Self-Accountability Is A Lie: The Real Reason You’re Not Taking Action

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The Business You Really Want | Self-Accountability

You know exactly what you should be doing in your business, but somehow you’re just not doing it. Sound familiar? You’re not alone, and it’s not a character flaw.

In this anniversary episode, Tonya Kubo and co-host Gwen Bortner are revisiting the third most-downloaded episode: Closing the Implementation Gap. What’s that? It’s the space between knowing what to do and actually doing it. It’s real, it’s permanent, and it happens to everyone.

Gwen explains why “self-accountability” isn’t actually a thing (you’re thinking of reliability), why guilt doesn’t work as motivation, and why most accountability systems are just fancy tracking. Real accountability requires two people and focuses on reflection, not judgment.

Tonya challenges the framework with the obvious question: if you let people change goals, how is that accountability? Together, they dig into when it makes sense to modify your goals versus when you’re just getting scared, why you need outside perspective from someone who actually cares about your success, and why generic advice often fails the nuance test.

The bottom line: If beating yourself up was going to work, it would have worked already. There’s a better way.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Self-Accountability Is A Lie: The Real Reason You’re Not Taking Action

One year ago, we launched The Business You Really Want, and you have made it clear which conversations matter most. Gwen, I’m still reeling from the understanding that we have been podcasters together for a year now. What I’m excited about is our number three episode. This is our number three most downloaded episode.

Our number four got several downloads. This one got in the probably like low 80s. It is about closing the implementation gap. This was episode 30. We tackled the elephant in the room that almost every business owner faces, if not every single business owner, which is exactly what you should be doing, but somehow you aren’t doing it. The knowledge is just not translating into action.

Gwen, here’s what I want to do with this one. Last one, what was next? We did the recap, and then we went deeper into a couple of things. This one, though, I really feel like when I re-listen to it, we only scratch the surface of what that gap between knowing and doing. I’m going to do a really quick recap. What I want you to do is I want you to just take us one step deeper and see how far we can go before the end of our time together. How does that sound?

Can I go 2 or 3, or 4 steps deeper?

Bridging the Implementation Gap

Yes, I’m trying to allocate as much time as I can for this. To refresh your memory, Gwen. In episode 30, what we talked about was that knowing is not the same as doing right. A lot of times, we go into this like learner addict mode, and we think that’s action. We think that’s business-building activity, but knowledge is not the same as action. Something that you said that I thought was really profound and also comforting is that it’s actually normal.

Knowledge is not the same as action. Share on X

It’s not a personal failing. You’re not a bad business owner because you invest way more time and knowledge than you do in action. It’s just the nature of who we are as entrepreneurs and what we do. The other thing you talked about is that we as entrepreneurs oftentimes default to thinking that the reason we’re not doing the thing is because we’re bad. We’re bad business owners, we’re bad people, we’re lazy, we’re whatever adjective we want to throw in. It’s really that either we don’t know how to do the thing that we really want to do.

We know, but we don’t understand the step-by-step. We lack the energy or the motivation to do the thing, or we just don’t have any accountability. We don’t have anybody checking in on us in our journey to do the thing. This is the episode, Gwen, where you defined true accountability as being both two-way and non-judgmental. Your big point in our conversation was that if you genuinely could do it yourself, whatever it is, you would have already done it. Gwen, what do you think about the implementation gap now?

All I know is it’s real and it’s going to exist forever. I don’t think anything has changed on it from that standpoint. It’s just a reality. The more I work with my clients, the more I talk with other people, the more I’m on other people’s podcasts, and we’re talking about it. This is a real thing. I think it’s a part of being a human. It’s definitely part of being an entrepreneur, but I think it may be a part of being a human.

I think different of us think about it differently. As you said, the word that we put in about why we’re not implementing, I think, has a lot to do with our upbringing and all sorts of other things. I don’t think anyone’s immune to it either. I think often we think people are immune to it because they’re very actively doing other things, but there are often things that they should be doing that they’re still not doing, either, or that they know they need to do that they aren’t actually doing.

