TL;DR: Traditional accountability coaching — the “did you do your homework?” style check-in — focuses on discipline and willpower rather than the emotional or environmental blockers actually holding people back. In original research from Beyond the Promise, fewer than 10% of group program participants said accountability contributed to their results. This model fails because it relies on willpower, extrinsic motivation, and treats lack of progress as a personality flaw rather than an environmental one. Effective accountability instead builds intrinsic motivation, the right conditions to succeed, and stays curious about the friction behind inaction — asking “what’s in your way?” instead of “did you do it?”
We are absolutely obsessed with accountability, and for good reason, because no doubt you have heard that it increases your chances of success by up to 95%.
So why on earth am I saying that accountability sucks?
Well, on the surface, accountability seems like a good thing. Like it’s going to support you to get the results that you want. But when I surveyed group program participants in my Beyond the Promise research earlier this year, I discovered that fewer than 10% of participants actually found accountability contributed to strong results, which I found quite interesting.
And then it got me thinking about my own experiences with accountability. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed with it. Accountability generally does actually suck.
The “Did You Do Your Homework?” Approach
That “did you do your homework” approach focuses more on your discipline, your commitment levels, whether or not you’re lazy, how motivated you are — rather than the emotional or environmental piece and the hurdles that are standing in your way.
And the more I thought about my own experiences, the more I realised that this approach — the “what are you working on this week” Monday thread, and the “celebrate your wins” Friday thread — it personally left me feeling anxious rather than supported. Everyone had these massive goals and seemed to be taking massive action and making way better progress than I was. It actually left me feeling less confident, less sure of myself, and less supported than no accountability at all.
I want to be clear that I am not anti-accountability. When it’s done the right way, it’s really, really impactful. And that is mirrored in that 95% statistic. But what I see more often than not, and I think it’s represented in that fewer-than-10% figure, is that its focus has been on compliance and giving the impression of support — because it’s easy to say “I’ll check in with you,” but it’s not actually giving you the support, the encouragement, all the things that you need to get the thing done.
In fact, what it’s doing is triggering your nervous system into that freeze, fight, flight, or fawn state. That sense of shame because you haven’t done it. Resistance because it doesn’t feel right. Maybe defensiveness if someone’s challenging you on whether or not you’ve done the thing. Maybe just withdrawal altogether. Or being tempted to lie about your progress because you want to appear to be doing the right thing.
And the dynamic in this type of accountability is all wrong. It’s like a teacher-child relationship. That’s why I call it “have you done your homework” accountability.
Why It Doesn’t Work
It relies solely on your willpower. This push to take massive action — that ethos of 10x your goals and all of this kind of stuff — it overloads your emotional processing with fear, and it overloads your logical brain with analysis paralysis. That never-ending stream of questions: how am I meant to take massive action? What does that even mean? What should I be doing? How should I be doing it? I’m not good enough. I don’t know how to show up in this way. And if we don’t feel capable, if we don’t feel confident, if we don’t believe that we can achieve the thing, that is a really strong indicator that we’re not actually going to do the thing. We’re not going to follow through.
It relies on extrinsic motivation and introjected motivation. It’s high pressure. It’s this push, push, drive, hustle to do the work. And it’s drowning you in somebody else’s shoulds, because they said so, this is the way to do it. The ultimate impact of that is that you are giving up your agency. You are giving up your desire to an external force that’s beyond yourself. You are following somebody else’s blueprint, somebody else’s pathway to success for you. And if they are no longer there, giving you that constant “have you done it, have you done it” input, then you’re going to be left stranded on your own with no systems to rely on.
It assumes that the lack of progress you’re making is down to your personality. You’re not committed enough. You’re lazy. You need to work on your motivation. You need to be more consistent, more disciplined — rather than focusing on the fact that a lot of this resistance comes down to emotional or environmental blockers.
So How Do We Actually Get Shit Done?
Not all accountability sucks, let’s be clear. Accountability needs to focus on three specific things.
One: intrinsic motivation. It does that by building belief — self-belief in yourself, your capability, relevance. It has to be connected to something that matters to you, that’s important to you, and you need to have ownership over that process. Your goal, your actions, your milestones, on your terms, under your energy — all of that stuff matters, because if somebody else is handing you the blueprint, the process, saying do this, do this, do this, in this way, in this time — it does not belong to you. It’s not your goal. It is not your strategy. It’s somebody else’s.
So we need to take those blueprints and frameworks and focus on how do we make this ours? Why does it matter to me? Why is it important? What’s the emotional connection to this? Are you making decisions on the actions you need to take that actually fit around the friction that you have in your life?
I was thinking just this morning — my kids are at my parents, and if I didn’t have children, my working life would be totally different. I woke up, went for a bike ride at half past six, got back, had a shower, and dove straight into work, because that first thing in the morning is when my brain works the best. But if I was preaching that approach to somebody who actually has children, who has to do the school run at 8:30 — it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t recognise that there are different friction points that different people have in their lives.
So we need to make sure that everything we’re working towards is ours, that we have the spark, the strategy, and the setup that fits our life — not somebody else’s vision of what they want their business to look like. And if we realise we have gaps in our knowledge or our systems, we need to fill those gaps to help us take consistent action and follow through.
Two: building the conditions to succeed. Have we got systems in place — and I don’t mean tech systems, I mean ways of working, ways of doing things that make it easier to do the things we want to do, and harder to do the things we don’t want to do? For example, the phone with the notifications — more often than not, mine is hidden away in a drawer. If it’s hidden away, I don’t reach for it, I don’t look at it, I’m not distracted by the notifications. I’ve made it harder — added friction — so that I don’t look at my phone.
If I want to follow through on my plan, I have a very clear checklist of the daily actions I’m taking. I have set intentions of what I’m going to do, when, and how. This time slot is for recording videos. This time is time-boxed for this particular task. And don’t get me wrong, I hate time-blocking. Seeing a calendar full of set activities at set times kind of makes me want to vomit. But if it’s something important, it goes in.
You also want to think about your own capacity — have you got the energetic, time, financial, and emotional capacity to do the things you say you’re going to do?
Three: making sure the accountability you have is not asking “did you do the thing?” It’s not chasing you for a check-in. It’s curious, and it’s asking why you didn’t do it. It’s focusing on what’s keeping you from taking the action, what’s going on in your environment, where are the friction points, and how can we remove it, reduce it, move around it — so that it becomes a small enough friction point that it feels safe enough to take action, safe enough to move.
The Accountability That Actually Works
When we have the intrinsic motivation, when we have the systems, the environment, the conditions for success, and when we’re really getting curious about why things aren’t happening — that’s the kind of accountability that works.
Not the “did you do your homework, did you do the thing” accountability that ends up making you feel bad.
Has accountability ever left you feeling worse than if you’d had none at all?
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