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Become an Accountability Coach

By Darren Finkelstein
By Darren Finkelstein

The Accountability Guy®

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Accountability coaching is anything but easy.

An Accountability Coach is someone who works with startups, businesses, executives, and entrepreneurs. Their job description includes identifying long and short term goals, prioritising tasks and objectives, determining deadlines, providing feedback and emotional support, and most importantly, ensuring people stay true to their words and promises so they can achieve their objectives within the required timeframe.

On paper, it may sound like an easy job, but it’s the exact opposite. You don’t just sit and boss people around but develop an intellectual, knowledgeable, charismatic, and disciplined personality. This is so you can inspire and guide them towards their goals. If you want to become a professional Accountability Coach or want to help yourself as an entrepreneur, here is what you will need to do.

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1. Do you ‘walk the talk’?

As an Accountability Coach, you would be guiding, supporting, assisting, counselling, encouraging, celebrating and leading business people in matters of importance which is a massive responsibility. That’s why you need to develop a rudimentary understanding of business and commercial wisdom.

It sure helps to understand your way through financials; knowing the importance of a good sales funnel. That you get marketing and good comms, that you understand the importance of having a strong products ecosystem and build services of that in which add value. That you recognise aspects of manufacturing and ensure inventory turns over, you’ll need to be across social and be able to leverage the general media whilst building meaningful partnerships and collaborations with aligned organisations, that a successful business exit is on the cards. You place customer service and a great customer experience, at the very top of the tree each and every time and you measure your team against the achievement of this.

Ideally, you should have a proven track-record in doing this stuff yourself, or at least have done it as part of your apprenticeship on the road to being a great Accountability Coach. ‘Walking the talk’ means you’ve done it successfully before and that the road you are taking has had you travelling there before.  It all helps, and gives your client so much more than just a one-hour session. With your skill, experience and wisdom, you can truly make a difference besides, you’ll probably have a really effective playbook to share which adds to the value you bring.

2. Develop Empathy & Patience

If you really want to help people turn things around, you need to be able to empathize. That will put you in a much better position to help them out, especially if you’ve walked that path before. Not everyone’s problem is the same even if it appears so on the surface. Most of the times, personal, social, and financial circumstances differ from entrepreneur to entrepreneur and you need to account for that to be a good Accountability Coach.

Apart from that, people will say and do things that might test your patience, and it will. Sometimes, they won’t follow the plan which means and they miss important milestones. This is often caused by overwhelm, procrastination and fear of not getting it right. In these situations, you need to demonstrate empathy, strong leadership and above all patience, so you can do course correction by listening and talking it through. Offer support and encouragement as you refocus towards the goal. Getting impatient and angry would be counterproductive and would achieve the opposite of what you actually want to achieve.

3. Be Disciplined & Learn Interpersonal Communication

The most significant aspect of an Accountability Coach’s job is to keep people honest and true to their word. The thing is, unless you are disciplined yourself, it’d be difficult for you to talk someone else into being disciplined. As an Accountability Coach, you will need to show up on time, evaluate progress regularly, and provide regular feedback. That couldn’t happen if you aren’t disciplined and organized yourself.

Moreover, it’s a job that involves a lot of close listening and communicating your ideas clearly. If you aren’t capable of listening to people’s issues or sharing solutions and deconstructing situations with your client for the purpose of timely implementation and execution, you will have a hard time being an Accountability Coach.

4. Be Supportive & Become a Solution Finder

Being an Accountability Coach also means you will be providing emotional support to your clients whenever they need it. Sometimes you will be celebrating their milestones and achievements. Other times you will be consoling them when things don’t work out in their favour. You need to be genuinely strong and supportive figure, in which your clients can rely on.

You also need to focus on being someone who can find solutions for a vast range of problems. As an Accountability Coach, you will face many situations where you will need to do something more than just providing moral support. For instance, having a great professional network can come in handy.

Final Word

Becoming an Accountability Coach is anything but easy. However, if you have the grit, knowledge, personality, charisma, and communicational authority. You can also acquire these skills, accountability coaching can be a fairly rewarding profession for you.