Smart, successful leaders are masters of justification. They can spin elaborate, seemingly ironclad explanations for missed deadlines, underperforming projects, and decisions they wish they could take back. The truth? Accountability issues rarely boil down to time management or the right tools; they are deeply rooted in the powerful, often emotional, stories we tell ourselves to avoid owning the outcome.
In this deep dive, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo expose the most common, insidious narratives that derail accountability—from the “I’m too busy” trap to the “I thought someone else was handling it” deflection. More importantly, we offer practical strategies for dismantling these unhelpful thought patterns, reframing your internal dialogue, and building the necessary structures to move from excuse-making to empowered action.
Stop letting your self-limiting stories control your leadership. Read on to learn how to spot your default excuse and start rewriting your narrative for true, reflective accountability.
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The Stories Leaders Tell To Avoid Accountability
Accountability issues, I wish, were about time or tools, but they are not. They are about the stories we tell ourselves. I can say this as an entrepreneur. I’m sure Gwen can tell you this as an entrepreneur. What we have found individually and collectively is that smart leaders are especially good at creating believable explanations for why something didn’t get done, even something important or mission-critical.
Gwen and I are going to talk through those narratives that derail accountability. Gwen’s going to help us rewrite them. Gwen, something I heard you say probably eons ago, and it all blends together now that we’ve been working together so long, is that we want accountability to be logistical. We want it to be just nuts and bolts, but it’s emotional. I was hoping you could help me and our audience understand a little bit more about what you mean by that.
The Emotional Nature Of Accountability
We talk about true accountability all the time. True accountability is reflective. Reflective is about asking yourself hard questions about behaviors and actions. That is a much more emotional thing than, “Did I do it or did I not do it?” One of the phrases that I’ve used for years and years, long before I was on this particular accountability train is, “Every excuse is a good one. It is the nature of it being an excuse.” Any excuse is a valid excuse. It is the nature of it, but accountability says, “We’re not worried about the excuse. We’re worried about how to get past it. Are there other things that are blocking it?” That’s much more of an emotional thing.
The Story Of The Missed Tech Migration Deadline
That reminds me of something current that’s going on. A friend of mine hired a team to do a tech migration for them. The migration was supposed to be done on December 31st, 2025.
We missed it.
Smart leaders are especially good at creating believable explanations for why something didn’t get done—even when it was truly important or mission-critical. Share on XAbout early December 2025, she had reached out and said, “I’m a little concerned. It’s supposed to be done by the end of December.” The owner says, “We’re doing our best, but when’s your drop-dead deadline?” She said, “My drop-dead deadline is February 4th, and then I need to cut ties. I can’t keep paying for this other service. I need to have it fully migrated.” She goes in because she’s like, “I haven’t heard from them,” and realizes that their stuff migrated over, but none of it’s been formatted. It’s all content that has to be migrated over. It’s a beast of a job, and it hasn’t been done.
She does what a lot of business owners do. She was like, “I should have been looking at this all along. They said they had it. I believe they had it.” We’ve heard this. She reaches out to me. She’s like, “I don’t know what to do.” I’m like, “You’ve got to put it back on them. You’ve got to have that hard conversation.” She said, “I tried to say, ‘I don’t see how this is going to be done by February 4th based on all of this stuff.’” The response she got back was, “I’m so sorry. I thought you knew the service we were migrating to better than you do,” which is an immediate red flag. Why are you blaming me for this?
I feel like there are a lot of our examples here that we can pull out of this story, which is why I’m spending some time telling them. My friend is like, “Did you just blame me for not knowing about the service you said you were an expert in? I don’t like that.” The other thing is the service provider says, “I know you’re on an annual contract with that other service. Can you just go month to month with them until we finish this out? We need a little bit more time. I’m going to have to look. Maybe what you can do is you can change your email service provider so that we don’t have to do so many Zap integrations. Maybe you can do this.” She starts talking her through changing out her tech stack.