I think this is part of nature. It’s one of the reasons I have gotten so focused. I’m going to say, have refocused the business. It’s not that we actually changed anything that we’re doing, but we’ve changed how we’re talking about what I do is really about the accountability piece. Anyone who says they’re self-accountable isn’t actually using the phrase correctly. What they are is they’re dependable, they’re reliable, they’re disciplined, all of those things. Accountability is a two-way street, like we talked about in episode 30.

It’s a process of reporting and reflecting. It’s not just about, I do the thing? As happens with so many words and so many things, we have taken the full meaning and we have condensed it down to a very tiny piece of that meaning. We have taken accountability down to did I do it or not? And if I didn’t, I’m in trouble. That’s not accountability. Accountability is saying, “Did I do it or not?” Let’s figure out what either made it successful or made it not successful.

It’s not just that I did it, “Yay, you.” That’s part of it, but also it’s like, this is a place that you’ve been working at and you’ve grown and you’ve done all these things. That’s also part of the accountability process is a reflection back. Not just when you have failed, but also when you have succeeded and are able to say, “This is something I can replicate again and again,” or “I can take this and apply it to this other scenario.” We’re talking now that really my primary focus is helping hold people accountable in a non-judgmental way.

Now, does it mean I’m not doing any operations stuff? No, because most people need accountability in their business operations. I’m still doing a lot of conversations around the business operations, but it’s because that’s where the accountability needs to be taken place. We’ve talked about it before that, and you can talk about it better. Marketing has its own self-accountability loop because we get reflection back based on how other people are responding to it.

It’s a built-in feedback loop.

Accountability really is about a feedback loop. It really is. As I said, we have shortened it to mean, I do it or did I not do it? I don’t think that’s accurate.

 

The Business You Really Want | Self-Accountability

 

Beyond Two-Way: The Investment In Growth:

The other point that you made in the episode that I think is important to drill into a little bit more here, because in episode 30, it was very much a new idea. Most people who read to that episode and reached out to us had not heard this before. That is that it’s not enough for it to be two-way, for there to be another person involved.

That other person has to have an investment in your growth, your success, your goal, and reaching it. If they’re not invested, then I don’t think they’re motivated to hold you accountable. It’s too easy to just be like, whatever or we’ve all had the accountability program that really consists of us filling out some online form, and the question being, did you do it or not? That’s how we hold you accountable.

It's not enough for it to be two-way; the other person involved has to have an investment in your growth, success, and reaching your goal. If they're not invested, they won’t be motivated to hold you accountable. Share on X

Back to we’ve shortened it to that. In our accountability process, we haven’t filled out an online form.

We do.

That in and of itself is not the problem. It is about the fact that we take time to read and reflect on what we’re seeing. That’s where the difference piece is, back to its part of the feedback loop of it. That can be done without being accusatory, without doing it under guilt, without doing it under shame. Doing it non-judgmentally is the piece that I think surprises a lot of people when they actually experience it.

I did a podcast episode quite some time ago with Sonia Narvaez, and she talked about that she was a little uncomfortable because she was expecting it to have guilt and shame, and it didn’t. She had to also get comfortable with like, “No, she’s not going to guilt me or shame me into doing anything because my answer always is I cannot make you do anything. I have no control over.” We really don’t have control over any humans.

You have small humans and I know that you will say this, that even though you potentially have as much control over another human as anyone, you also know you still do not have control over another human but so much so more so when, you it’s not family, it’s not any of these other things. I cannot make you do anything. You have to choose to do it, but I can help you figure out how to get past the learning and into the doing, how to get past the decision and into the action, how to get past the starting point and get out of the blocks.

I can't make you do anything. You have to choose to do it. Share on X

The “Jerk Question”: When Judgment Isn’t Needed:

I’m going to ask the jerk question here because I do that. I hear all sorts of stuff. My first jerk question is, but if you’re not showing some type of judgment, if you’re not showing some type of disappointment, how are they ever going to move forward? How do you get them to move forward?

