The dark side of accountability

The eleventh newsletter is about intrinsic motivation

Because I’m a life coach and a self-improver, I’m surrounded by people who value personal growth.

This feels awesome, like a warm blanket for my spirit.

Regularly talking to people like that is inspiring and motivating, and I gulp it up. The energy, the support, the outlook, I love everything about it. Except one thing…

Accountability.

The word is thrown around a lot and to put it softly, I’m not a fan.

Someone holding me accountable? Uh, I don’t think so. A sweaty irritation immediately starts to rise as I drop my weight like an authority-defying 2-year-old being dragged through the aisle of a supermarket.

The limit of accountability

Despite my accountability-allergy, when diving deep into the self-development ocean, I’ve taken part in more than a few courses, workshops and challenges, where accountability was one of the touted features.

The latest one being Ryan Holiday’s “2023 New Year New You challenge”. A 21-day course of daily, stoic-inspired prompts. It was the fourth time I took the challenge and once again, it was a great way to start the new year strong, together with a vibrant community of like-minded folks.

But a familiar sound reverberated through the virtual hallways: ‘I need the accountability’, people say.

And I get it, getting started is hard.

An accountability partner is great for starting a new habit (or breaking an old one). When I’m getting something off the ground that is hard and heavy, I need all the help I can get. Making sure to start stacking up those first small successes when my confidence is still climbing has proved to be an excellent strategy. For the short-term.

But endlessly leaning on accountability seriously undermines long-term progress. It inhibits the search for a deeper purpose and the cultivation of intrinsic motivation.

If accountability is the only reason you’re getting something done, it’s a crutch and you're doomed to fail long-term. Sorry Ryan.

Bad coach

As coaches we are taught to help our clients make a plan and ask what they’re ready to commit to. And then next week, we’re supposed to check what they ended up doing. Holding them accountable.

Unsurprisingly this has never sat well with me and I haven’t incorporated this into my personal coaching style and practice.

There’s nothing wrong with asking people to ‘give account’ of what they did. It’s very helpful to look back and start noticing what worked well and what didn’t work so well. That’s how we create awareness around our behavior so we can grow.

But holding someone else accountable isn’t helpful and can be destructive in the long-term.

It creates a sort of purpose-finding-laziness and a dependence on the coach or accountability partner. People start doing things for others because they want to be ‘a good boy’ and only stick to a habit as long as the accountability partner is there. This blocks the search for authentic, independent, intrinsic motivation.  

Intrinsic motivation is based on your values. Things like growth, purpose, curiosity, self-expression, learning, etc. Extrinsic motivation is based on external rewards, like money, prestige, praise, or (fear of) punishment.

When you help people find their intrinsic motivation through discovering and reaffirming their values, they’ll pick up their own responsibility because they have a purpose or a mission. Enforcing strictness and discipline will only stand in the way of that.

When I look back at my ‘history of habits’, the ones that I was able to stick with long-term were the ones that had personal meaning behind them. Not some fear of losing face, ridicule, or punishment, which ‘holding someone accountable’ often does.

When they didn’t stick, my intrinsic motivation wasn't high enough over a longer period of time to keep them going. Maybe I relied on the initial enthusiasm, maybe I even had some support, but I ended up dropping them because 'life got in the way'.

Accountability wouldn’t have changed that, it would just have made me allergic.