What Happens When No One’s Watching?

Thought For The Week

This week I’ve been contemplating accountability. A personal trainer provides accountability to her clients; an app provides accountability when tracking food habits; the group provides accountability when we sign up to an exercise class. But in all these examples, it’s something external that’s driving us. It kind of makes sense. External expectations can be more tangible and immediate, and the fear of disappointing others can outweigh the discomfort of failing ourselves. But relying on external validation makes us accountable out of obligation, rather than out of willingness. Honouring ourselves should be just as important. This way, we start fostering intrinsic motivation, and we don’t become dependent on those external factors always being present. Perhaps then, obligation can be a useful tool to help us get started and build discipline and consistency, but ultimately, we should be looking to take responsibility and hold ourselves accountable if we want to maintain our results.

Exercise Tip

To help get you started or to ride out a tough period, hire a personal trainer, join a group class, or find an accountability buddy to train with. Focus on creating positive habits, building consistency and identifying the elements you enjoy or feel particularly positive about. If you’re ready to go it alone, you’ll need these positive experiences already under your belt; you’ll be drawing on them for intrinsic motivation. You’ll also need to identify your core values; Your reasons for training must align – and even more importantly, cannot be at odds – with your values if you want to start holding yourself to account. Let me give you an example: I enjoy training enough in the short term, it energises me and gives me a sense of accomplishment. But when my motivation dwindles, I use my values to help keep me accountable: My mental health is my number one priority; without it I can’t be a good coach, a good friend or a good dog mum. Exercise is what keeps me sane. So, for the sake of everything else, I keep training.

Nutrition Tip

Food tracking apps can be a useful tool to help you get to grips with your nutritional intake and learn about the calorie content and macronutrient quantity of the foods you’re eating. But an over-reliance on them can lead to poor food choices when you start favouring calorie content over nutritional quality. By all means use them if you’d benefit from a better understanding of your nutrition and you’re looking to build some consistency around, say, your weekly protein intake. But when it comes to making long-term changes to your nutrition, bear in mind that maintaining some degree of freedom, flexibility and enjoyment around food is vital if you want to sustain your efforts.

Links & Resources

Book: In The Mountain Is You, Briana Wiest shows us how to unlock our true potential by learning to take responsibility and act as our highest-potential future selves.

Blog: The best calorie-counting apps according to Women’s Health.

Product: Looking to build a new self-motivated exercise habit at home? Fitness Superstore is my go-to for all my equipment needs.

Inspirational Quote

"You can make any promises as long as you are not going to be there to fulfil them."

Pawan Mishra