It is all to make sense of this issue of why a migration is not going to make it now, to a month past the deadline. She’s like, “No, I can’t pay for the service again. That’s why I hired you months ago.” I said, “You’re going to have to say, ‘Here are the options.’” Nobody wants to be the bad guy, but option one, you pay for the service since you’re the reason that we’re going beyond. Option two, you get it done on time. We could all agree that’s what we want.
That should be option one.
That’s option one. Option three is you pay for the service, and you do the rest of it for free because I’ve been paying you monthly for doing this, and I’m not getting what’s worth it. I said, “The best option is that they do it on time because that’s what we all want.” The response back was, “I understand how you feel. I had a death in the family. It put us behind.” It makes perfect sense.
Any excuse can feel valid—that’s the nature of excuses. But accountability isn’t about the excuse. It’s about how we move past it and whether other factors are blocking progress. Share on X” via=”no”]
None of us wants to be cold and heartless, but why didn’t you reach out when you had a death in the family? If you have a team, why isn’t there somebody in your team who was put in place? What does this say about your business and your structure that this derails the whole thing? Why is it on me, as the client, to pay double for services because you went over? I want you to tell me all of the emotional stuff that went into that situation because ultimately, they’re good excuses.
It was more complex than we thought it was. That’s a good excuse, and it’s most likely true. I had a death in the family. That’s a good excuse, and it’s most likely true. As a client, I should have been checking their work more than I did throughout the months. I shouldn’t have just assumed they had it when I saw things that were wonky. It is also true and a good excuse to give a pass.
Back to, every excuse is a good excuse. The first emotional piece started by not having regular milestones and check-ins for a project that long. That’s the first place that we don’t do our emotional work because we feel like asking for milestones, check-ins, and regular performance checks is us not trusting someone and saying, “We don’t believe that you can do this, so we need to do these things,” which, to some degree, is true.
If you’re capable of doing the things, it’s not going to be a problem. That’s the thing. We don’t want to say that because we feel like that’s saying, “I don’t trust you.” Unless you’ve got a long history of working with this person on this kind of project in this kind of way, it’s fair. Even if they come, highly recommended, or a strong referral, the gut feeling is all right, and all of that.
The Fear Of Micromanagement Vs. Necessary Management
One of the phrases that we’ve been using a little more around here is trust, but verify. You wouldn’t hire them if you didn’t trust that they were capable of doing the work. This is the verify part. We feel like micromanagement has gotten such a bad rap. Not that micromanagement is good. I’ll be clear about that. It has gotten this expansion that any kind of management is micromanagement.
It’s not that micromanagement has gotten a bad rap. It’s that micromanagement has somehow become an umbrella label for making sure people do what they say they’re going to do when they said they were going to do it.
It’s not that micromanagement has gotten a bad rap. It’s that “micromanagement” has somehow become an umbrella label for making sure people do what they say they’re going to do. Share on XAny type of management has become micromanagement. Micromanagement is a very specific behavior that, quite honestly, most people don’t do. What we’ve gotten into is that if anybody’s doing any activity that feels like management, “You’re micromanaging me.” I am not. Out of 100 managers, two or three might do micromanagement.
What we’ve got it to is that out of 100 managers, 98, if they’re doing any management at all or micromanaging. That’s not true. The other two aren’t doing any management at all. We’re afraid of micromanaging. That’s the first piece, even though none of this would be micromanagement. It would be checking in, verifying, and managing your side of the project. That’s piece number one.
Piece number two is when the flag came up that we are not going to hit the deadline, then that’s when we start moving into something that would be closer to resembling micromanagement. Still, it’s not micromanagement because what we have verified at this point is you’re not able to do the job that you said you were going to be able to do. This is where we’re afraid to say all of the hard things.
That’s the next emotional thing. Apparently, you don’t know how to do this job. Who and how are you bringing in people to get this job done, because it needs to be done by this time? What are your guarantees back to me? I’m no longer paying as of January 31st. If it’s going to take you six months, you’re going to take six months. If you don’t deliver, then I’m going to go after you in small claims court because you didn’t deliver a service that I paid for.
