was doing that, what's the obstacle? I'm gonna bump into problems; what are some of those obstacles? And then create a plan to overcome those obstacles.
It's a great strategy and it can be used in many different environments. It could be used at work, it could be used with your children, it could be used with yourself when you want to motivate yourself. So a simple strategy is called the WOOP strategy—W-O-O-P. You can look it up; it's a strategy to help with motivation.
The other part of that is what we want to understand: the most successful people have accountability. If you really want to take yourself out of not doing something, tell somebody that you're going to do it, and then let them know that you'd like to report back. Social accountability is one of the strongest positive outcomes that we have. So if you're looking at what's gonna help me the most, tell somebody and then report to them how it went.
There's a book I read many years ago titled Change Anything, and that was one of the core research findings that they did. They found in looking at research is that when you are socially accountable, you're more likely to get the outcome you want.
