Motivational monologue about personal accountability and taking ownership of one’s life. The speaker urges listeners to become the “CEO” of their lives by owning responsibilities (finances, relationships, health), setting plans, tracking progress, and using social and coaching structures for accountability. Personal anecdotes illustrate how becoming a coach or leader raises one’s standard and enforces congruence between values and actions.
Chapters
You own your dream. You own that impulse in your heart that says to get better once you are the CEO of your life, not just the follower. Everything shifts for us, and that's accountability. That we're personally responsible doesn't mean all the things that happened to us didn't happen to us by other people. It doesn't mean there's not some bad guys out there. What it means is our next move. We've got to chart it. We've got to be congruent with those actions, and we have to have some sense of accountability. Accountability means, you know what? My credit card bills, those are mine. I'm accountable for handling those instead of avoiding them. I am personally responsible to deal with these. Even if I didn't cause all these problems, I am now the person who, if I'm going to clear the problems off my plate, I got to take some personal accountability for that. I am now the person who gets to choose my attitude today. I am now the person who expects myself to follow a higher standard and to follow through accountability. Personal responsibility or personal accountability says, okay, I'm going to own this reality. I'm going to plan my way through it. I'm going to follow through and I'm going to set up checks and balances to make sure I do that. Where that's setting goals and tracking and measuring the goals and my own behavior towards those goals, or getting a coach, sharing socially in the community, or talking with your friends and family and putting it out there, now your butt's on the line and you got to do it. I think that's what's important. So often we say, you know, I have dreams. I'm not going to tell anybody. And often in person development, you hear people say, no, tell people. Because once you verbalized it, you can realize it. Once you verbalized it and it's socialized now, there's an expectation you follow through. Here's my question to you. Do you have enough expectations to follow through? Often when I work with CEOs as their executive coach, what ends up happening is they have that kind of. Maybe they have investors, and their investors expect them to stay on path. Maybe they need to hit their quarterly goals. But what ends up happening is sometimes they start feeling like their accountability is driven by others. And often high performers feel all these obligations. They are accountable, but they're accountable to obligations that other people have set. And if you want a real fast track to being demotivated, stop setting your own plan. Stop setting your own accountability. This is why for me, as I Told you. I. I go in my plan section of Growth Day every day. I look at a lot of those plans. I'm like, I'm behind on this. But I don't get discouraged. I just make a plan on how to handle it. Sometimes I look at it, I'm like, I don't like my score here with my friends. I went three months without really talking to my friends. I don't get down on myself. I make a plan. I don't fall prey to that victim part of myself that says, but all these other things are happening, and oh, my God. I just go, okay, got it. I don't like that I'm the only one in charge of the ship. You're the only one in charge of those scores. And once you realize that, you're like, okay, I'm accountable. What's my plan? Because sometimes you've left your accountability to your boss. You left your accountability to your manager, you left your accountability to your spouse, you left your accountability to the kids. You left your accountability to somebody else, and you didn't internally own it anymore. If you've ever been to my seminars before, I'll talk about this for a while, and I. And that'll get the whole audience up. We'll play this music, we'll do the lights, and all of a sudden we'll have everyone start shouting, I own my dream. I own my dream. I own my dream. To help them realize again they're the owner of their life. You own your dream. You own that impulse in your heart that says to get better. Once you are the CEO of your life, not just the follower, everything shifts for us, and that's accountability. That we're personally responsible doesn't mean all the things that happened to us didn't happen to us by other people. It doesn't mean there's not some bad guys out there. What it means is our next move. We've got to chart it. We've got to be congruent with those actions. And we have to have some sense of accountability, either by having our goals and measuring it, or social accountability. This is why I recommend everybody. Obviously, I'm the guy who certifies coaches, which I'll talk about. But it's like, I recommend everyone get a coach at some point because you need someone to have that sounding board who asks you next time where you're at in your development or in your progress or where you're stunted or whether you're crushing it and helps you tease out those lessons so that you stay motivated and clear. About the next steps. And that's why I think it's so powerful. Often the biggest shifts in our life happen when we're accountable. Sometimes it happens when you work with a coach or some of you, you become a coach. I've never been more accountable for my life or had so many other people become so accountable for their life when they became a coach. Because once you're a coach, you're accountable to help someone grow and that instantly raises up your awareness. Just like many of you. When you get a teenager and you start talking to your teenager about health or mindset and you realize you're a little off, it makes you more accountable because as soon as you teach it, you're even more accountable to live up to it. Remember that congruence thing? It's a beautiful thing. The best I ever became in my life is once I became a coach. Because once I was a coach, it was like, oh, level up your identity, Brendon. You got to follow through on these things. You have to be congruent on them too. Woo. You can't go out on the stage all the time tired. Like, come on, everybody. It's like I had to learn to take care of my health. That I could literally manage a 38 foot stage with thousands of people and for multiple days, it was like running a marathon every single day. I had to be accountable to that audience because I was teaching it. And it was like, oh, soon as you put yourself in a role of a leader, a coach, a mentor, a role model, a caregiver, soon as you're in that space, you gain positional accountability. You realize, oh, I better walk this talk. Because if I don't walk this talk, not only will they notice, I will start to dislike myself. I share that. I rarely shared one of the big gates that happened for me after my car accident. It wasn't just the car accident made me want to live, love and matter. It was after the car accident. I had to sit with the reality that I had built the life I didn't intend to. I had set in motion that relationship that wasn't the right relationship. I chose the wrong person. Despite some red flags, I allowed abusive language to happen in a relationship. I allowed, I'd say, resentment to carry on. I had done some things and I had experienced some things that I didn't like and I could accept them. They did. But now I was accountable for building that next relationship. That had to be better. I had to make that next relationship better. It was on me. I was the captain of the ship. The director of the Destiny. I was the director behind the movie set. Watching that character evolve, I was choosing the next act. That's accountability. That's a great thing to have in life. West SA.
