The Mindset Mentor - 5 Ways to Hold Yourself Accountable

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

If you're working from home right now or you own your own business, this episode is extremely important for you. In this episode, we will cover 5 different tips to make sure you hold yourself accountable to get stuff done. Follow me on IG for more inspiration here: https://www.instagram.com/robdialjr/ If you live in the US/Canada and you want to receive motivational texts from me, text me now at 1-512-580-9305 or click here https://my.community.com/robdial Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. And if you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you want to receive motivational text messages from me directly to your cell phone, text me right now. 1-512-580-9305. Once again, 1-512-580-9305. And I will start texting you. Today is Thursday, which means it is the business edition of the Mindset Mentor, which means that I am joined by my best friend and business partner, Dean DeVries. Dean, what's going on, buddy? It is great to be here. Happy Thursday. Happy Thursday. Today, we're going to be talking about five different ways to hold yourself accountable. And this is important because we have coached you and I

hundreds of business owners at this point. And one of the things that we see a lot of business owners struggle with is accountability. And it makes sense because, you know, we're going to talk about how we're raised in the school system and no one's really taught on how to be a successful business owner. So what we're going to talk about is some of our keys to hold yourself accountable, whether you're a business owner, whether you're a sales rep, or even just someone working from home right now. But let's dive into why accountability is so hard. Yeah. Well, you know, first the, the thing that just came up for me as you were saying that is as I feel like as, as time goes on are like the generations get less and less accountable you know and more and more entitled you know like that immediate gratification type of

type of uh attitude and that's a complete inverse of accountability and so this is a really important episode and so yeah the the consequence of of not being accountable is ultimately they're not not having the life that you want you know not hitting goals not believing in yourself you know or the imposter syndrome also just living out of integrity with yourself with others with your business and there's major consequences that can come from that. Yeah. And if you think about it, it's not really our fault. And I'm going to say it's not your fault up until now. It's going to be your fault after this. But when we go to school, look at the

school system. You have to wake up and you have to be at school at a certain time. There's a bell that dings. Then the class ends. There's a bell that dings and you have periods. And then you have a certain amount of time that you can walk to class. You've got to raise your hand and get permission to go take a shit. Like literally you're, you're, you're owned. You're basically taught how to be a worker. And then what happens? And you go to, you know, then you go to college.

It's the exact same thing. And then you have work. And when you go to work, you have a start time and you have an end time. And then you can go to lunch. Then you get 14 days off each year. But don't take all 14 days or else we're going to get really pissed at you because you shouldn't. You should want to work the whole time. And it's like we've been raised to literally be people who are workers.

So to hold ourself accountable and say, I'm going to work from this time to this time on my business is not something that people are really used to. Yeah. I'm going to work from this time to this time on my business. It's not something that people are really used to. Yeah. Well, the major difference between that and school, the example that you just used is that in school, there's a high degree of compliance and there's direct consequences. If you, you know, if you miss the bus, right, then you miss the bus. Yeah.

It's like, you've got to hold yourself accountable in that moment. And then, and if not, you feel the consequences in that moment. And that's almost an easier environment to be accountable in than being a business owner. Because oftentimes the worst consequences that business owners experience don't happen all at once. It's just compact. It's like death by a thousand cuts. Yeah, you don't show up to school, they're going to call your mom that day, not six months down the road. Yeah. And if you don't show up for work, you know, or if you, if you, you know, show up

late or sleep in or, you know, don't get your work done, uh, you know, miss the appointment with yourself or somebody else, there's not going to be an immediate consequence right then and there. And you could probably do that for a few days, a few weeks, a few, maybe even a few months. You're talking about your business, right? Yeah. For somebody else. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. As a business owner, if you're just not showing up for a month, it, your, your, your bank account might not be directly impacted that much immediately, but man, you fast forward another month of that or another three months of that got another year of that major, major consequences. I mean, you can have a business that's crushing it and literally going from that to being crushed

by your business. Yeah. And you know, the thing about it too, is, you know, if you work, if I, if I work for somebody and I don't show up today if I'm supposed to be there at 9 And I show up at 1030 I'm gonna probably hear about it. Yeah, right someone's gonna hold me accountable immediately if I don't show up till 1030 You know if my I Work from home most people work from home as they start a brand new business If you decide that you want to start working at 9 and you start at 1030 There's no one there to reprimand you at that time

