Taking Action - Part III in the "Goals and Dreams" Series

We last wrote about communicating our intentions to the right group of stakeholders to garner support for our dreams and visions. By deliberately reaching out and engaging those supporters of yours, you build a network of accountability that supports your intentions. While it's wonderful to have that external support, how do you hold yourself accountable? Action Planning and accountability will be the focus for this portion of the series.

When my husband and I started our business in 2002 where I could do my consulting, we were excited to build something that had flexibility, a degree of freedom, and a way to give back what I had learned over my years in corporate. We set out to establish our LLC, and begin networking and telling the key stakeholders about what I was doing to fulfill on this intention.

Marketing mode was great because it required very little accountability on my part - at least for the part of networking. I found it quite easy and enjoyed meeting up and having lunch with colleagues to discuss our lives and business in general. However, as the work began to come in, I had to find a way to manage my time and hold myself accountable to the business development, marketing, and delivery portions of the business. It was exciting and overwhelming.

I hired a Personal Coach who helped me build an accountability model for myself of weekly action plans and checklists. For about a year my coach was the one I was accountable to while I built up my own internal accountability mechanism. We developed a planning tool that highlighted my annual goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, and then the daily activities that I needed to do to manage all of this. I grew this tool to include my personal mission statement (thank you Steven Covey) as well as my personal goals as these are part of all of my activities and affect my actions. I still use this one sheet of paper to outline my actions every Sunday. I cross the items off the list as I complete them, and feel happy to be completing the most important as well as the urgent items.

This tool worked well for me and was fairly easy to develop - once I knew my goals, dreams, intentions and had communicated those. There are plenty of tools you can use to hold yourself accountable - iPhone, Microsoft Outlook with Tasks and Calendar options, or a Planner or Organizer. Whatever tool you choose, the most important part is to be sure that it is designed to hold you accountable to your true intentions - those you commit to fulfilling. If you fail to add these intentions, the tool won't be useful and you lose the method of holding yourself accountable.

If you want support in building action plans or an accountability tool, just reply to this post and I am happy to help. Have fun with your dreams - turn them into intentions, communicate them to your universe, and build supporting action plans and accountability mechanisms. Watch your dreams come to life through these simple, effective steps.


Question to Ponder: What actions should be in my "Weekly Action Plan" that will lead me to fulfilling on my intentions? How would I best hold myself accountable? Who should help me develop my own accountability model - a friend, coworker, family member, personal coach?