The Power of Personal Accountability
Author: Sophie Chiche & Mark Samuel

The Path of Accountability:
Eight Powerful Steps to Achieving What Matters to You
How would your life change if you kept your commitments? A new book by
Mark Samuel and Sophie Chiche shows you how to stop imagining and start achieving.

Los Angeles, CA (October 2004)—Maybe you want to lose 25 pounds. Or write
a best-selling novel. Or get that promotion at work. Whatever your dreams might be, you might feel stuck or can’t seem to make much progress toward achieving them. You keep breaking the commitments you make to yourself, then finding excuses about why it’s not your fault. (You have a slow metabolism. You’re too busy taking care of the kids to write. Your boss doesn’t like you.) If this sounds all too familiar, says consultant Mark Samuel, it’s because you see yourself as a victim of your circumstances and feel like you don’t have a choice. What you need is a strong dose of accountability.

“People don’t understand the ‘A’ word,” say Samuel and co-author Sophie
Chiche, who have written a new book The Power of Personal Accountability: Achieve What Matters to You (Xephor Press, 2004, ISBN: 0-9752638-2-X, .95 [hardcover]; ISBN: 0-9752638-1-1, .95 [softcover]). “They think it has to do with blaming and finger-pointing. But all accountability really means is doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s simple, but not easy. If it were, people wouldn’t so often fail to keep their commitments. And that’s unfortunate, because accountability can totally transform your life. It makes everything possible.”

Samuel and Chiche explain that people resist accountability out of fear. First, we
associate accountability with blame. If we’re accountable for something, we’ll be the one to get blamed if it goes wrong. Second, we fear failure. No one wants to look bad, make mistakes, or feel incompetent. To avoid feeling that way, we don’t challenge ourselves. Finally, we avoid accountability for fear of success. If we increase accountability, we will accomplish more, we’ll be held to a higher standard of performance, and we’ll have to maintain excellence. It is easier to dream of success than to actually achieve it.

In The Power of Personal Accountability, Samuel and Chiche offer a thought provoking how-to guide for breaking what they call the “Victim Loop” and choosing the “Accountability Loop” instead. The result is moving from a way of life where “stuff” happens to you without your consent, and embracing a way of life whose shape, scope, and flavor you determine.

Here are a few of their insights on creating an accountable life:

• Be a victim no more.
“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.” -Voltaire
When things happen to you and you don’t seem to have a choice in the matter, you are a victim. But the unsettling truth is people usually choose to be victims. It’s a mindset. What Samuel and Chiche call the “Victim Loop” is simply this: when faced with a situation, you ignore, deny, blame, rationalize, resist, and ultimately hide. When you move from being a victim to being accountable, you realize that regardless of what has happened to you in the past, you can choose what you do next. Breaking free of the victim mindset allows you to move into action. In this way you regain power over a life that seems to be passing you by.

• Take charge of your life.
“I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head.” -Jack Nicklaus
Now that you’ve stopped being a victim, you must clarify what real success looks like to you. How could you possibly move toward a goal until you have identified what that goal is? Take a cue from Jim Carrey: when he was a struggling actor in the mid-1980s, he wrote himself a check in the amount of million “for acting services rendered.” Once you have defined and refined your picture of success, put together a list of accountable actions that will take you there. But beware of one of the surprising pitfalls of accountability: perfectionism. That’s right. If you wait until you have perfected something, you will never move on. Remember what John Updike said: “Perfectionism is the enemy of creation.”

• Recognize your current reality.
“We have to permeate every mind in the company with an attitude, with an atmosphere that allows people—in fact, encourages people—to see things as they are, to deal with the way it is now, not the way they wish it would be.” -Jack Welch
Call it what it is—whatever it is. Until you know what you are dealing with and are
willing to just state it sincerely, you can’t do anything differently. Sometimes, it just looks really big. When you shine the light on it, it turns out it wasn’t as big as you feared. So, pull out your flashlight and take an objective and unbiased look at where you really are. The challenge is to attain a neutral frame of mind, marked by compassion, openness, and sincerity. Don’t judge or let resentment or guilt take over. Your best thinking brought you to this point—if you had known how to do any of this better, you would have done it better. Your current reality is a great setup for learning.

• Own your part.
“Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it is addressed to someone else.” -Ivern Ball
In order to change the reality you live in, it needs to be your reality. Since you are the creator of the original situation, you can create a different one. And consider this: when you own something, you are much more likely to respect it. When was the last time you took a rental car through the car wash? When you are working on a project with other people, assume 100 percent of the ownership in your own mind. Don’t become a powermonger, or a martyr who takes all the blame, or a sidestepper who takes none of the blame. Find a good balance of responsibilities, while keeping in mind that at the end of the day, what needs to be done, needs to be done.

