The Best Ways to Infuse Accountability Into Your TpT Business | Episode #77

Episode Summary

When we know someone else is paying attention to what we are doing, it creates a magical force of productivity. THAT is the magic of accountability: being held responsible for what we say we will do. If you know you need accountability but are not sure how or where to find it, this episode is for you.

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Infusing Accountability in Your TpT Business

Today we are diving into the topic of accountability. And I love accountability in my business because the truth is I am just a lazy person. Like if left to my own devices with no external motivation or anything like that, I am just kind of a lazy bones, and it’s fine. I’ve accepted that part of my personality. I love just like lying in bed and binging TikToks, things like that.

But when it comes to my business, I need a little bit extra to really get myself going. And over the years, I have found different ways to do that. Obviously, I talk a lot about productivity and ways to efficiently use your time, time management, batching, etc. So I’ve definitely found life hacks around my laziness. But I’ve recently been rediscovering the beauty of accountability in my business.

What is accountability anyway?

So let’s just back up a little bit and talk about what accountability is. Simply put, having accountability is being held responsible. Whether it’s being held responsible for things you’re doing in your business or things you’re doing at home. It’s just a little bit of extra pressure to make sure that you are doing the things that you should be doing. And accountability is great because of the obvious, right? When other people are involved and know what you hope to accomplish, then we are more motivated to get to our goals, right?

But I was also very curious about the science behind accountability because I knew that just from my own personal experience it has been helpful for me. But I dove a little deeper, and I found these statistics that have just been blowing my mind. And I’ve read them again and again over the last several months as we have been building up our accountability pieces in Ignite which is the School of Sellers work club that we just launched.

The Power of Accountability

But listen to this. This is crazy. There was a recent study of accountability by the Association for Talent Development. And the researchers in this study found that individuals have the following probabilities of completing a goal by taking these actions. Okay. You ready for this?

So to begin, having a goal or idea makes you 10% likely to complete the goal. Just by having that idea, you have a 10% chance that you are going to meet that goal, which I think is pretty generous considering all you have to do is come up with it. So 10%, not great. Let’s take it a step further. Then they found that consciously deciding that you are going to do it, so not only just making the goal and writing it down but making a conscious decision that it’s going to happen increases your chances of meeting that goal up to 25%. So now you’re 25% likely to complete your goal because you’ve thought about it and you’ve committed to it to yourself.

But then they found that deciding when you were going to do that goal, so attaching a timeline or a deadline to it, increases your chances to 40%. So now at this point this study has said that if you have the goal or idea, you commit to it, and then you decide a deadline, you have a 40% chance of reaching it. So I mean that’s pretty promising to just set a goal and pick a deadline, right?

How do you increase your chances of completing a goal?

But obviously we want to get to closer to that 100%. So then they say that making a plan and planning how you’re going to get to that goal gives you a 50% chance of reaching your goal. And I think that’s pretty fair. A lot of times on the show and in the School of Sellers community, we talk about how having that idea isn’t enough and even having the goal isn’t enough. It’s deciding how you’re going to get there that really truly matters. But then this is where the magic happens.

What happens if you share and commit to someone else that you’re going to achieve that goal? Let’s say you text your TpT friend and you’re like, “I’m going to get this done, this is a goal I set, and this is when I’m going to do it by.” When you do that, the study shows that you have then a 65% chance of completing that goal. A 65% chance.

But then, this is my favorite part, the study results show that having a specific accountability appointment with someone that you’ve committed to is even more effective. So maybe you text that same TpT friend and take it a step further and you say, “hey, let’s meet once a week or whatever, and I’m going to work towards this goal.” The study shows that just having that accountability appointment with someone increases your probability to a 95% chance that you will then reach that goal. 95%! That is amazing.

How You Can Infuse More Accountability Into Your TpT Business

So I wanted to share that with you today because, like I said, I have seen huge strides in my business when I infuse accountability into it. But it wasn’t until recently that I became more purposeful, more intentional about putting that accountability into my business that I really did see results. And so I’m going to give you some tips today about how you can get accountability into your own business. And it doesn’t matter if you are just starting out or if you’ve been doing this for years. It doesn’t matter if you have one friend or 20 TpT friends or maybe you don’t have any TpT friends yet. I have solutions for everybody, and I’m really excited to encourage you in some way, shape, or form to get some degree of accountability into your business starting today.

Get Your Power Hour On

So I’m going to start with the obvious because this is something I’ve been talking about a lot lately. And I shouldn’t say obvious. But something that has been a hot topic in the SOS community lately is the idea of power hours. Most people host power hours over Zoom, Facetime, or Facebook rooms inside a group. And it is a live video where you spend an hour working with other TpT people on whatever tasks you might choose.

So as an example, in our Ignite work club, we have scheduled power hours two weeks out of each month where we will go live on Facebook and work together. But then something really cool that’s been happening is a lot of the members inside the Ignite Facebook group are using the Facebook rooms feature which are like video chat rooms, and they can host their own power hours. So if they decide to do a pop-up power hour inside the Ignite group, anyone else can join.

And you basically join without video. You don’t even need video. And you just chat at the beginning, and you announce your intentions and what you’re going to be working on for the next hour, state your goals, and then you get to work. Sometimes there’s a time keeper that reminds you when you’re halfway through, maybe 15-minute reminders, and then at the end, you can share what you got done and celebrate your small wins. And then you are on your way. So it’s a really cool way to have real-time accountability with other people who are working on the same or similar things.

