Accountability
This brief article is excerpted from a weekly ezine ("Monday Morning Muse") offered by The Coaching Corporation
www.TheCoachingCorp.com. Each Muse has been prepared under the guidance of Inga Estes, president of The Coaching Corporation.
INTRO:Accountability is the greatest freedom we can create for ourselves. When we turn the tables and "own" the thing that owns us, we eliminate "victim mentality." Accountability allows us to take full responsibility for our own lives, acknowledging what we’ve chosen and standing by it.
A Shearson/Lehman Brothers print ad from 1987 sums up accountability:
- Accountability is taking responsibility before the fact, rather than after the fact.
- Accountability is taking a stand, and standing by it.
- When those who are accountable are right, they take the credit.
- When they are wrong, they take the heat, a fair exchange.
- Accountability is a way of working.
- Those who practice it have an unspoken respect for each other and a visible disdain for the absent-minded apologizers, mumbling excuse-makers and, trembling fence sitters who run from integrity as if it were the plague.