I’ll let you in on a little secret.

There are not a lot of surprises in my life. If I water my plants every day, they’re going to be healthy and happy. And that’s with life too. When I take care of the things in my life and put forth effort and time into them, they flourish.

There hasn’t been a lot of surprise in my life because I’ve always got out what I put in. I’ve put in a lot of time. I’ve put in a lot of effort. I asked questions, spent time learning, and sought mentors. In my bowling career especially, I was always living my life towards greater success so it was never a surprise whenever I won.

If you work really hard in life, you’re going to get to where you want to go. You’re not entitled to anything in life. You have to work towards it. If you want to excel in a certain area of your life, you get to choose to do that. And that’s really cool. You get to choose your own destination. You get to choose your own adventure.

I tell this to the kids in my Elite Youth Tour all the time. The most empowering thing about life is that you get to choose how good you want to be in anything, not just in bowling but in life. Things aren’t going to just happen and suddenly surprise you. You get to choose your destiny.

Most of your daily decisions relate to how you are achieving your goals. But so many people forget this and, amidst being busy, start making choices that are not carrying them towards their goals. But what we all need to realize is that every time we do this, we’re making choices that are compromising our goals.

There are so many choices every day, I know. I could go into the gym or I could sit on my couch and watch a movie. But I choose what keeps me on track to my goal.

To keep me on track, journeying towards a goal, I actually map out my time each day to stay conscious about my day to day decisions. I’ve always been one to plan and there are rarely days when I wake up not knowing what I’m going to do. I’m not saying that every moment needs to be filled with something to do, but when we live intentionally, we get closer to our goals.

So I teach people to clearly set intentions and follow through. The follow-through, as I’ve said, is just as important. Staying accountable to our word.

I’m really big about keeping your word. Because that’s your real power. Backing up your word. Don’t just write it down or say it. Do what you say. I truly believe if you don’t keep your word in life, you have nothing.

That part is called accountability, and I’m really a big advocate for accountability. I actually started to teach accountability to my kids at a young age. I don’t get mad about things or blame, I just nip things really quickly when they happen. A really good example is a day last spring when I had a talk with my son about his morning schedule. My son had started taking showers on his own schedule and one night, in particular, I said, Is it shower night? He said he yes, but will take a shower in the morning before school. I thought, okay, he’s capable so he can do that. I don’t wake him up in the morning. He wakes himself up. He has an alarm. He has a Fitbit watch.

The next morning, he didn’t wake up in time to take a shower. It’s something very small. But it matters. How we do anything is how we do everything. Accountability to small things sets us up for how we handle the bigger things. So I went into his room to wake him up, to make sure he was ready for school, and reminded him that he had said he was going to take a shower. His first instinct was to blame me. He said, well, you didn’t wake me up. But I said “No, no, no. In this house, we’re accountable. You said you were going to do something. You didn’t do it. It is not anyone else’s fault. I’m not mad, but the lesson is that you have to be accountable.

The shower itself may seem somewhat insignificant, but it was important to teach that we cannot go through life blaming other people for our failures. We need to own our mistakes, to learn and grow from them. We need to have the strength to not feel bad about messing up but to just acknowledge the mistake. We can say, “that failure is on me, but I know I can learn and do better.”  We learn and grow through these experiences. 

As a parent, as my kids grow up, I’m their in-house accountability partner. But sometimes we adults need someone to be there to help us remain accountable too. As much as we can learn and build an internal sense of accountability towards our goals, it can really help when we have the support of others.

Who is your accountability partner to keep you focused on your goals?

I talk all about accountability in GoalsLAB. If you are interested in having a built-in accountability group, then join us today in GoalsLAB!

Interested in watching the replay of In Pursuit of Goals FREE Masterclass? You can HERE!