Monday Spark: Make yourself accountable to someone you would hate to disappoint.

sign of accountabilityWe have dreams. We make ourselves promises. We make resolutions.

And…all too often, absolutely nothing happens or changes.

When nothing changes, we are quick to find excuses. We find a way to make other people or circumstances the cause of our failure to take action and move forward. If all else fails, we can simply say something wooly like, “The time wasn’t right. Maybe next year.”

It’s easy to get away with this kind of non-action, because we keep our plans and promises to ourselves. In fact, if we hard work on it, we can even persuade ourselves that we didn’t really promise ourselves to do anything at all. (As humans we’ll go to almost any lengths to protect our self-esteem.)

One step forward is to make yourself accountable by letting other people know what you plan to change or achieve. In fact, there are whole websites devoted to sharing your goals with other people. At this time of year, people also share their resolutions on social media sites like Facebook.

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