How to stay motivated: Find someone to hold you accountable

I recently finished my last session with my amazing career coach Rachel. In the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what I want to do next in my career. I went from being extremely unhappy in a well-paid job to being extremely enthusiastic and motivated to start my own small business. Throughout my journey, I had my career coach there to check-in on my progress and make sure that I was sticking to my goals.

In my final session, my coach asked me what the one thing was that made working with her so worthwhile. For me, it was having someone to hold me accountable for my actions. When you work for a large company, you usually have to set quarterly and annual goals for you and your boss to use as a benchmark to measure your performance. When you’re running your own business, there is no one there to tell you whether you are on track.

Now that I am moving on from my coaching sessions, I need to find someone new to hold me accountable. Otherwise, it’s easy to forgive myself for not following through on my intended actions. Apart from asking friends and family members to hold me accountable, I thought it might also make it extra tough for me to slack off if I made some of my 2011 goals known to the readers of my blog.

That way, if I don’t follow through on my goals then my readers will know when I check-in at the end of the year to review what I have achieved.

Let’s face it, fear is a great motivator. I am motivated by the fear of ever letting someone down – and I certainly don’t want to let down my readers.

So, I’m asking you, the readers of my blog to hold me accountable for the following small business goals:

• Have at least 5-10 phone calls or meetings with new contacts every day (my motto is always be networking)
• Have 3-5 repeat clients by the end of 2011
• Host at least 2 group presentations about B2B digital corporate storytelling by the end of 2011
• Help at least 3 small websites to put together an integrated media sales strategy by the end of 2011
• Work with 3-5 businesses to help them profile Canadian digital media trends and online user behaviours (via blogs, market insights reports, presentations, etc.) by the end of 2011
• Pitch a Canadian digital media news story to 3-5 print publications where I’d like to be published

So, there you have it. Those are some of my business goals for the rest of 2011, sans career coach. If you are a small business owner and happen to read this blog, I’d love to hear some of your goals. Perhaps we can help each other to stay motivated and inspired.

Image source: iStockPhoto.com