It’s saying all of the hard things that none of us want to say because we like people and we don’t want to be considered bad. At the same point, how is it not bad that you’ve paid somebody X thousands of dollars for something that hasn’t been delivered? If you paid a car lot $20,000 for a car, but never got a car. You wouldn’t hesitate to say, “That’s fraud.” It’s because people serving people, we’re like, “We can’t.” Everyone has to own their piece of it.
They have to come up with a negotiation, but those are hard conversations. This is where you’ve heard me use the phrase, “This can be short hard or long hard.” Emotionally, we don’t want to do any hard. You and I were talking about that. What we do is we assume that if we avoid short hard, somehow, long hard is going to take care of itself, and it won’t be hard. That can happen, but it’s pretty rare. I can’t say I’ve never seen that happen, but it’s a tiny percentage.
There’s always the cost involved in waiting for it to happen.
It’s still hard for all of the long time until it solves itself.
Some of the emotional stuff that I was thinking about as you were talking in this specific situation is one of the issues that causes us to do this. We’ll get into the stories in a second. We want to protect our identity or our reputation. We want to believe that we are better than how we are behaving. On one hand, you’ve got a client in this specific case who doesn’t want to be thought of as a nightmare client. She doesn’t want to be micromanaging and wants to be like, “I paid you a fee. You’re going to do this thing. You said you could do all this. Go do it.”
We want to believe that we are better than how we’re behaving. Share on X“I hired you as a professional, so I’m paying you as a professional. I’m going to treat you like a professional.”
You’ve got this service provider who is like, “I am an expert in this platform. I can take you from A to B here.” They want to sit in that expert seat. They don’t want anything to get in the way of their expert seat. We get things not going according to plan. We’ve got a service provider who’s now scared of exposure like, “If they knew that we are in over our heads, we’d be in trouble. They wouldn’t want to pay us. We’ve got to keep this hidden, so we’re not going to communicate. We’re going to pray to God they don’t ask us anything.” You get the avoidance. You get the “I’m reaching out, but I’m not hearing anything back. Maybe it’s the holidays. Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s that.”
They bid off more than they could chew. At some point, they probably realized that this was way bigger. They way underbid for the project. At that point, they could have said three months in, “This is way bigger. This is not going to happen.” They don’t want to admit they bid off more than they could chew because then that negates that identity as we are subject matter experts here. They rinse and repeat. What are the stories that you could see the CEOs telling themselves in this situation?
What side of the story? The story that they immediately tell is, “I hired a professional. I’m going to treat them like a professional because anything else is demeaning.”
It’s like, “I thought they were handling it. I paid them to handle it.” I also think, “I’m too busy to check on them.”
It’s part of the same story, like, “I hired a professional because I didn’t want to have to do the work to manage it, to do all of the things.” “I hired a professional because I’m too busy. I don’t have the expertise. I want to hire someone who has the expertise. I could figure this out. I don’t have time to figure this out.” There is also a story of, as you said, “I don’t want to be a nightmare client.” That’s definitely a story that we have in our heads.
This happened in another group. I appreciated this example. We were in a group. There were about 50 of us in the room. It was a good-sized group, but not a huge group. The question was, “How many of you have ever felt like you were taken advantage of by another service provider?” Everybody raised their hand. They said, “How many times as a service provider have you ever taken advantage of somebody?” No one raised their hand.
They said, “What’s the chance that none of that is true?” It’s zero because we believe that we’re acting in a certain way, back to the stories that we’re telling ourselves. We’re saying, “I know if it were me, I would have done all of the right things in this situation.” The reality is, there’s probably someone out there who says, “Gwen took advantage of me.” I know I don’t ever try to do that from my perspective, but I am positive. I don’t know who it is, but I’m sure of it just because I know there are people who I feel took advantage of me in similar kinds of situations.
I am sure they would never think that that’s what they did. This is also the story that’s going on in our heads. I want to treat them like I know I treat all of my clients, because I know I would have done all of these things if this were true, even though the reality is, maybe we wouldn’t have. We thought we were, but it wasn’t being perceived that way by the other person.
