Keeping yourself accountable for behavior change
Before you can commit to behavior change, you must find a way to hold yourself accountable. This requires a thoughtful approach. Avoid negative strategies such as guilt, regret, or punishment. Instead, focus on strong positive emotions—emotional engagement fosters a sense of responsibility, and responsibility is what drives action.
Accountability begins with relying on internal motivation and self-reflection rather than external pressure. Meaningful change involves being honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses, acknowledging your mistakes, and learning from them in order to grow.
Regular self-assessment helps you evaluate progress, identify areas for improvement, and recognize both positive and negative outcomes. It also supports better decision-making and increased effort.
Finally, accountability involves a willingness to learn, which is essential for recognizing patterns in your own behavior.
behavior change
When trying to develop yourself as an athlete, you will inevitably run into plateaus that keep you from progressing. When reaching said plateau you will be challenged with finding a creative way to stimulate more growth, whether that involves improving your nutrition or your sleep or any other focus point.
The obstacle in between you and overcoming the plateau is your ability to change your behavior and maintain said behavior over the long-term. Many coaches will tell you things like “you just need to want it more” or “you need to be more disciplined”, however I find those words nothing but empty platitudes.
Here is what to do instead:
A fundamental part of this journey is about changing your athlete identity, to become the type of athlete who prioritizes their nutrition or focuses on their recovery. To start, we need to define what your current athlete identity is (what we call your current self) and what the athlete identity is you want to take on (what we call your ought self).
You will soon notice that there is a (sizable) gap between those two versions of yourself, and that’s totally fine! Take a moment to define the areas you are falling short on. How would you think, feel and act if you were the type of athlete you aspire to be? How would your day-to-day life be different? What would you do and what wouldn’t you do? Take time with this process.
You can use this as a framework to inform your daily decision-making by asking “if I were this athlete I aspire to be, how would I act now?” and try to take goal-directed action to act in line with that athlete identity.
You can use the following model to reflect on this process:
To make this process a bit easier we need to not only see the bigger picture but also implement more short-term rewards to stay engaged in this process long enough to reap the rewards of our hard work.
Here is what to understand about staying motivated in that process:
Your brain is designed to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. To make it simple, visualize pleasure as a carrot (a reward) and the pain as a stick (punishment). Many times, athletes don’t maintain behavior long-term due to the fact that the behavior change itself seems more like a stick rather than a carrot. So naturally, you will slowly gravitate away from the behavior.
Instead, try to seek out what could potentially be a short-term reward that keeps you motivated to maintain behavior change. This could be noticing changes in your energy levels. Or improved mood. Or maybe even better focus in- and outside of the gym.