I don’t need to show any disappointment because they’re already disappointed in themselves. They’ve got plenty of that voice already in their head. They do not need that voice. If that voice was all they needed, they would have already done it because that voice is living inside their head all the live long time. I don’t know any entrepreneurs, and I really don’t know a whole lot of people who are like, “I’m going to see if I can fail today.” That’s like not a thing. Undoubtedly, there are people out there like that. Somebody, but they’re not listening to my podcast. I can assure you that. This is not something that they’re listening to. These are not my people.

We are not for them.

They have never found me. They are never going to find me. I am not worried about that. The people who are reading don’t need that. They’ve already got that from themselves and potentially other sources, which I’m not even going to try and address. That’s not the thing that’s preventing them from doing it. It is additional knowledge, not the knowledge that they have, but the additional knowledge.

It’s the understanding, it’s the motivation, and really saying, “Is this the right thing?” It’s not about I have to force you to do it. It’s understanding, so what is keeping you from doing it? Which is a completely different question. What is keeping you from doing the thing? That’s when we can start thinking about it differently. It’s like, “What’s keeping me from doing the thing is I don’t know how to do the first step.”

Let’s see what we can figure out how to do the first step. What’s keeping you from doing the thing? I just really hate the idea of doing this thing. Do we need to do this thing at all? Maybe not. Guilting them into it won’t ever change the fact that they still don’t want to do this thing. If it needs to be done, if it needs to be done, let’s pick something that they maybe are not wanting to do, but absolutely needs to be done, like file their taxes.

We start looking at how we can still get that done with the minimal amount of your involvement. Still needs to be done, but how do we do it in a way that we can still get it done, where you don’t have to hate it? It’s really not about, “I need to make you feel bad. I need to force you to do something.” I think most of the time that we’re actually not taking action on things is some combination of not really knowing the additional pieces or not really being motivated to do it for a good reason. Maybe we just toss it out.

Most of the time that we're not taking action on things, it's some combination of not really knowing the additional piece or not being motivated to do it for good reason. Share on X

To that point, if you’re proposing that they just toss it out, how is that accountability?

It’s because we’ve reflected on whether or not it was something they really should be doing in the first place. I’m not saying we get to toss out everything. As I said, you don’t get to toss out not paying your taxes. You do get to toss out, I’m going to post on all five major social media platforms three times a day. Someone told them that’s what they needed to do, and that was going to make a difference.

It’s like, “It would only make a difference if that was motivating for you, you could do it consistently. It’s not going to do anything other than make you feel guilty and have you less productive than everything else you do.” Let’s reevaluate that. I’m not saying don’t post on anything, although that could be an option too, but let’s reevaluate what needs to be thrown out.

Redefining Goals: Is it Accountability?:

I’m thinking the reason I asked that question is that I’m thinking back to your interview with Sonia on her podcast. One of the things that she had talked about was that she spent a lot of time dreading the process because of her fear. It’s like rejection-sensitive dysphoria, like her fear of what you might say to her. There was also this feeling of regret, remorse, of picking the wrong goal.

As she got deeper into the accountability process, that’s when she was able to recognize through your two-way conversations that what she was doing was not really what she wanted to be doing, and the consistent action was going to get her to a place that she didn’t like. I know for a fact that there are a lot of people out there who offer accountability, but they hold you to that goal very rigidly. I can imagine that there is somebody listening who’s like, “If you give me permission to change the goal midway, that cannot be accountability.”

It can if it’s the wrong goal.

Now we have that to do?

That’s the piece that’s tricky, and why it has to be a conversation. Why it actually have to be reflection, and why it cannot be just a checkbox? Sometimes we don’t know it’s the wrong goal until we’ve started after it because there’s no way to know until you’ve gone partway down. All of a sudden, you get partway down and you’re like, “This is not at all what I thought it was.” Going to hit the goal just to hit the goal is a stupid goal.

Fair.

If it’s not where you want to be. Now, sometimes we say that because we get scared, but that’s back to true accountability as reflection and saying, “Are we scared because it’s unknown, or are we scared because we’ve had enough other experience to say, this is not where I want to be?” Back to reflection. You’ve got to have somebody who can actually reflect with you on that.

As you’re saying that, I’m smiling because I’m thinking back to, I don’t even know what episode number it was off the top of my head, but when we did the live 531.