The CEO’s Stories: “I’m Too Busy” & “I Thought Someone Else Was Handling It”
This story is a great example of those two common stories that CEOs tell like, “I’m too busy to hold somebody accountable. I’m too busy to be held accountable for this. I thought somebody else was handling it.” In this case, the client says, “I paid these people good money to handle it for me, and I was letting them handle it.” In the case of the service provider, “I have a team. I thought my team had it. I shouldn’t need to check in on the team.”
A great example of common stories leaders tell is: “I’m too busy. I’m too busy to hold someone accountable. I’m too busy to be held accountable. I thought someone else was handling it.” Share on XHow many times have we both worked with agencies that had CEOs who were like that? It was like, “I have a team for a reason. Sorry, my team let you down,” but they don’t take responsibility. Separate from this example, what are the other stories you hear? I’ll throw one that I hear a lot of times from people who want to talk about why programs or courses didn’t work for them, or why they didn’t make a hard decision in the past.
I oftentimes hear, “It wasn’t the right time. I should have let that person go a couple of years ago, but my mom died, and we were planning my sister’s wedding. It wasn’t the right time. I didn’t have my head in the business to address it, and so I’m here.” Meanwhile, that person now has two years of working with you, doing whatever it is they’ve been doing for two years.
They don’t understand why they’re being let go now. Why is it a problem now, and it wasn’t a problem two years ago? When people do work with clients, it’s like, “It wasn’t the right time. I paid a lot of money for that, but it wasn’t the right time to take advantage of what was available.” What else do you hear?
A version of it wasn’t the right time is, I’m too busy. It’s related to priority. It’s like, “I’ve taken advantage of this special deal, but I can’t take advantage of the special deal.” I was talking to a good friend. She’s like, “I’m thinking about hiring someone to do such and such.” A couple of us said, “Is that what you need now?” It’s like, “She’s offering this great deal.” It’s like, “Yes, but unfortunately, that ends up being money that gets wasted because it isn’t the thing that you needed right then.” We get caught in the urgency sales trap that may or may not be beneficial to us.
Another one is back to, we think each of these things is going to be the silver bullet. We buy it. We put a tiny bit of effort into it. It’s like, “Nope, that’s not solving the problem. I’m going to buy the next thing. Put a little effort into it. Nope, not solving the problem. Buy the next thing.” It is not being able or willing to put the effort into it, because what we want is, as I said, that silver bullet, that magic thing that just happens. Have you found any silver bullets? I haven’t found any silver bullets.
I have not found any silver bullets.
It doesn’t mean that I haven’t kept trying to buy them.
It’s like that thing. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I feel that in a lot of ways. There’s also sometimes this quest for clarity, especially in delaying decisions. I told my team I was going to get a thing to them by a certain deadline, and I didn’t. It’s because I needed more clarity before I could make the final decision. I don’t want to send my team chasing rabbits, and so I’m holding off.
We haven’t talked about this a whole lot on the show, but we talk a lot, and I talk a lot to my clients about his personality type. If you play it all into the personality type world, which is the extrovert, introvert, and all the four-letter definitions. That last pair of letters, the J and the P, is often how we think about projects in time. I’ve got no data on this at all. This is my experience. My experience is that most entrepreneurs have a P personality type, which means they work as they’re inspired.
Most entrepreneurs have a P personality type, which means they work as they’re inspired. That’s part of their superpower—it’s not inherently good or bad. The other trait is that they don’t want to share anything until they absolutely, positively have… Share on XIt is part of their superpower. It’s not like this is a good thing or a bad thing. The other is they don’t want to share anything until they positively have to, as far as decisions, information, and all of that, because they want to leave their options open. That’s part of their process, but the problem is that most people entrepreneurs hire, not all, but a lot, are J personality types. They don’t know how to get started until they have all the information.
