The key to making sustainable, lasting changes in your life, your exercise habits, and your health lies in accountability. If you want resolutions to "take," you need to hold yourself accountable and stick to the commitments you've made.
Perhaps the most potent form of accountability is immediate pressure. For instance, if there’s a car coming towards you, you dive out of the way. The looming "accountability" of a car killing you triggers the "resolution" to dive out of the way. The acute presence of extreme danger holds you accountable. Or, more commonly, consider the deadline. As it approaches, you suddenly become more likely to complete the task. The deadline not only holds you accountable but also the potential consequences to your life and livelihood if you fail to meet it.
However, we can’t always rely on deadlines and acutely stressful, dangerous situations for accountability when it comes to keeping resolutions. These methods generally don’t work for our long-term goals... but the underlying principle remains the same. How can we make ourselves accountable for our resolutions?
How can we simulate the urgency of not meeting those resolutions? How can we establish a system where we feel like we are failing if we don’t meet them? I’m not talking about just feeling personally disappointed, sitting on the edge of your bed, engulfed in the pangs of regret over your failure after the fact. Rather, how can you feel the pain before you fail? How can you maintain a sense of accountability throughout your day and life, and not just when you fail? Feeling that accountability only after the opportunity has passed is no use. It only leads to sadness, or even depression. What you need is to feel accountable immediately upon making the resolution or deciding to make changes. It’s this type of accountability that truly enables real changes to be made.
What are some possible ways to stay accountable?
Social pressure is a classic accountability agent. The knowledge that the community is expecting you to stick to your guns and finish the job, that they're counting on you can be very powerful. The awareness that they'll be disappointed in you if you give up or fail is even more powerful.
Familial responsibility is another. It's a classic story. A reckless party animal has a kid and suddenly settles down, gets a good job, and becomes a different person. A father, in the blink of an eye. He's become accountable to another life.
My method is a bit of an amalgam of all these: "What's the worst that could happen?" I ask myself just how bad things could get if I didn't accomplish my goals and stick to my resolutions.
If I kept running 100+ miles a week and spending all my free time training and eating to support my endurance career, how bad would my health get? How many soccer games and Little League practices would I miss?
If I gave up on Primal Kitchen, how badly would I regret it? How much would it hurt to see the competitor's brand on store shelves?
If I stopped writing Mark's Daily Apple after the first couple years, what could have been? How many millions of people would never know about Primal living?
That's actually how I've stayed accountable: imagining what could happen to my family and my health if I didn't succeed. Imagining, in lurid, visceral detail, just how bad things could be.
Now, it's not always smooth sailing. I spent many nights tossing and turning because I was so worried about failing. Because I was thinking about what might be. I'm not exactly recommending this to everyone. But the point is that you need accountability. You need to find something that works for you. And whether you like it or not, accountability has to be somewhat unpleasant. It must carry the whiff of danger about it or else it's not actually accountability.
