Successful people will always tell you that it doesn’t matter what you do when people are watching, it’s all about what you do when nobody is watching. The early mornings, the late nights, the extra hustle, this is what makes you successful when it comes to your goals.

But what happens when you wake up that one morning at 5am and can’t be bothered to get out of bed? Apart from your own motivational guru inside you, who is there to shout at you to get up and get firing all cylinders for the day? Unless you can hire a personal coach to drag you out of bed!

This is where being held accountable can help you in your everyday life. We all know that holding yourself accountable is a tough job and you can come up with an array of excuses when you’ve only got yourself to answer to. So how can an accountability partner help you?

Here are 5 ways an accountability partner can help you:

1. Creates A Habit Of Analysing Your Goals

We all know that setting goals is a must, with a timescale and a definitive end point, but how many of us set new goals every week and review them? By emailing an accountability partner every week you can review the following:

• What went really well? You can assess your goals from last week and talk about the positives.
• What did you learn? We can look at failures and learn from them, the simple process of writing down a lesson that you learnt from a failure can help to overcome the same problem next time.
• Are you being too hard or easy on yourself with your goal setting?

This weekly review of your goals shows you where your strengths are and which areas you can improve, always making a step towards your bigger end goals. You’ll find that your accountability partner will also pick up trends or excuses and can advise you how to improve in a certain area.

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” – Thomas Jefferson

2. You’ll Stop Making Excuses

We’ve all had that battle in our heads when we’ve got to act on something: “I’ve got a long day so I’ll have another half an hour in bed” or  “The assignment isn’t in until next week, I’ll start it tomorrow”. You will try and talk yourself out of something and it’s funny how inventive we are when hard work rears its head.

By having an accountability partner you’ll find that you can’t use these excuses anymore, as they’ll look ridiculous when it comes to explaining that you didn’t go for that three mile run “because it looked like it was going to rain.” This will create a shift in your mind set, you will go from finding ways to get out of it, to finding ways to make it happen.

3. Gives You A Different Angle

A huge benefit of having an accountability partner is having another person to help you find a solution, as they say two heads are better than one. Having an accountability partner, especially one that has different interests to yourself, will look at the problem from a different angle to the one you have done for the last few weeks.

Remember your accountability partner is there to help and motivate you and it should be reciprocal. You may find a goal that they are struggling to achieve that you can find a solution for. There is a great sense of achievement when you feel you have helped someone. Having an accountability partner can feed that good feeling.

4. You Can Share Networks

Networking is a great way to get ahead in life. There is always someone who can help you get to that next step in your life, or introduce you to someone who can help you solve a problem. By having an accountability partner your networking circle will essentially double in size.

Good accountability partners will always want to help each other, otherwise why would they be doing it? So, for example, when you are telling your partner every week: “Arrange a coffee meeting with a website designer and ask them how they started in website design”, They may have a very good friend in their networking circle who is a web designer that they can introduce you to.

The great part about this is that their friend will more than likely do it as they are helping out a friend. Great for you, as it gets you a meeting with someone that you may never have come across before.

“Networking is an essential part of building wealth.” – Armstrong Williams

5. Helps You Celebrate Success

There is nothing more that we enjoy doing than shouting about how successful we are, without being big headed. Having a partner in success allows you to share your successes every week or even every day. This gives you a boost because you are showing how many goals you’ve achieved.

By sharing these successes with your accountability partner you’ll find two things:

1. It proves to yourself that you can actually do it. By writing it down, it cements it in your mind that it can be done and when you come to this problem again you know it can be done.
2. You raise your standards. You have proven to your accountability partner that you can actually run 3 miles comfortably so no more setting goals of running under 3 miles.

Accountability partners are there to help you get to where you want to go. You’ll find that you’ll put more effort into your goals than ever before, because someone is holding you accountable.

What areas of your life has your accountability partner helped you with? Leave your thoughts below!