Using the example that you had, not saying this is it because I’ve got zero information on this, but I’ve seen this in other environments, it could be that the owner of the agency is a P, and her people are Js. The reason they didn’t get it done on time was that she was still thinking about things and deciding on things, and didn’t give enough information to her J people. They couldn’t get started in the way that they wanted to get started. Likely, once we started getting close to deadlines, it’s like, “I finally got to make these decisions.” I’m totally making this up. It could be like, “It’s now December 1st. I need to make these decisions.”
He makes the decisions and tells the team. They’re like, “Now we can get started.” The six-month project for them didn’t start until December 1st in a real, doable, deliverable way. If it’s still a six-month project, that means it’s not done until the end of April. There are all these kinds of things, “I want to leave my options open.” That’s another thing that we get. That’s an excuse that we tell ourselves. “I need to leave my options open because something might change that I need to be able to pivot fast. If I have to undo something before I redo something, that’s going to be problematic,” which isn’t usually true.
The most common stories we’ve got here are the, I’m too busy one, it wasn’t the right time, I needed more clarity and I thought somebody else was handling it. You’ve given variations of that like, I paid somebody to do this, and I held them to that. I don’t have the information I need. I didn’t give the information they needed because I wanted to be able to be nimble. We all love to be nimble and agile, don’t we? Assuming somebody is tuning in and they’re like, “Maybe that’s me or that doesn’t quite sound like me.” How can a CEO or a business owner spot their story quickly? Tell me if I’m wrong, but all of us tend to have one or two default stories we tell ourselves.
Recognizing Your Default Accountability Story (Pattern Recognition)
That’s it. Start looking for pattern recognition. You know what I’m always going to say. This is why it’s good to have someone else you are in an accountability process with on a consistent basis, because it’s often them hearing a similar story multiple times that will be the one who says, “Anytime this thing comes up, this is the story I hear.” Most of the time, it’s back to any excuse is a good excuse.
The story that’s inside our head is saying, “This is legit. The reason why you can’t get this done is because of X, Y, and Z.” The next time, it’s not quite X, Y, and Z. It’s U, V, and W, but it’s still a very similar thing. In our head, it’s back to, “That’s legit,” because if it was obvious to us, we probably wouldn’t be doing it. For most of us, that’s not the MO that we want to be running around doing.
The way that we want to be operating is being highly effective, getting things done, and making stuff happen. To me, this is where that outside perspective of somebody on a consistent basis comes in, so that they can start seeing the pattern recognition to help you start seeing the pattern recognition. Usually, once it’s been identified, you can’t unsee it. Have you experienced similar kinds of things? What do you think?
One thing that helps, but you’ve got to be open to it, is team feedback. That’s tricky.
They have to be empowered to do it.
That’s what I was going to say. It’s tricky because on one hand, we want to say we have an open-door policy and we’re open to hearing anything from the team. On the other hand, we do a lot of things that tell our team that we’re not open. In my own background, one of the things that I have been confronting is my own level of refusing to take ownership of my business in certain ways and feeling like, “I hire people to do that. Therefore, I don’t have to deal with it.”
I had somebody years ago say, “I’m not the CEO. I don’t know what’s in your head. I know what you tell me, but that’s not the same as being inside your head. I need you to take some of that stuff that’s inside your head and bring it out.” What they were asking for, I was like, “That’s not the important stuff. The important stuff is this and this. That’s what I’ve empowered you to do.” That’s before I knew about Js and Ps and all of that.
Looking back, I’m like, “Why’d she stick out with me for so long? I was crappy.” She stuck it out because she saw what I was trying to do. She was doing her best, but there got to a point where her best wasn’t good enough, and I wasn’t changing because I didn’t see. You need to have the team feedback. You need to listen to it. When the team is telling you the same thing over and over again, maybe the common denominator is you.
You need to get feedback from your team—and listen to it. When the team is telling you the same thing over and over, maybe the common denominator is you. Share on XIn my case, this is the other issue. Those of us who are small business owners will have one VA for five years. It’s not like you have the revolving door of VA, so you’ve got ten people telling you the same thing. It’s this one person who’s been telling you the same thing for five years. One thing is listening to the people you work with. What I now know in hindsight is not just say your VAs, your direct team members, but also other people that you’ve done business with. Do the same problems keep coming up?