• Give the gift of forgiveness.
“The old law of ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Once you have recognized the reality of what you are dealing with and owned the part you have played to get there, forgiveness is your way out. Not an excuse to do something that didn’t work again, but an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and give it another shot. Forgiveness is not a substitute for corrective action, but a way to come to the action in a more creative, caring way. “There are two adages that I think of in connection with forgiveness,” says Chiche. “One is: Hurt people hurt people. When you can remember this, it’s easier to forgive and move on. The other is: 80 percent eyes in front of you, 20 percent rear-view mirror. If a thought serves you, it is welcome to say. If it paralyzes you, it has to go. Period.”

• Practice the art of self-examination.
“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.”
-Albert Einstein
This is the turning point. From here, you can start creating your new life. It’s time to get rid of your automatic pilot syndrome—Samuel and Chiche’s term for thinking, doing, and/or feeling the same things over and over—and start making deliberate, healthful choices. You may feel that you have no control over your circumstances, and it’s certainly true that you can’t control other people. But what you can control is how you respond and react. Ask yourself: how might I have created, promoted, or allowed the situation I am in? If you are honest, you will see that you did play a role in your current situation, even if you merely sat back and let it happen.

• Be a master learner.
“Change is the end result of all true learning.” -Leo Buscaglia
Seize the opportunity and let yourself be transformed. Think differently. If what you did in a previous situation didn’t work out, the process of learning guarantees you will proceed differently next time. Be aware, however, of the traps that get in the way oflearning: perhaps you feel attached to the old way, or you tried it before and failed, or you feel that you have to have absolute proof that it will work before you try it. Be completely open to learning. Leave your ego at the door. To be a master learner, you must believe that you know nothing. In this way, the “old dog” can learn new tricks.

• Take action.
“Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”
-Will Rogers
There is a direct relationship between your life as a whole and all the actions you take every hour of every day. To like your life—the sum of your actions—you have to like each action individually. Take small, manageable actions that take you beyond your comfort zone but don’t paralyze you. Keep moving toward your goal. Reach out for help when you need it. Finally, have a recovery plan. If there’s one certainty in life it’s that things will not go according to plan! So figure out what you’ll do when you get off course—as long as you recommit yourself to your goal, you will be able to recover from your mistakes.

Ultimately, say Samuel and Chiche, there is no end or limit to the rewards of a life lived with accountability. And anyone who longs for the freedom of being in the driver’s seat—rather than living a life that’s nothing more than a series of random accidents— should heed their message. “When you commit to accountability, everything else falls into place,” says Chiche. “Your relationships become deeper, more honest, more fulfilling. Your career takes off. Your health improves. Accountability unleashes your creativity and expands
your ability to love and be loved. No, you will not live a perfect life—life is too
unpredictable to ever be perfect—but you will live a deeply rich and meaningful life. The accountable person knows that anything is possible…and is not afraid to get out there and achieve it.”







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Mark Samuel is the president and founder of IMPAQ, a worldwide consulting firm focusing on individual and business accountability, and the nationally acclaimed author of The Accountability Revolution: Achieve Breakthrough Results in Half the Time! He has been featured in Fortune magazine as a top authority on “how companies can end blame in the ranks, and create a place where people want to work and get results” and has appeared on Bloomberg and CNBC.

Considered a practical visionary by Fortune 500 companies, Mark teaches organizations how to thrive in the competitive twenty-first century global marketplace through results oriented management based upon the practice of accountability.

As an award-winning speaker, Mark has been guiding organizations worldwide to higher levels of sustainable success through his innovative accountability-based programs for twenty-two years. Mark holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Science, a Master’s Degree in Management with special emphasis in Organizational Development, and a Master’s Degree in Applied Psychology.

Sophie Chiche is the chief operating officer of IMPAQ, and is firmly committed to the principles of personal and team accountability. She also acts as the creative advisor of the development of IMPAQ’s image, drawing from her diverse and highly accomplished artistic background.

Before joining IMPAQ, Sophie served as the U.S. correspondent for the European publication Psychologies Magazine. Her ability to capture the essence of personal accountability and relay it to her audience is unsurpassed. Sophie holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business and a Master’s Degree in Applied Psychology.

Mark Samuel and Sophie Chiche are leaders in the Personal and Organizational Accountability Movement, firmly committed to inspiring excellence using the principles found in their book.

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