Week 7: Accountability Report

Whether you are investing, pursuing a new job, teaching your child a second language, or just trying to read more books than you did last year, it is often said that one of the most important things you can do to be successful in whatever you are endeavoring to do is sit down on a weekly basis and do a written assessment of yourself and your situation.

Are your investments performing the way you want them to? Are you finding the job openings that you are interested in? More importantly, are you getting the interviews that you want and are you nailing them? Is your child responding to your teaching methods and materials? Are you carrying books around with you everywhere you go and actually reading them, or are they just taking up space in your bag?

If you don’t sit down on a regular basis and actually take a good look at these things, you’ll never really know. Yes, you may have an idea that your plans are working well, or average, or not so well, but unless you take the time on a regular basis to thoroughly analyze the reasons behind the performance of your actions/plans, you won’t be able to do two very important things.

1. You won’t be able to maximize the behaviors, actions, and habits that are most beneficial to your goals.

2. You won’t be able to pinpoint the things that are keeping you from achieving what you want to achieve, which means that you won’t be able to make the changes that you need to make, or try the new things that you need to try.

The Benefits of Doing a Written Assessment:

Why write about your progress, or your lack thereof? Why not just think about it, or talk to a friend about it?

There is something about the act of writing itself that causes us to think at a different pace and in different ways. When we write, our thoughts must slow to the pace at which our fingers are able to move across a keyboard or to the speed at which we can scribble words onto a page. When our thoughts are slowed, they can become more focused. In the process of reading and rereading the words we have written, we often rethink the thoughts that we had and their wording and their emphasis changes. Sometimes, we become sidetracked on beneficial detours. Sometimes we locate problems and solutions that could have easily slipped our attention had we only been thinking or talking about them.

Writing gives us a record that we can continue to work with and refer to in the future. It gives us a transcription of our actions and their results. It shows us where we have been and what we have done along the way. And by doing so, writing helps us, possibly more than anything else, to make the decisions we need to make regarding how we should best proceed.

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This Week’s Accountability Report

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Exercise:

Six out of seven days: I’m very happy to say (and a little tired as well) that I exercised on each of these six days. Not only that, but on one day, I even exercised after shoveling snow for close to one hour and on another day, I did two workouts: in the morning I exercised the way that I typically do, and in the afternoon I walked and ran for a combined thirty minutes in a walking pool (I also played with my kids in the pool for another hour and a half).

Weight:

Today, I finally broke the 81 kg mark. This morning, I weighed in at 80.8 kg. I know that I could easily wake up tomorrow and be over 81 kg or even 82 kg again, but that doesn’t take anything away from the feeling that I got this morning when I looked down at the scale and saw that I weighed less than 81 kg. My weight is changing slowly, and in my opinion, that is good. I am beginning to feel confident that if I keep up my current exercise habits, my weight will slowly and steadily move in the direction I want it to.

Waist Measurement:

Once again, I didn’t take a waist measurement this morning. It simply slipped my mind as I was trying to get out the door.

Looking Forward/Looking Back:

I think I can safely say that without doing these weekly accountability reports, I would not still be exercising today. Taking the time to examine my feelings and habits each week has really helped me to get this far. Last week, I was having a bad week, but as soon as I did my weekly check-in and posted it here, I felt better. Since then, I have been riding a new wave of motivation and determination.

For this upcoming week, I just want to continue trying to workout on a daily basis (not including snow shoveling and other activities like that), even if it is only a light workout. I also want to try getting into a gym at least once. I recently discovered that there is one just down the street from my children’s nursery school, so I should be able to go there for thirty minutes before picking them up.

While this sounds easy enough, it isn’t. I have to align my schedule and my plans with my wife’s schedule as well as my kids’ schedules. So, to make this step more attainable, my real goal for this week is to prepare a gym bag that I can easily carry with me at any time. When I have my gym bag prepared, I will be much more capable of attaining my ultimate goal, which is to get to the gym.

Thank you for reading and giving me your support.