The Power of Four

A Goal. Setting one is easy, but accomplishing one can be a different story. Your goal could be running a half marathon, learning a new language, or reading a book each month. All can be accomplished with persistence, but in many cases, we give up on our goals before they are even close to being accomplished.

It is this middle spot between setting a goal and accomplishing it that is the most difficult for many of us. Often times, we make it too easy for ourselves to not follow through on the action plans that we set, to reach a specific goal.

So why do we fail at goals? We make it too easy for ourselves to become unaccountable. If a goal is important to you and you want to accomplish it, then you must make yourself accountable.

Making yourself immediately accountable is easier than you think; by simply telling four distinctly different people about your goal. By doing this, you are already setting yourself up for success. The key to this strategy being effective is that each of the people you tell need to be from different parts of your life. There are four key categories that you should source people from.

1. Family: Your spouse, partner, parents, children
2. Friends: Must be part of your social world (non family/non coworker)
3. Co-worker: Must be part of your business world
4. Acquaintances: (Anyone else you engage with frequently that does not fall into the first three categories): Your gym trainer, barista or person you talk with weekly at the dog park.

 The reason that the magic number is FOUR is because you need to make yourself accountable in each of the segments of your life.

 We all live throughout different segments of our life, where certain areas do not cross over into others. If you only tell one or even two categories of people about your goal, then it makes it significantly easier to back out. If you only tell your family or close friends, they are usually more lenient on allowing you to not follow through. From my experience, category #4 (acquaintance) is the key to this formula. Typically these are the people that you are engaging in small talk with the most and they will follow up on the things you talked about in your previous conversations, which means they will almost always follow up to find out if progress has been made.

The next time you have a goal, big or small, consider the Power of 4 as a way to hold yourself more accountable, accomplish your goal, and move on to the next one.