The #1 Success Habit

There are times you may have a hangnail, a headache, the flu, feel overwhelmed, or anxious.

You can use those instances as an excuse…

Or you can be accountable.

Being accountable means you will suit up and show up. You will deliver. The show must go on.

What does that mean?

A producer, a closer, and a finisher find ways to overcome challenges and obstacles.

When you are accountable, you do everything in your power to meet your obligations. That doesn’t mean if you are sick you don’t take a day off. But, when you are accountable, you meet your responsibilities.

Many of my clients have part-time businesses. Their goal is to become a full-time business owner and quit their job.

What tends to happen is people can be accountable in a job. There is a set of rules to follow.

BUT… there are a different set of skills, parameters, and blueprint you must operate within when you own a business. You have to be accountable to yourself. You are the boss. You have to be your best employee.

Owning a business means you must be accountable for your time. You don’t get paid an hourly wage. You get paid for production, service, and value. Your responsibility is to turn time into results.

Being Accountable to Yourself

Accountability is being honest with yourself.

You may have heard the phrase, “The fortune is in the follow-up.” That may be true, but you require being able to follow up and follow through with your commitments. Finishing must become an identity.

Many people have a procrastination identity. They have bad habits and avoid taking action. Their challenges are a reflection of the stories they tell themselves.

“If I avoid accountability, then I don’t fail.” “If I avoid success, I don’t fail.”

The truth is you fail because you don’t engage. Success is based on an engagement principle. You must be able to engage your prospects.

ALSO… you must be able to engage your fears and anxieties. That means you confront others and confront yourself in a relaxed body.

Many people start and don’t finish. They are chronic avoiders. If you want to succeed, you have to pay the price. You have to be a master of discipline. That means you master your emotional state. You learn the skills, and you develop a daily method of operation.

A committed finisher is someone who focuses on the outcome. To be a finisher, you have to become clear about what you are capable of accomplishing. No matter where you have been or what you have been through, you can unequivocally change.

The Process of Change

Change is a choice. It’s a commitment and a decision. It is a one day at a time process.

When you focus on the emotional discipline one day at a time…

…you will stay in the game long enough to master the skills of your vocation.

Lack of emotional discipline is what leads to avoidance. It leads to procrastination.

When you can chunk your vision and goals down to one day at a time, the story about it being hard diminishes. The goal is to develop the emotional discipline to complete tasks and produce results.

Mastering Your Emotions

Success is not difficult to master.

Your emotions are the challenge. If you don’t master your emotions, then you are trying to control your emotions. Control is force. You cannot force yourself to be in peace. Control overwhelms you.

Overwhelm is about the stories you tell yourself. You get so worked up that you can’t produce results.

You don’t take action.

You don’t finish what you started.

Overwhelm is why people get ready to get ready. When you get ready to get ready, you create dust. You don’t blaze the trail. For you to blaze the trail of success, you have to enter the unknown.

When you focus on results and solutions, then the problem doesn’t seem so big. The stories you tell yourself create doubt. Uncertainty drives you to opt out instead of staying the course. When you let go of doubt, success becomes a certainty.

Completion

Accountability is completion.

It means you are completion conscious. You finish what you start. When you are accountable, you find a way to overcome a challenge rather than focus on the problem. When you focus on the problem, it creates anxiety. When you focus on a result, your body releases. The body is no longer overwhelmed in frantic energy.

To be accountable, you must let go of the noise in your mind that says, “How am I going to do this?” “How am I going to pull this off? “I’m not smart enough.” “This is too hard.” Accountability is when you can stand the gaff, and you don’t listen to the voices that say, “I can’t.”

I have a long-time friend and client that lived in Austin, Texas almost 20 years ago. He was a top income earner in a small start-up network marketing company.  He went through some challenges.  He realized that he wasn’t cut out to have a job or own a traditional business. He packed up his belongings and moved to Nashville, Tennessee.

He committed to pursuing his love of music. He is a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He played in honky-tonks, juke joints, and bars. When times were tough, you could find him playing for money with his guitar case open on the street.

He’s been playing music for over twenty years. He is accountable for his goals and his dreams. This past year he has performed over three hundred times. If he doesn’t make it to the big leagues…

…I guarantee he will still be in Nashville playing the game.

He will not live the pain of regret. He will not die with his music inside of him. He’s motivated because he is inspired to live his dream.

Self-Motivation

To many people, their goals and dreams may seem like a mountain. When you are self-motivated, you don’t require someone else to motivate you to make the climb. You are going to scale that rock until you reach the peak.

Most of us are groomed, raised, and conditioned to have a job. OR we are conditioned to go to college so we can get a job. We are used to someone else to telling us what to do.

We tend to operate from the forty, forty, forty club. That is a forty-hour work week, for forty thousand dollars, for forty years. Then, it only brings you a forty-dollar Timex watch.

When you have spent much of your life waiting for someone else to tell you what to do, it can be challenging to be an entrepreneur. You become the boss so you must tell yourself what to do. Most people who have a small business from their home operate their enterprise as though they were a non-profit organization. They don’t know how to motivate themselves to create profit.

(If you want to learn what it takes to be an entrepreneur, check out my blog called: 3 COMMON MYTHS ABOUT BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR)

Being self-motivated requires a different level of emotional energy. When you attempt to force yourself to do something, it is not likely to happen. You should not have to make yourself take action toward your dreams.

Ask yourself this…

“Why do I get out of bed in the morning? What dream will motivate me to spring into action when I wake?”

When you can see, feel, and believe in your dreams, you will be self-motivated.

If you aren’t buying into to your dreams, then your why isn’t powerful enough. When you know your why, what you do has more meaning. Your why is a success tool.

It is what drives you to break through.

As you develop this clarity, your life is motivated by purpose. You live in integrity with your dreams because you are self-motivated by your why.