When we did this with you, I still love that episode.

That one. I don’t know that I love the fact that that lives in posterity, but no surprise, it’s not in our top four most downloaded episodes, okay? During that time, one of my goals, I think it was my three-year goal, was I wanted to work twenty hours a week. That’s the goal I’d set. That had been a goal that I had set a few years ago.

Working towards just twenty hours a week. As I started making some of the shifts that we concluded I needed to make in order to get there, I realized that it’s not that I want a true twenty-hour work week. I just want a time-bound limit to my work week. I don’t want to be client-facing for more than twenty hours a week. I don’t want to be working on a deadline for more than twenty hours a week. I am quite content working 35 hours a week if those 35 hours aren’t all FaceTime.

Back to you, you couldn’t quite get there until you got down the path to realize, “That’s not exactly it.” That’s the thing. Sometimes it’s a complete retraction of the goal, but sometimes it’s just a modification of the goal. Yours, I would consider a modification, not a complete retraction.

It just gets me thinking about the profitability piece. Somebody comes in and their goal is usually it’s more profit. They first think it’s more revenue. They come in, they want more revenue. This is something I’ve seen happen several times since we started working together. Where they get to the end of the year and they feel disappointed because their sales are down. Every time sales are down, and I’m just going to let you finish this, what is up?

Their profitability is up because we’ve been taught that income, sales, revenue, whichever word you want to use, is tied directly to profitability. That is not true. They are related, but they are not absolutely parallel related that if the income goes up, the profitability goes up. It is possible for the income to go down and the profitability to go up. There’s a point that will no longer work. That doesn’t go on forever. You cannot do it forever, but it is making assumptions that may not be true. Whenever we’re setting goals, we’re totally crystal balling.

We’re guessing. It’s always a guess, no matter how good we are at setting goals, it’s always a guess. There are so many things out of our control, see the previous episode. We’re making a guess. Allow it to be a guess, not a proclamation, not an absolute. The same thing can happen on the other side, that the guess is I want to do X, and we instantly get there. It’s like that wasn’t really a goal. That was just an activity I needed to do. All I needed was to define it, that I just really need to do that activity.

Not only was it just an activity, but it wasn’t even a thirteen-week activity.

It was a relatively easy activity. I’ve just been avoiding it. You talked about that sometimes things get put off long enough that when you actually get to them, they’re way bigger in your head. I was like, “I thought this was going to take like 3 days, and it took like 2 hours.”

The Unexpected Value Of Accountability:

It’s thinking back to the 531 episode, I had spent so much time wanting a twenty-hour work week that I never stopped to ask myself, A, “Do I still want that?” or B, “Why do I want it? What will it get me?” I thought that was really interesting in this idea of how accountability plays into that, because I think accountability plays into our success way more than we think it does.

 

The Business You Really Want | Self-Accountability

  

It absolutely does.

Your definition that requires outside perspective, I think, is also new information and 100% correct, and important because going back to the idea of the business owner who is depressed because their sales are down. I don’t know very many people who would look at their numbers and point out that profitability was up. They would stop at sales being down. I know this because I had a conversation.

I was in a group of six business women, and it was right after tax season. One of them was practically in tears. She’s like, “I think I’m going to have to close my business. I had my lowest year ever.” I’ve never had sales so low. Everybody was like, “Me too. The economy and this and that.” Only because I work with you, not because I’m brilliant or smart or anything. I said, “Have you looked at how much you paid yourself?”

I love that you’re able to do that, and yes, you actually are brilliant, but I do know I’ve gotten your brain asking different questions that it used to, but you are brilliant.

It’s funny because I, since I’ve started working with you, stopped looking, I still look at how much revenue I made.

It’s still an element.

I first look at how much I should pay myself, and I compare that to the last few years. Because if I made less this year than I did last year, but I paid myself more, I’m happy, and I’m not setting any goals based on revenue. I’m just like, “How do I keep this?” If I made more and paid myself less, I know I got a big problem.

I’ll say it’s a piece of data. It’s not necessarily a problem, but you have to be really aware of what that is telling you.

