Beardens' Blog

Accountability & Quality of Days - Choices & Consequences

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If you’ve read the previous entries in this series on accountability (and if you haven’t I invite you to do so; they’re short, so go ahead, read them), then you know that I treat accountability as something more than fulfilling obligations or meeting responsibilities. In my work as a speaker, trainer and facilitator, my primary focus is on Leadership, Sales and Customer Service. I am convinced that personal accountability is a prerequisite for success in those three disciplines.

Let me begin this entry with the following observation:

Personal accountability is not a trait to be developed

Personal accountability is a truth to be acknowledged

What that means is that we don’t have to learn to be accountable; we already are.  The extent of our intrinsic accountability—our ownership of the choices we make and of the consequences those choices produce—can be readily seen in the quality of our days.

The quality of our days is a two-dimensional phenomenon. There’s the physical dimension (the outside factors we encounter), and the emotional dimension (the feelings we experience). While both dimensions are “in play”, it seems to me that the emotional is the one we ultimately use to assess the quality of our days. When we experience positive feelings, it’s a good day, and when the feelings are negative, the day is bad. Fair enough?

Most people in our culture seem convinced that the outside factors they encounter (the physical dimension) cause or create their feelings. These people believe that the quality of their days is an outside-in phenomenon, that they are at the mercy of the outside factors. Sound familiar?

Armed with that belief, most people establish “rules” for what must and must not happen “out there” (in the physical dimension) in order for them to have good days (experience positive feelings). Whether we call them “pet peeves”, attachments, aversions or addictions, these “rules” represent choices we’ve made, choices that set us up for some interesting emotional swings.

These “rules” range from petty (how many items people ahead of me in the express line can have in their carts) to profound (when and how people are supposed to die). The one thing most of them have in common is that they apply to areas over which we have absolutely no control.

That being the case, what’s the one thing we can be absolutely sure of? Our “rules” will be violated; the outside factors will not always conform to the demands we’ve placed on them. And when—not if—that happens the quality of our days (as measured by our feelings) takes a dive, right?

I’m not suggesting that the outside factors are unimportant or that they don’t have some impact on us, because they do. What I am suggesting is that the suffering and drama (negative feelings) we associate with the outside factors we encounter is not caused by those outside factors, but by the mental choices we make about them. We don’t have to learn to be accountable for making the mental choices that create negative emotional consequences; we already do all that. To improve the quality of our days, regardless of the hands we’re dealt (the outside factors we encounter) we must acknowledge and improve the mental choices we make about those outside factors.

Here’s an assignment for you. I want you to pay attention to your feelings, and when you catch yourself bummed out (angry, frustrated, etc.), I want you to acknowledge the outside factor you’ve encountered, and then I want you to identify which of your “rules” that outside factor has violated. You might pay special attention to any of your “recurring peeves”, situations in which you seem to have lots of “rules” that are frequently violated.

That’s it for now. More to follow. Read the earlier blog entries. Do your homework.