This week is all about accountability coaching/coaches.  Sure, we’ve heard of fitness coaches and/or nutrition coaches, and they each provide a measure of accountability, aka keeping you accountable for your goals.  So what exactly is accountability coaching as a standalone service?  What services do accountability coaches provide?

Let’s say you’ve ever wished you could pay someone to come along and slap donuts (or other less-than-optimal foods) out of your hand.  Your nutrition coach might give you a plan or advice along those lines, but sometimes you just don’t want to admit it to him or her when you’re struggling.  Or you don’t really need a full-blown custom meal plan, but you do need some helpful nudges and/or healthful tips or tricks to get or stay on track.  Or maybe you want to have a little voice in your ear pushing you to get more out of your workouts, especially if your athletic trainer or coach has assigned you a program but isn’t there to monitor you every day.  Or you’re looking for accountability help you stay on track with any success habit or life goal, from practicing the mandolin every day to competing in an Ironman. That’s accountability coaching.  It’s like having a really intrusive and pushy friend or family member, in the best kind of way, without the awkward emotional entanglement.

Let’s read on for some of the top benefits that accountability coaches bring.

Sharing the burden of your goals

We don’t often think of goals as a burden (or sometimes we do) – but the sense that we have undertaken a task alone, that we alone can accomplish can feel burdensome, even if we have the support of family and friends and even moreso when we don’t. Because even when our friends support us, they might not “get it” and they are not the ones doing the hard work.

A good accountability coach shares the burden of your goals with you. He or she provides independent, third party perspective and strategies to move past stick points and blind spots.

 

Community

Accountability coaches provide a sense of community. When the going gets tough, you’ve got a network to fall back on with someone who is in your corner (figuratively, at least, and maybe even literally), beyond your family, friends, training partners and even athletic coaches or personal trainers.  Let’s be honest; we don’t always even have the support of our family or friends with our goals.  Sometimes they think we’re crazy for even attempting to reach our biggest dreams; other times they are judgmental at worst and unsupportive at best.

Change is uncomfortable, scary and uncertain not just for the person going through it, but also for the people around you.  People might fear a changed relationship with you (and this CAN happen) and either subconsciously or consciously sabotage or undermine your efforts in the hopes of keeping things as they were.  A good coach can recognize these behaviours and patterns and provide you with strategies for working past them.

When you have victories, big or small, an accountability coach is there to celebrate with you (or remind you to celebrate yourself, because sometimes we need reminders about just how awesome we are).

 

Perspective

They provide perspective. Often we when are working toward a goal we develop some tunnel vision. This laser-like focus is useful in terms of discipline and motivation but it can also cause us to forget where we were when we started or three months ago or six months ago. If we’re constantly focused on where we need to go and fail to take stock of how far we’ve come, we can get a bit discouraged. Coaches provide the necessary perspective to remind us of all the wins we’ve had along the way and snap us out of a funk when we think we can’t make it the rest of the way.  They are also armed with experience and education to provide those little “tweaks” needed to bridge the gap from “good” to “great.”

 

Importance

Accountability coaches let you know that your goal matters to someone more than just you. And by extension, it means that YOU matter to someone else, too. Beyond your friend and family and training partners (and honestly, some people don’t have all or any of the foregoing), your accountability coach is part of your community, your TRIBE, as discussed earlier. They provide you with not only perspective and objective strategies but also added inspiration and motivation. Your goal isn’t just about you any more; it matters to your coach, too.

Since your goal matters to someone else, there are times you will push through discomfort for the sake of that person – many of us have experienced this in various ways with sacrifices we have made for our loved ones.  We wouldn’t have done it just for ourselves, but knowing that it was about something bigger than just us gave us the will to persevere.

 

Consistency

Consistency: Accountability coaches can help you achieve consistency with your fitness and/or nutrition.
Sure, we might crush our workouts…once a week. Or every few weeks. Or we kill it for a week and then lose steam.
Same with nutrition – maybe we’re super on point for a few days or Monday-Friday…but life happens. An accountability coach is there to encourage you, push you and teach you to get DAILY consistency, every day.

Consistency can be the difference between good and great. It’s better to get consistent moderate workouts than inconsistent killer workouts. All the better if you can get consistent killer workouts, supported by consistent nutrition choices!

Choose coaching. Choose consistency.  Choose yourself.  Choose victory!  Choose me!

Have a fit day!