My point, Gwen, is that not one woman in that room had looked at how much she paid herself compared to the prior year.

Accountability, thinking outside, looking at it from a different perspective. Part of the reason we talk about outside perspective is, we’ve used this phrase before when you’re inside the jar, you cannot read the label. You cannot read the label from inside the jar. It’s a true thing. Often, folks are trying to get perspective from other folks who are either in the exact same jar or in similar enough jars that they cannot see the label either.

When you're inside the jar, you can't read the label. Share on X

I’ve had folks say, “My spouse, my sister, my fill-in, any close friend or relative is my accountability partner.” It’s like, “Yeah, but they also have their own agenda that’s closely related to you, no matter what their best intentions are.” They do. We talk about that you help hold me accountable, but you’ve now been in the business long enough that it’s not an optimal accountability partner for me. We hold each other accountable within the team, which is useful. You get benefits from the business. You’ve got a slightly warped perspective of it because you are one of my contractors.

You also have been in it long enough that some of the things that we probably should be questioning are not necessarily getting questioned just because it makes sense. You help make the decision. Of course, this decision makes sense. Not that you’re a bad person, for heaven’s sake, that’s not even close, but because you also work with lots of other clients, you still have enough outside perspective that provides. Generally, another employee in the business, particularly someone who works for you, does not have enough outside perspective.

Let me think how to say this. This is true in marketing, too. One of the biggest things that frustrates me to know, and it frustrated me when I was working in higher ed, especially because everybody wants to be new and different. They want to do the newest thing. In higher ed at the time, everybody wanted to go viral.

They want to be new, they want to be different. In order to figure out how to do that, they’re looking at their peers. They’re looking at what all the other universities are doing, and they’re going, “Let’s do that.” It’s like, “That’s not new and different. That’s just copying somebody.” Early on in my career, I just started looking at other industries. That’s how I even found really like online business is cause I started looking at email marketing and some tactics that they were doing in email marketing to think of how we could apply that into public higher ed?

Could it apply to private higher ed? How did that work? That’s what allowed the university I was working for to actually do new and different things. Taking this back to the clients we serve and you, think part of it, and it’s not something you talk about a lot as the marketing professional on this team, I would say you don’t talk about it enough, is that you have eyes and experience in close to 50 different industries.

Over my career, which has been fairly long at this point, and because most of my career was in some form of consultant, freelance, whatever, in a given year, I was not in the industry. Even if I was deeply embedded in a particular company, I was still usually embedded in 2 or 3 different industries again and. It does allow me to look at things with very fresh eyes.

The phrase that came to me a number of years ago when someone said I was an out-of-the-box thinker is I laughed and I said, “No, I just know what is in everybody’s box.” I can look at something and say, “This is like this, but not quite like this. What if we applied this?” It’s like, “No one’s ever done that.” It’s like, “No, actually there are people who do this all the time and have been doing it for decades, just not in this industry.”

That is something that I think, if people thought about it long enough, they would recognize how important that is, and they would ask different questions of the people they take courses from, the people they hire. Often, I still see like, I’m going to use marketing examples, because that’s my life. You can trust me to help you get to 10,000 email subscribers because I got to 10,000 email subscribers.

The Nuance Of Knowledge: Why Context Matters:

You can trust me to build your health and wellness business because I am a health and wellness professional, or I’ve been working in the health and wellness space for X amount of time. What you might need is somebody who works in an industrial industry to help you figure out, like, how can you be different than other health and wellness professionals? What else do you think we need to talk about when it comes to accountability, the implementation gap, that difference between knowing and doing?

Where you are just when I think is a really important place to go, I think that’s one of the problems with the implementation gap, and I’m overgeneralizing here, but most of us are getting our knowledge through books, some in a conference-like environment, not necessarily a conference. When I say that includes workshops and trainings. All of those things. Books, some conference environment for a twin person, I don’t care, or possibly like YouTube videos, Google search.

These things were starting to get information from AI, but all four of these have the same issue, which means they’re pulling from existing knowledge. Often, the implementation gap comes back to my favorite phrase, yes, you know it, context matters. If you’ve watched more than one episode or if you even watched our pre-trailer trailer, where I say context matters 8,000 times in 40 different outfits. Context matters.