But as it goes month after month after month, you're ingraining a bad routine into you. And the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So if you're not being accountable in your business, you're probably not being accountable in other places. And you're probably not bringing your full potential out in other places. So, you know, it's, it's important to make sure that you're holding yourself accountable. And it's not always about willpower. That's what people have to realize is, is that the best leaders are out there also receiving leadership from other people and holding themselves accountable by having other people that are talking to them or saying to their team that they're going to be in at a certain time. So it's

like, you know, it's not all about just in your own head. There is also bringing other people in. They can also help you with this. But really what we're talking about is holding yourself to a higher standard. Um, because most people haven't been taught to have great standards around their business. So that's kind of five different things we're going to talk about today. Yeah. And to that point, it's also a choice as a business owner to be in certain environments, be in, have a certain circle of influence, have a, you know, have a certain type of conversation that's happening, you know, have a certain type of conversation that's happening. Those are all choices that we make. And you could either surround yourself with people that will buy your bullshit, or you could surround yourself with people that will call you

into that higher standard. So I do think that also is a choice. And even if it's not direct self accountability, it's a, it's a self accountability system that comes from the environment. So I just wanted to name that because I think that's also important. Yeah. A hundred percent. So let's dive into the five things. So number one that we put down is act like it's a job. This is one thing that, that helps a lot of people that are working from home or that have their own business and they're brand new to it is if you treat it like a hobby, you're going to get paid like a hobby and hobbies don't pay really well. In fact, you usually lose money at hobbies.

So when we say treat it like a job is you should see that you should know the exact time that you need to be quote unquote at work and the time when you're quote unquote leaving work. So there's a lot of people that we've coached over the years. And we coach coaches who work from home. And sometimes you'll see them. I'm running a noon Eastern live and they literally look like they just woke up. And it's like, okay, you can do that if you want. Maybe they're in Pacific time and it's 9am for them or whatever it might be. But if you act like it's a job, you're going to get paid like it's a job.

So what I mean by that is before you go into quote unquote work, take a shower, get dressed, fix your hair, have a start time, have an end time, make yourself a cup of coffee, do a workout in the morning. Like there should be no difference between you going in and working for somebody else versus you going into your own job and working for yourself. Yeah. Well, everybody wants to be their own boss, but they don't want to be their own employee. That's true. Right. Yeah. But you know, if, if, if I think this is a really big point, because if you're a business owner, you've got to ask yourself, like, if I was my, my own employee, would I fire myself? And I, I mean, I could speak to it. Like there's been times where I asked myself that question, like, shit, yeah, I would fire myself right now. shit yeah I would fire myself

right now because yeah I didn't you know didn't show up on the time that I put it in my schedule you know I was a few minutes late and those are standards that we have to hold ourselves to as entrepreneurs and that's that's the challenging part about being an entrepreneur is that we're also our own employee so being the boss and the employee all at once, there's, you know, the, the, the, it's very easy to, to slip. Yeah. And if you think about that, this is how crazy it is. If you really want to go down that rabbit hole is that if somebody is going to go, all right, I'm working for somebody else. I'll show up at 8am. I'll leave at 5pm. And then they decided to work for themselves and they start at 1030, you know, they get done at

one and then they decide they want to go do something else. They're actually working harder at building somebody else's dream than their own dream. Yeah. And that's crazy to think that you would work harder for somebody else than you would for yourself simply because there's an accountability system set up that you have to yourself simply because there's an accountability system set up that you have to follow versus setting up your own accountability system for yourself. Yeah. Or a fear of getting fired versus the desire for success. Sometimes the fear of being fired is so much more than somebody's desire for success. And so, yeah, I think, you know, just bringing that attitude into every

single day. I love what you just shared about like, get ready for work, you know, treat it like a job. What time are you scheduled to start working? Like put it in your schedule, actually have it blocked off in your schedule, which kind of leads us to, leads us to the second point, which is protecting your time. Hey, when hiring gets hard, you need Indeed, the job site that makes hiring incredibly simple.

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features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to shopify.com slash dial. Once again, shopify.com slash dial and protecting your time, especially like when you're working from home, there's challenges. And, and if you're, if you've got family at home, if you've got, you know, other people that are, are there with you, there's going to be distractions. There's also the refrigerator that you just keep going over to, to just see what, what, what, what, what magically appeared, even though you just checked it an hour ago, frigging refrigerator magician. Yeah. A hundred percent. And so it's like working from home and I've, I'm totally, I've been totally guilty of this before where it's easy to find all the distractions. And so to protect your time and say, Hey, this is the time where I'm going to be really

intentional. Even if it's not like, you know, seven, eight hours straight. Um, you know, there's, there's techniques like the Pomodoro technique where you could go, you know, 25 minutes on five minutes off or 50 minutes on 10 minutes off. But the most important thing is hold, holding that time sacred, because that's the time that you're there to show up to the world, to make your impact, to do what it is that you set out to do when you first started your business. Yeah. And that also deals with other people as well. Cause one thing that's really interesting is people like, Oh, well Dean works from home. So I can call him and see if he'll do this for me. Like I've had many people who we've trained who are like, yeah, you know, I was supposed to do