On the other side of things, milestones might be huge like the TpT milestones when you reach certain levels of earnings. But the important thing is that by having these deadlines and milestones that you are working toward, by sharing them with others, it definitely gives you some accountability. So even if you don’t have TpT friends or you’re just not that into being entrenched in the TpT community, start small. Share your deadlines and milestones with maybe your partner, your children, your friends, your parents, anyone in your life who you go to for support and celebrations. Tell them. And it really is exciting to have other people invested in your business and you reaching those goals!

Celebrate Your Wins, No Matter How Small

I also would stress the idea of not underestimating the power of the small stuff, especially when it comes to celebrating your wins. So when you do reach those milestones or deadlines, make sure you celebrate. You need to give yourself that good, positive feedback! Because that’s the only way you’re going to be motivated to keep reaching for more deadlines and milestones. I think so many times we’re focused on just getting to the next thing and seeing what’s next on our list that we truly don’t stop to celebrate the things that we do get done. So then at the end of the day, we don’t feel like we got a whole lot done. We need to start celebrating everything in our business.

Monthly Challenges

Another one of my favorite ways to get accountability is to come up with monthly challenges for yourself. Maybe you sit down at the beginning of the year, and you decide that every single month you’re going to have a different theme that you try to master that month. Make it something you want to get really good at. Maybe each month you pick one big goal that you’re going to tackle. Come up with a series of monthly challenges. And also, make sure that you are giving yourself prizes and those celebrations that we talked about every time you complete a challenge.

If you don’t feel like creating them for yourself, there are other places that you can look for monthly challenges. You can Google free monthly challenges for your business. There are tons of different options out there. You can look on Pinterest. You can also join the Ignite monthly challenges. It’s open all year round so you can sign up for a monthly challenge that’s already made for you. You have options though. That’s the most important thing. By setting these smaller goals and breaking things apart, our work can feel a little more attainable. The bottom line though is when you have a plan, you’re definitely more likely to succeed and reach those goals.

Get Yourself An Accountability Partner (Or Two or Three or More)

Now this is obvious, but one of the great ways to have accountability in your business is to have accountability partners. And I know we already talked about the power hours and having like accountability groups. But the truth is that your accountability doesn’t have to be fancy or complicated. It doesn’t even have to involve a call of any sort. Let me share a quick example of this. At the beginning of December, I was feeling really unmotivated in the physical health aspect of my life, and I knew I needed to get back to exercising on a regular basis because I was just really not feeling my greatest. And so I decided to go and work out on my Peloton every single day for a couple days in a row. I posted about it I think on Instagram.

And one of my friends, Angie from Lucky Little Learners, saw it and she was like, “hey, if you would want to do like an accountability thing where we just message each other when we ride.” It’s been working out really well. She does it with some of her other friends. And so I was like, “yeah, sure, I need all the help I can get.”

So literally all we would do is just any time I hopped on the bike, I would take a picture and DM it to Angie, and then she would do the same. And she helped me come up with a realistic goal for the month. I decided I was going to do 12 rides that month because she had done something similar. And it just worked out really well. It was super simple, super doable, but it worked. Just knowing that there was someone else on the other end of my goal was the extra push I needed on those days where I just wasn’t feeling like getting into it. So don’t feel like you need to go all in on your accountability. It can totally be something casual and simple with one other person.

Use Habit Trackers

And the last piece of advice I have for giving yourself accountability is to use habit trackers. Habit trackers are any way that you can track what you are doing consistently over a period of time. So let’s say you set a goal to complete a product line of yours. You know that in order to complete that product line, you have to work on it for at least an hour a day for the next month, right? So you could set up a habit tracker where you get to color in every single day that you worked an hour on that product or whatever it might be. This is another great thing to Google.

There are tons of free habit trackers out there, and you can tailor a habit tracker to whatever goal you’re trying to reach. But the one thing I would recommend is to keep it realistic and simple, especially when you are first starting. You will see that there are some habit trackers that are like 365 days, 50 days, things like that.

Those can be great for certain goals, but I find that with starting out with habit trackers, it’s really helpful to keep it realistic. Maybe start tracking one week at a time and see how many days out of a week you can reach a goal. And then you get a fresh start every seven days rather than being weighed down by a 50-day habit tracker. So I love habit trackers for things like small goals. For example, I told myself that I was going to send a note to followers every single week this year. So that would be a really great thing to track on a habit tracker.

Plan for a Reward!

And then this is also something that really pays to involve some sort of reward. Come up with a way that you are going to celebrate once you reach a certain number on your habit tracker. Or maybe when all is said and done, if you reached an overall number, that is what you’re going to celebrate. Maybe you want to take this one step further and infuse this whole idea of habit trackers into your accountability group. We actually have some mini challenges within challenges coming up in the Ignite group. So there are a lot of different ways that you can utilize the tracking tools.

I would like to officially invite you to join us at any time of year to Ignite. It’s a work club for teacher sellers just like you where we focus on monthly challenges that cover all areas of our business. And it also gives you opportunities to work with other sellers and have that accountability piece that is missing in so many of our businesses.

Conclusion

If you’d like to sign up for Ignite, we are open all year, every day, and we welcome you to join at any point. We have hundreds of sellers inside the group right now, completing challenges, making sales literally minutes after completing challenges. And it is so exciting to see our growth even after just a few weeks of being open. And there you have it, friends. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you and talk to you again next time, same place.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• SOS Ignite Accountability Club

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