Why Accountability Can Lift Personal Performance

These are common problems that people at all levels in business will recognise and the effects can be very debilitating, not only from a practical business point of view but psychologically too. When you leave things untended, they linger as a threat that can haunt you night and day. Rather than giving yourself a sense of breathing space, you actually increase the pressure in your mind, reducing your ability to think clearly and work efficiently.

The voice of your conscience

A business coach can help you overcome these problems by holding you to account and making sure you tackle those necessary tasks when they need to be tackled. It’s natural to put off the more onerous tasks and focus on the ones we enjoy. A business coach will act as your conscience, making sure you attend to the less palatable but still important tasks, like your mother telling you to eat your greens.

Indeed, a lot of coaches will advise you to tackle the tasks you don’t like first. This comes back to that sense of threat, as mentioned above. As long as you know there is something unpleasant that you need to do, it will fester in your mind until you do it. And this will have a detrimental effect on everything you do in the meantime. So get the nasty jobs out of the way at the start of the day and then you can enjoy the good jobs with a greater sense of freedom.

But coaching is not just a case of having someone to nag you. A good coach will help you with the positive, forward-thinking steps. They will go over your plans with you and challenge your rationale for the objectives you’ve set, then make sure you’re following the plan according to the schedule. This will give you confidence in your own plans, which in turn will give you extra energy to pursue them.

A framework for progress

At the same time, a coach will install the structure you need to keep your plans on track. They will become a regular fixture in your monthly schedule, a base camp for you to unload your burdens, review your objectives, set new goals and manage your time efficiently.

Time management – or rather, poor allocation of your time – is the most common cause for leaving jobs unattended. The sense that you’re just too busy, that there are just not enough hours in the day, is what leads people to put things off. A coach will look at the way you allocate your time and help you to identify where time is being wasted and where it could be more efficiently spent.

There are also certain habits you can adopt that will help with this. One is the ‘try to touch it only once’ principle: a classic example being an email that lands in your Inbox, you glance at it, see there’s a question that you need to answer, and decide to park it for later attention. Does this save you time? No. It pushes a task you could and should tackle now into a time when you might be busy with other things, thus increasing the pressure on yourself.

If you’ve got the time to look at your emails now, you should have the time to respond to them now, otherwise you need to review the way you use email. Treat it as a defined task that you carry out, say, three times a day and give a block of time to each session, rather than allowing yourself to be distracted by every email as it comes in.

Helpful disciplines

By following the ‘try to touch it only once’ principle, you will discover that you begin to make time at times of day when you previously were fully occupied, commonly at the end of the working day when work begins to eat into your downtime.

Disciplines such as these make perfect sense but are notoriously difficult to impose on yourself, such is human nature. A business coach can make that vital difference, helping you to install these helpful disciplines and making sure you continue to follow them. With your mind free of threats and buoyed up by seeing your objectives being met in an efficient and progressive manner, you will find that your performance at work improves dramatically.