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Teresa Flood
Welcome to the Upside Podcast, where we help you get unstuck in your life and your business by elevating your thinking and provoking meaningful change from the inside out. I'm your host, Teresa Flood. Thank you for joining. We are talking about everybody's favorite word today. What is this word you say? Yes, when I say it, it's going to be music to your ears. You're going to be so excited. I kid you, you're probably not. It's accountability. We tend to not love that word. We tend to not embrace that word. Don't turn me off. I'm going to hopefully phrase this and present this to you in a way that might change your perspective just a little bit on this dirty word. So all success, all results that we have in our life, I fundamentally believe this, this is the, this is the reason why we have the Upside Podcast, is that all success comes inside to outside, that you are not going to achieve anything externally, that you don't first win that battle and achieve internally. And accountability is really no different. And so many times we think about accountability in regards to a third party, meaning we think about accountability. I'm going to hire a coach to hold me accountable. I am going to hire a trainer at the gym to hold me accountable. I, as a parent, am I going to hold my teenagers accountable? We think about that from a leading and managing people about holding people accountable. But here is the truth. You really cannot hold an unaccountable person accountable. It can't be done. Except for maybe if you think about the law. Yes, if somebody is not an accountable person and they go rob a bank, the law can hold them accountable, arrest them, put them in jail, you get the point. But in our relationships, if you've ever had a coach that you've lied to, if you've ever had a parent that you have lied to, you realize as adult human beings in a free world, at the end of the day, we all have choice. And accountability has to first be a character trait that we develop. Our coaching relationships, our trainers, our peer relationships, do they help hold us accountable? Absolutely. Only when we have that character trait, first and foremost, of being accountable. So what does it really mean to be accountable and how do we develop that? So I'd like to describe accountability as very, very simple. It's ownership. Accountability is ownership. It is saying if it's meant to be, it's up to me. I'm always going to look for my fingerprint. It's always within my power to change me first internally, before I see those external results. So if you. Just to give you an example, so if you were walking down the side of the road and you got mugged and somebody came and they put a gun in your back and they took your wallet in your purse and you were mugged in that moment. If you say, what did you lose? And I've done this with a live audience, and everyone's like, well, you lost your wallet. That's not what I mean. Yes, you lost your. You probably lost your sense of security and all of these things, but really what you lost in that moment was your power. You lost your ability to make a choice. Somebody forced themselves to you in a way that you lost that power. It's a horrible feeling. A horrible. And if you have experienced anything like where you have been a true victim of something, that is an awful, awful feeling. Accountability is about ownership and about taking your power back. That whatever life dishes at you, you have the power to choose the next. You have the power to choose the outcome. Accountable people own their own decisions and their own situations. So I heard an interview recently, and they were interviewing Terry Crews. If you don't know who Terry Crews is, you can Google it. He's a very famous actor, TV host. He did, I think, America's Got Talent host, really awesome guy. And I did not know his personal story, but he actually started in the NFL and he didn't make it. And so when he left the NFL, he was not rich and famous. He had not accomplished all of the things. And he and his wife decided to move to LA because he was actually an artist. And that's where his initial hopes and dreams were, was. Was becoming a artist for Pixar. And he says, though, that he knew when he left the NFL and hadn't made it that he had a choice. And he could either blame coaches, blame situations, blame circumstances, point all the fingers, or he could take accountability and ownership. And this was an incredib, incredibly vulnerable statement. He actually said, I knew I had done absolutely everything that I needed to do to succeed in that at the highest level. And I wonder, had he not owned that piece of it, would he be Terry Crews that we know today? I think maybe not. So I want to give you some examples of what it looks like to be a victim of our circumstance, a victim within our life, or to really be an accountable person that takes ownership. We'll put the chart here. All right, So a victim is. Life's gonna happen, reality shows up, whatever. And that happens all the time for us in life. But a victim is going to stay in ignorance they don't seek reality, they don't ask questions, they don't come from curiosity, they don't explore what's beyond just the surface level. The second thing is, is they fight reality. They go into denial. That's not the way it is. I don't see it that way. That's not my perception. And then they start the blame game. And if you've been on the other side of somebody who's gone into victim mode, you can't win. When somebody starts the blame game. If everybody else would have done their job, it's not my fault, it's your fault. The market is to blame, the economy is to blame, my coach is to blame. Why didn't you do something if everybody else had just done X, Y and Z? And then they start with personal excuses. It's