It was interesting when you said that because the thing that popped into my head is that some people say, “I’ve hired this VA. It didn’t work out.” They do have that revolving door. At that point, are all of the VAs having the same problem? If they are, then that problem likely is you.
Knowing what I know now, largely in the work that I’ve done with you, is when I look back, I go, “The issues I had with that assistant have also manifested in different service provider relationships.” They’ve gotten better each time, but what I realize is when I speak, “This is what I want to do.” People think there’s a lot more going on behind those statements than sometimes there is. I’m just trying to be efficient. They assume for every one word I’m saying, there are 500 other words that I didn’t say. They think they know what they are. There aren’t 500 other words. All I got is what I just said.
There’s that piece. When I look at different service provider things, I’m like, “That was a theme for a long time.” It hasn’t been for the last couple of years. I started turning things around. One of the things I think of is, I always wonder, could I have listened differently to that feedback? I don’t think I could have because it is what it is. I wasn’t who I am now. That’s one thing. Where I want us to land, and I want to make sure that we have some time for this, is how do you rewrite the story so that the action is easier?
This is the joy of human. There is always an opportunity to continue to grow and develop. Reflecting on what you said, you have gotten better. You also know that there is more better to get. If we can approach it in that way to say, “I’m learning. I’m getting better,” there will continue to be more to learn and get better. The first thing is to say, “I don’t have this nailed.” The first thing we have to do is to accept that there’s more to do.
The next is what I would call the pattern recognition. Start being aware of where you are seeing patterns. Try to put the pattern recognition together to say, “A, B, and C were three completely different situations, yet they had this in common.” Start asking people who are appropriate, who can help you to think through that, which is what real accountability is. That’s the real problem-solving piece of it to say, “When this happens, I tend to do this. Help me think of a different way to respond. Help me understand why I respond that way. Help me create a new pathway because the grooves in our brains are deep for some of these things.”
It’s going to take a lot to retrain it. It’s an interesting scenario because when we try to retrain our brain to do something new, it wants to default to other things that we think we fixed. It’s looking at all of those pieces at the same time. For me, it is about approaching it with that curiosity and problem-solving mindset and not looking at, “It’s because I’m lame.” It’s not letting all that negative self-talk take over.
When we try to retrain our brain to do something new, it tends to default to other behaviors we think we’ve already fixed. Share on XRewriting The Story: Moving From Blame To Curiosity & Problem-Solving
One of the things that I talk about when I’m talking about accountability, and we’ve talked about it on the show before, but maybe we haven’t, is that if you can change the way you phrase the question, our brain goes to a different place. When we phrase the question, “Why didn’t you get that done?” Our brain immediately goes to the things about me. “Why didn’t you?” It is an interesting thing. That’s always where it is. Why didn’t you get that thing done? A why and a you typically go together.
If you change and ask the question slightly differently with a what, or sometimes it’s with a how, like, “What prevented you from getting that done?” What it becomes about is the thing, not about you. That helps us get into that curiosity placed about the thing as opposed to, “I’m bad.” It’s all that horrible voice that almost all of us have in our heads at some point like, “I was lazy. I was stupid. I was lame.” The list goes on and on.
Reframing the story is important. You didn’t say this specifically, but a lot of times this is where we need external support because it’s hard to recognize our own unhelpful thinking. I don’t want to go so far as to call it toxic. Although sometimes, for some of us, it is toxic thinking. It’s hard to overcome our own unhelpful thinking because all we have are more unhelpful things to say.
It’s circular thinking.
The external support helps. One of the things that you had said, though, that I liked about learning is that whole, I’m too busy statement can easily be reframed as, “It takes me time to learn things or it takes me time to learn new things.” It is very different. It’s not about me. “I’m too busy. I need to be more efficient and better. I took too long.” It is, “I’m learning.” Learning takes time. Back to focusing on that entity.