X, Y, Z, but then my mom called me because she needed me to pick up her laundry. I'm like, yeah, you know, I was supposed to do X, Y, Z, but then my mom called me because she needed me to pick up her laundry. I'm like, would your mom ever call you at two o'clock on a Tuesday when you were for Google and be like, honey, will you go pick up my clothes for me? Like she wouldn't have the audacity to do that. So the difference is, and we, we talk about this is you teach people how to treat you and how to talk to you. So if you go and, and you know, you're like, oh yeah, I'll go do this for my mom because she's my mom. Like you can go get her laundry and her dry cleaning or whatever errand she has to run at 6 PM. But you have to have some sort of boundaries as to what people can expect of you when you're working from home, because working from home doesn't mean not working. Working from home means that's just the location that I'm working from, but I'm still getting shit done. Yeah.

Yeah, totally. Uh, well let's go into number three. Yep. This kind of deals with number two as well. Kind of flows perfectly into it. Yeah. And it's to actually use a calendar and use a schedule and a little hack here, uh, with using a calendar or schedule is to remind yourself every single day why this is important. So not just like, okay, I'm going to do prospecting from 8am to 10am. Then I'm going to do follow up calls from this time to this time. Then I'm going to do this paperwork from this time to this time. And if it's just in your work, in your calendar paperwork, well, that sounds pretty fucking awful. Sounds awesome. So remind yourself why all of this is important. What's the thing that you're after by doing all of this?

Oh, well, yeah, that's right. My goal is to have a six-figure year or a seven-figure year or whatever that goal is that you're excited about. Remind yourself of that. And don't just come up with the goal and write it down somewhere and never look at it again. Setting a goal. And this, this I think is really important when it comes to writing down what you're actually going to be doing throughout the day and scheduling your time, because it's also kind of like setting the intention, setting

the intention for the day. But it starts with setting the intention when you write, write down that goal and remind yourself of it every day. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the, the way to think about it as well is, you know, you, you're the most important person in your business. And if you had an amazing employee, like an incredible sales rep, and they wanted to have an appointment with you, would you miss that appointment? No, no, you'd be there every single time. Well, why, why would you miss an appointment with yourself? If you have in your schedule, it's something that you're going to be doing. Don't allow yourself to miss it. It's in, you know, block off time to do what needs to be done. And part of this is the, why it's important

in putting this in your calendar is the difference between focusing on the opportunity versus the obligation. So like one of the things that we teach people that we coach, so we coach coaches is we teach prospecting. Prospecting a lot of the times is not the sexiest part of their job. So if somebody thinks, Oh my God, I got to go prospect. That's not the most fun thing. But if you remind yourself why it's important, well, because there's somebody out there who needs me and whose life is going to change from working with me, it makes me more motivated to go and work for that because that's the opportunity. The obligation is I have to prospect for an hour. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So going into the next one, number four is being

productive versus busy. Yep. And you know, an example of this is going with the example that you just mentioned is blocking off that prospecting time. And maybe you blocked off two hours to do prospecting. But then it's easy in that prospecting time to be like, okay, well, you know, I kind of want to work on my, you know, handling objections. You need to get better at prospecting. Yeah, let me work on my script a little bit. Let me watch some YouTube videos on this. Let me see if there's any Grant Cardone videos about prospecting. Look at this podcast about podcast prospecting. I'm going to go ahead and listen to this. Yeah. So we tell ourselves instead of actually doing the thing that we, which we really

need to do, which actually moves the needle that we should learn about the thing that moves the needle. And we call that being productive when in reality, we're just keeping ourselves busy. Right. It's just occupying time, but not creating results. And that's the difference between being productive and being busy. Yeah. I always give the example of like, you know, imagine if LeBron James just watched all of the other teams, you know, watch the film, but never stepped on the court. He wouldn't be a great basketball player. And so there's so many people out there that are, I always say it's the difference between studying versus training, right? You can study another team or you can actually go out there and actually train. The only people are going to actually be going to improve and move

the needle, the ones that are actually training. So in your business, in your sales position, everything that you do, are you acting like you're getting, like if you're, if somebody's a coach out there and you're like, well, you know what I should do instead of prospecting, I should probably get myself better. Let me read a book on, on personal development. That's going to help me get better. Right? Like we're not saying, you know, we're not poo-pooing all over personal development and reading books and watching YouTube videos and trying to get better. What we're saying is those are not going to move the needle and move the needle immediately and bring in revenue to your business. Your business is a business. It needs revenue. It is the oxygen of your business to keep it alive. So don't trick yourself and tell