deflection. So. So nobody told me. It's not my job. I did my part. I was never given the chance. If I had really been developed, if I had really been given opportunity, I did what I was supposed to do and it didn't work. That's what they told me. And then a victim will just wait and hope they are in resignation. Let's just wait and see what happens. They allow life to continue, continue happening to them. And as opposed to standing up and saying I'm good. We can't control everything in life. That is, that is 100% true. What we can always control is what happens with us internally. We can always control our next choice, we can always control our next decision. We can always control what we decide to learn. We can always control the story we decide to tell. So what does an accountable person do? They seek reality. They ask questions, they say, what is this situation? And. And then they acknowledge reality. This is not about just putting your head in this in the sky and saying something bad didn't happen, but it's saying this is how it is. I've got it. I'm going to figure out how do I respond to this in a way that owns my next choice. So then they own it. They put their energy and their focus in to the fourth thing, which is finding solutions. Don't you just love working with people that are solution oriented? Have you ever had anyone come to you for advice and you've thrown out a couple solutions and they blow you off because they're not actually interested in solutions. They just want to hear themselves complain. Like, listen, I get it. You know, you can have a little wine fest for a few minutes and if we're going to take accountability and own Our lives and our futures, we've got to be solution minded. And then guess what, we get on with it. We say, let's go, let's get started. This is what I'm going to do next. Here's my plan and they own it. So I would tell you a personal story. So when I was pregnant with my girls, we found out we were having twins very early on in the process. Tommy at the time was still in full time ministry and I was working for First American Home Warranty. And we were talking about, as all prospective parents do, what are we going to do when these babies come? And I'm not going to lie, I was a little overwhelmed. I was 30, 31 years old when the girls were born. I was a little overwhelmed with being a new mom and the thought of being a new mom and definitely overwhelmed with the thought of twins. And Tommy and I made the decision fairly early on that I was going to go back to work. And I actually did know and believe that this was the right decision for our family. But it was still a hard decision. I was raised by an amazing stay at home mom. There was a lot of years of my life that I thought that, that I would stay home with my kids. And so this was a little bit of a shift in that way. And at the time, you know, we weren't making a ton of money and so to lose my income would have been a huge hit for our family. But I would catch myself when somebody would ask me, so are you going back to work? I would say things like, well, yeah, I have to go back to work because you know, I have to, we can't really afford for me not to go back to work. Or. And I would use it, which is all victim language. It was all happening to me and I carried an amount of guilt about going back to work. And even though I knew deep down it was the right choice. But I had this epiphany one day and I realized that by using that language, that victim language, I was actually keeping myself in guilt. And I started saying when I was asked that question or when I would talk about it, I would say, yes, I'm choosing to go back to work. It's the best choice for our family. And when I owned it as a choice I was making, it completely shifted my internal thoughts and feelings around it. And I think we do this a lot of times and we don't even realize that we're getting into victim thinking. We say things like, I gotta go work out. No, you don't have to go Work out. You actually don't have to do anything. You choose to go work out because you have goals for your health and your. Your fitness, or I've had single moms tell me, well, I have to do this. I'm a single mom. There's no one else to do it. Well, guess what? The other parent didn't do it. You don't have to. You're choosing to because it's the right thing to do and because that's who you are. That's the character that you have. That's the choice that you make. And so give yourself some credit, because you actually don't have to. They're choosing to. And that's an incredible, incredible choice. So I just want to encourage you to own the choices that you're making. And if you don't want to own them, don't make those choices. Right? That holds me accountable to making sure that then what I'm choosing to do, I'm not a victim of it. That's the choice that I'm making. And I'm choosing to do it to be the absolute best for my husband, for my kids, for my business, for my friends. So accountability will always start internally. Can a coach, a trainer appear? Absolutely. They can help remind us of those commitments that we've made. They can help give us structure. They can. They can put those habits in front of us in a way that makes it easier, 100%. I'm all for that. But it starts with choosing to be an accountable person. You get your power back. Get back in the driver's seat. Don't give your away your power to anybody else, anything, any situation, because you're worth it. So thank you for listening today to the Upside Podcast. And if Today inspired you, would you please share this, subscribe or follow at whatever platform you are listening on. And remember, when you invest in your growth every single day, it will yield great returns in your life and in your business. Until next time, I'm Teresa Flood and this is the Upside Podcast.