Another thing that I wanted to run by you. You had mentioned before that a long-term project has milestones. There is a way we can do that with ourselves. If we find that we get stuck in the same places, we can create some micro-commitments. I always get stuck between agreeing to do the thing and getting started on it. I could set a milestone with my team, my client, or whoever, that says, “On February 1st, I will have an outline for the proposal for you. We’ll get an alignment there, and then we can decide what comes next.”
It’s having those micro-commitments. You and I have done that before because we do our accountability check-ins on Fridays. Monday is when we review each other’s. There’s some wiggle room over the weekend. Sometimes, we’ll be like, “There’s a lot going on. If you touch base with me on Friday, and I don’t look at that until Monday, things can go sideways. How about this? How about we touch base on Wednesday? That way, if things are going too far off track, you’ve got a couple of days until our Friday check-in and I have a couple of days before a Monday.”
A version of that is understanding what you need to work for you. The classic example I use for myself is that I don’t ever need someone to confirm that I’m going to be at a meeting. I don’t ever not make a meeting unless two things have happened. It’s either I’m deathly sick, and even then, I make sure you, Sophia, or somebody is contacting everybody and making sure that they know I’m not going to make a meeting because I’m in bed dying, or if something bizarre happened on the calendar, and I don’t know that the meeting happened. I’d love to say it never happens, but that has happened.
That also means that if I’ve got a meeting with someone to go over the proposal, using your example, means I may not get it done until January 31st, if it’s due on February 1st, but it will be done because I will not show up to the meeting, particularly, a meeting that has a purpose, unprepared. That’s one of those deep grooves that I’ve got in my brain. That’s the other place. You use some of those deep grooves to your own advantage.
It’s part of what we’re also talking about. It would not be this show if we weren’t talking about this, if I didn’t bring this up. You’re talking about having some accountability structures in place, whether that is internal to your organization or external. We would all love to believe that we don’t need structure. Let’s be real. We’re humans. We need structure. Even people who think they are free spirits and free flowing, there is a structure to their free spiritedness. It just may be different than the structure of somebody who’s a little bit more rigid. Any other final thoughts when it comes to rewriting your story so that action is easier?
We’d all love to believe we don’t need structure, but let’s be real—we’re human. Even free spirits have structure; it just looks different from the structure of someone more rigid. Share on XThe most important thing is to try to approach it with curiosity and reflection, and say, “The only way I can grow and get better is to pay attention to this and move it away from avoidance because I’m a bad person.” Anytime that we say, “I didn’t do this because of,” and it has a negative connotation associated with it, we want to avoid that.
If we can make it into that positive, that’s the place that makes it so much easier to start taking the steps that we need to take and move it away from blame, guilt, and shame. The problem is that our natural tendency when things aren’t going well is to blame, guilt, and shame. If we focus on problem-solving, then it works better for everybody. We start realizing that this is a place where we can grow.
Our natural tendency when things aren’t going well is to fall into blame, guilt, and shame. But if we focus on problem-solving, it works better for everyone, and we begin to see it as a place for growth. Share on XOn that note, we have a free resource for that. It’s not a PDF download. It’s not cold, and one more thing for you to support your circular thinking. If you’re tuning in and you’re thinking, “I need external support to help me with new framing and to help me with micro-commitments. I need a structure of accountability. I just don’t know where to begin.” That’s where that weekly accountability nudge we have called our One Good Question email because we don’t have a better name for it yet. It is one good question emailed out every Friday from Gwen.
If you choose to respond to it and want to participate in that accountability structure, that external support, you get a personalized response from Gwen. If Gwen’s out of the office, you’ll get one from me. Sometimes, we have to tap the bench for some extra support. Most of the time, it comes directly from Gwen. If you want to sign up for that, it’s free. It’s on www.tonyakubo.com/Question. You can get more details there. That is a great way to dip your toe into the water of debunking these stories that we consistently tell ourselves that aren’t serving us anymore. With that, we’ll see you next time.
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.
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