The Process of Self Accountability

 

Self-Accountability. This is one of the most useful and important skills one can have but somehow our social media dominated culture has almost made us less inclined to seriously practice this. For every mistake or bad choice we make, we can find a comforting thread/subsection of Twitter/Youtube/Instagram which acts as an echo chamber for our beliefs and subsequent actions. This is not to say that making bad choices makes somebody a terrible person, but it is to say that there is a serious danger in not challenging your own belief systems on a regular basis. There is also a danger in not interrogating your own choices and character on a regular basis. Of course, within limits, you don’t interrogate yourself to the stage of nit-picking everything that is wrong with you. But, thoughts are a good predictor of actions and actions become habits which become character which forms part of your identity. Hence, it is important that you spend some proper time and pay close attention to your own fallibilities and shortcomings as a human being.

Now, is this a difficult process to undergo? Absolutely. Nobody said that it was easy, but I’m certainly saying that it’s necessary. Now, the task of doing so requires scrutiny. You have to look at yourself and pick apart your actions. This requires a level of comfortability with oneself that needs to be worked on and nurtured. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you are not savaging yourself entirely, but you are instead saying “I love myself enough to acknowledge that I have things I need to work on and improve, because I deserve to be the best I can be in order to create the life that I deserve”. Once you see it from this kind of perspective, the task becomes a little less daunting. 

Then you can really start to hold yourself accountable for poor decisions that you made. Where did they come from and how can I learn from them to be better in future? I made some bad decisions at the start of this academic year, prioritized the wrong things and that had dire consequences for me. Academically my grades suffered, mentally I spiralled downwards, I wasn’t taking care of myself as well I should have been. At some point, probably just before the new year, I had to really confront the consequences of some of my poor choices. Was it all my fault that things panned out the way they did? Not necessarily. Was it productive for me to focus my attention on that? No. Why? Because there is something deeply liberating about taking life by the scruff of the neck and owning your problems. Taking control of your life, instead of allowing yourself to become a subdued passenger. I indeed had been allowing time to pass me by too easily. 

So, I forced myself to have difficult conversations with myself; to really look hard and long in the mirror. I won’t sugar-coat it, it led to me having a mini breakdown. But that was only temporary, I soon began to feel the benefits of my refreshed thinking and changes I had made to my life. This was through accepting responsibility and accountability for the consequences of choices I made. Nobody else but me made those choices, I helped create the conditions and realities that made me miserable and negatively impacted my life. But here’s the key thing, does that or did that make me a lost cause or a failure of a human being? Of course not. I was willing/eager to learn and improve so that I don’t repeat those same mistakes. That is a process you will want to get good at.