yourself that you're being productive when in reality, you're just being busy until five o'clock hits and then you're going to go ahead and take time off. Yeah. And it's also about having integrity with yourself. When we're in integrity with ourself, we show up better. We also, we show up better for ourselves. We show up better for other people. And we just feel more energized because anytime that we're out of integrity with ourself, it's always like our subconscious holds onto that shit. It's not like we just forget that that ever happened. As much as we don't think about it, it's there it's still taking up energy so whenever we're blocking off the time to do prospecting but instead we're reading about prospecting and trying to bullshit ourselves to thinking that oh well no i did some prospecting

learning you know i did some reading about three hours of prospecting yeah i had a very busy day yeah but i didn't do shit i didn't get anything any money right so yeah i think this is a very busy day. Yeah, but I didn't do shit. I didn't get to get any money. Right. So yeah, I think this is a very fine line that, you know, it's a very easy trap for, for entrepreneurs to, to, to fall into. And, you know, if you're listening to this and you're, you're guilty of it, Hey, welcome to the club. I am too. Right. We've all done this, but to build an awareness and be like, you know what? Yeah, they're right. That's not being productive. That's not actually serving me, even though it feels productive. It might feel like, okay, I got that dopamine hit because I just absorbed something new and that's sexy. And I feel like I'm moving forward and I'm learning and I'm growing. But if you're not doing the work, that's, that's the thing that's holding you back. Sometimes the most important thing that you can do as a business owner is just to embrace the suck.

Yep. Yep. Which brings us to point number five, which is surround yourself with people that will hold you to a higher standard than you hold yourself. It's easy to let ourselves slip, but it's harder to let yourself slip when there's people around you that are crushing it. When there's people around you that are holding yourself to a higher level. So if you have employees that work for you right now, how can you make a contest with them to make

sure, Hey, this is what I'm going to do. This is what I'm committing to you. I need you guys to hold me accountable to it. How can you get the people around you to help you with that? If you work by yourself, you know, do you have someone that lives with you? How can they hold you accountable? Do you have, you know, networking groups that you can go to and be around other people who have the, uh, have other businesses that make you, when you're looking at someone, you're like, man, I'm only doing 200 grand this year. This guy's doing a million. This guy's doing 3 million. It naturally makes you want to hold yourself to a higher standard by being around other people who are holding themselves to high standards as well. Yeah. I'm reminded of the time that we were in Cutco together and we were running offices. We had two, technically we were competitors,

but we were two of the top managers and really in the company. And every single morning we'd get into our office at 7am, which almost nobody else was doing, but we would get there at 7am on the way to the, on the way to the office, we'd call each other and, you know, pick each other's brains, you know, push each other, challenge each other, share ideas, kind of mastermind with each other. And it held us to that high standard where, you know, if I called you or you called me and one of us was on the way to, to the office and the other one was in bed, there'd be a conversation like, dude, what the hell are you doing? And being able to have that tough love with somebody and receive that kind of tough love when you're not showing up. Because

hey, we're human. There's gonna be times where we don't feel like it. And it's really important just to have that extra accountability. So you can lean on that and, and allow that to push you into your, your, your true potential. Because I believe this when you're in the right environment, which is also having the right relationships when you're in the right environment, it is natural to be in your highest potential, but the right environment isn't handed to you. You've got to create that. You've got to participate in that. Yeah. And what's crazy is, is we didn't even know when we were showing up into our offices at 8am, we didn't even know that other people were not showing up to the offices at 8am because we didn't even talk to them. We were just thinking that everybody, it took us about four months to find out that people

weren't doing that. But it's just like, we held ourselves to a high standard, just talking to each other. We didn't talk to anybody else because we didn't talk to anybody else. We weren't influenced to not be in the office at that time. And so this is the important thing about it is to realize that, you know, as an entrepreneur, it's a, it's a double-edged sword. Like you have the freedom to work as much or as little as you want. And if you only work when you feel like it, then you're probably going to have a pretty terrible looking bank account and ultimately not make the impact in the world that you know that you meant to. So if it is something that you truly want to do,

you're going to have to learn how to hold yourself accountable with yourself, by yourself, but also with other people around if possible as well. So what we hope is that you take these five tips, you learn how to hold yourself accountable, and then from that, you're able to grow your business like an actual business versus treating it like a hobby. So that's what we got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories.

Tag me in it. Rob Dow Jr. R-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Tag Dean in it. Kaizen Dean. K-A-I-Z-E-N-D-E-A-N. And I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better.

I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.