If you want to be successful, you must take accountability for your mistakes. Failure is inevitable. Everyone fails, and we often fail multiple times a week. We get up too late, we skip the gym, we turn something in late because we procrastinated. The good news is that we can turn a failure into a learning moment—essentially by learning from our mistakes. How can you expect to grow and become a better person if you can’t hold yourself accountable? If you can’t even admit that you’ve failed?
The beautiful thing about accountability is that you’re given a second chance. A fresh start. An opportunity to show up and do something differently. But you have to admit to yourself that you did something wrong, in order to figure out how to do it right.
It’s only April and I’ve already failed many, many times. It’s affecting my mental health and it’s affecting my business. I knew that something needed to change. I had to come to terms with the fact that I’ve been…lazy. No one ever wants to be called lazy. It’s not a very sexy trait. But I’m being honest with myself. I’ve been lazy. There are things I could have done, but chose not to because I didn’t feel like it. And every aspect of my life were affected by those decisions.
I think one of the best ways to hold yourself accountable is to create a system of accountability. Create a plan detailing how you will move forward and how you will do things differently. I’m gonna show you how I hold myself accountable every Sunday with a simple template I made in Notion.
This is it! This is how I do it every Sunday. Let me break down each section to give you an idea of how I use this template for accountability.
😌 the good
Under this section, I write down every win and every good thing that happened the past week. I write down everything. Big or small, every ‘win’ goes under this section. This helps me balance out the next section, where I talk about every fail lmao
😵💫 the bad
I mean this is pretty self-explanatory. I write down every ‘bad’ thing that happened within the past week. This includes stuff like forgetting to email someone back or spending beyond my budget. Again, big or small, every ‘failure’ goes under this section.
☁️ learnings
This section is directly linked to ‘the bad’. For every ‘bad’ item that I wrote down, I write down a little blurb about what I learned from that experience. This way, I’m not just feeling bad about myself—I am also holding myself accountable and creating actionable solutions.
⭐️ values check in
In this column, I like to check in with myself and my values. Everyone’s values might be different in this column, but the ones that I chose to put in my weekly template are:
mind & body – exercise, meditation, medication, etc.
craft – acting, content creation, writing
playfulness – hanging out with friends, dinners, playing nintendo switch, etc.
order – organization, communication, tidiness, etc.
Under every value, I write a few bullet points about how I did or didn’t prioritize my values within the past week. If I exercised when I said I would, I’d write that down. If I said I would film 2 videos this week but I didn’t, I’d write that down. This helps me stay accountable for multiple aspects of my life to help me balance life & work!
If you already have Notion and you’re interested in using this template for yourself, you can duplicate it here.
Happy Accountability!