Just because you have a health and wellness business and they have a health and wellness business, and you’re even offering what appears to be the exact same product, that solution they have doesn’t feel right. I’m going to use the term feel in this case, that it’s more of an instinctive thing, so you know what to do, but it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.

I think that’s another place where this implementation gap comes in, and you don’t know how to get from I know and what I feel and how to reconcile them. Sometimes it’s because your feeling is completely right. The thing that you need to do is nothing like what they need to do or what they have done. I work with a number of businesses that, technically, on the outside look awfully similar.

These are typically are product-based businesses because they’re easier to look similar. They look very similar. I am never talking to the owners of each of these businesses about the same thing at the same time because their context is different. Even though they generally have a lot of the same problems but it’s because it doesn’t feel right to them or they’ve got this slightly different nuance about it. The nuances can be small.

The nuances can be the difference between I own this building and I lease this building. Even if they’re leasing, it’s the exact same square footage, and they’re selling pretty much the exact same product. Those nuances can make a difference. Sometimes that’s where that implementation gap comes in is there’s this nuanced piece. That’s hard to get in any of those other environments. You cannot get the nuance in a book.

You rarely can get the nuance in a convention workshop, or whatever training. You said maybe you get a little of it. You can definitely not get the nuance out of AI, even though they’re like, “It’s my own personal GPT. It knows everything about me.” No, it does not. It is not even close to knowing everything about you to be able to deal with the nuance. What was the last, my fourth one, books, training, AI courses, hardly ever able to get to the nuance.

That’s where that accountability piece to say, “Let’s help reflect on what the nuance is between knowledge and implementation.” Often, that’s really the only thing that’s in the gap is the nuance. The nuanced difference between what I know and what I feel and know, and how do we get across that gap? Back to, do we actually need to get across that gap?

Based on that, I’m going to ask you the same question I asked you in the last episode, which is of everything we’ve talked about, what are the three things that you want somebody reading to take away from this episode if they take away nothing else?

No matter how disciplined, how responsible, how whatever words you want to use around that, everybody needs accountability because accountability is reflection with somebody else who cares and is paying attention. When you’re looking for real accountability, so that was one, real accountability takes some outside perspective and some experience.

You cannot be accountable to someone who doesn’t have that much experience because they cannot help you get past this nuance thing that we were just talking about between the implementation and the knowledge gap. That knowledge-to-implementation piece takes more experience than I know one way, because when it doesn’t fit the one way, then it’s not very useful for you. The third thing is that everybody struggles with the implementation gap. Everybody struggles with it. I’m good at doing a whole lot of this stuff.

I struggle with it too. It’d be a total lie to say I don’t struggle with it. The reason it appears that I struggle with it less is because I’m aware that I struggle with it. I’m not afraid to admit it and do the things that I need to do to help me get past it. It’s the one place that I probably have a superpower, and I think a lot of it has to do with age, quite honestly, is that I don’t beat myself up over it. I say, “This is a problem. How can I get past this thing?” Usually, it is some version of accountability that gets me past it, but I don’t beat myself up over it because I do think it’s the nature of being human.

Gwen, this is so good. I am really glad that we spent the time focusing on this particular episode, really on the accountability piece, because it is so different from what a lot of people hear. Also, because of nothing else, like what I hope anybody reading gets out of this episode that beating yourself up definitely is not the way to get yourself to do a thing. Even if you’re sick of yourself, even if you’re sick of hearing yourself roll the same goals over and over again, there’s no good that comes from that.

As we said before, if that was going to work, it would have already worked.

Exactly. Here’s what I would love is I would love it if you are reading, I would just love your take on accountability. Does this resonate with you? Does it not resonate with you? I’m not hearing a lot of people talk about accountability in this way, but maybe you are. One way or the other, just email me at Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. That’s Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. I hope you will stay tuned for our next episode, where we go to our number two most downloaded episode of our first year as podcasters. Gwen, we are on to the next one. I just want to say thank you, everybody, for reading.

 

Mentioned in This Episode

 

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.