A Search for Accountability; What Could Grow Right?

What would one year look like after weekly checkup on your goals, visions, weaknesses, and opportunities (and how often you seize them?)

Accountability to yourself is either taught in childhood, or it’s earned through the drudgery of changing your daily habits. Accountability to someone else is impossible until you’ve mastered some level of accountability to self.

After years of building up better habits, client experiences, and a body of work, I felt I had finally learned accountability to self. I felt (exhaustedly) ready to find someone to help coach me or support me into the next phase of my mission. But this opportunity didn’t come easily for me.

Do you have a calling to strengthen yourself for greater impact? And if so, have you also faced the challenge of feeling as though you’re running your race alone?

Discipline, Discipleship, and Christian Coaching

We’re all disciples of something. Once you define where your energy is focused you define what you’re a disciple of. You may have many interests, but what are you after, wholly? All your daily habits, disciplines, and guidance comes that passion.

It’s that passion that will see you through those days you’re running alone for seemingly no reason, except for the invisible call that does not exist anywhere outside of yourself. Your discipline and your discipleship drive you forward.

The driving force in my own calling is that first, I am a disciple after Christ. This is a tall order, a heavy cross, but a light yoke. This discipleship shapes my mission, my vision, and how I move toward the strange thing no one else sees or knows.

But in my search for a coach, I could never find the right balance of someone developing disciples who were entrepreneurs; verses a coach developing entrepreneurs who were of the same faith.

Don’t misunderstand me, Christian coaches and networks exist. They serve a fine purpose and there’s always value in networking with like-minded people. But within the business community, the Venn diagram of how people intermingle the two, faith and business, often comes out with varied and  interesting results. Sometimes to the detriment of our own faith.

I started to wonder how many enterprising ministers who are Christ-loving offer a patented formula for a closer relationship with Christ, If only you pay the membership fee?

And because we wear a suit and tie and serve the church, we don’t compare ourselves to the money changers, offering redemption through the high price of temple coin exchange and holy merchant purchases.

Please forgive the hyperbole, I do recognize the very clear differences between the religious-political exploitive nature of temple coin and selling repentance. But I do recognize taking the Lord’s name in vain, too.

Fortunately, God’s grace is abundant, and if we find ourselves doing this, we get to ask for wisdom. It’s better to separate gatekeeping relationship with Christ from offering unique skill or talent for pouring into your brother or sister. Because at the end of the day, we cannot circumvent our positions as servants to one another in a pursuit of business impact.

Maybe I’m a little cynical, being able to recognize the effect of brand development, I can easily spot when something is packaged for perceived value, and authority on any given subject is perceived value. Not only do I have a problem submitting to people I don’t know, (you have to trust your coach.) but if you’re going to pick a coach, they should be living a life similar to that which you’re trying to achieve.

After so much searching for a “coach” I started to wonder if I would ever find the right person? The order seemed to grow.

1. Someone who wouldn’t position themselves as “authority” in the relationships but maybe as a peer, instead.
2. One who would be willing to recognize the work I’ve already put in.
3. One who is gifted at listening and responding, rather than coming to the table with pre-packaged answers to maintain disinterest in my unique journey.
4. One who was living the kind of intentional life of discipleship, fellowship, and sacrifice I could see and respect.
5. One who offers co-operative conversation verses some guided-and-fixed outcome they want me to achieve so I can help prove the effectiveness of their patented coaching formula. Then wash, rinse, repeat.
   

In the business world it is profit suicide to tailor an experience unless you work with elites who can pay for the individual attention. The easier you package something the easier you turn over outcomes, the better you eat. Everything about marketing and copywriting tells you to position yourself as an authority in your industry and market, and to create repeatable outcomes, that’s value.

Unfortunately “Christian” coaching is no different, making sure to create a market value even for peer-to-peer opportunities. There will always be the enterpriser in the room who knows the most, they are the guru.

But by always positioning ourselves as an authority, we deny ourselves the opportunity to speak with humility as a student, as one with weaknesses, as one with limited perception- The position of authority somehow diminished the importance of listening on behalf of the “teacher.”

Who are the therapists for the therapists, the coaches for the coaches, the preachers for the preachers – just offering value of accountability, intentional and reciprocated?

By the end of 2024, I had grown to be a great helper for others, learned about giving attention to others, encouraged them along their journeys, and provided them with resources; but I was at a loss to find someone willing to be both teacher and listener for my next phase of growing.

In midst of my search, I found a local business owner offering a group coaching program. I paid a $500 deposit for a chance to be surrounded by business people more experienced than myself, and I hoped to find some faithful disciples among the group, too.

I was really counting on this. $500 was special money to me and I was setting aside more for this “opportunity.”

Unfortunately, somewhere between miscommunications and misunderstandings about who their market really was (not me,) I ultimately did not have the opportunity to take advantage of that program.

Is there such a thing as relationships intentionally seeking to sharpen one another and help each other grow?

A story about a storm and a dingy.

Then, like a life raft in the middle of an ocean of doubt, an acquaintance and I began connecting over professional matters.

She was seeking advice on how to handle something at work, and little did she know I was seeking someone who cared enough to look for such advice.

Then, around December 2024, she invited me to a goal-setting seminar without knowing my history with setting goals and keeping accountable to them. Her invitation was the igniting I needed to reimagine my mission for the future.

(My friends, never underestimate the value of bringing someone along your journey of success!)

It was at that seminar we challenged each other to weekly check-ins and accountability over the next year.

Over the next many months, we would assess each other’s goals while praying over each other’s missions and mistakes. We text each other every Tuesday, asking about our top three goals for the week and our top three priorities for the day.

We met for a nice lunch at least once a month to intimately connect about our families, our work, our communities, and our struggles with discipleship and discipline. We confessed to each other our selfish actions and admitted our shame in order to gain better perspective of our motives. We called out our desire to put such things to rest for better ways. We celebrated one another’s wins and created reward systems to continue our momentum together.

We didn’t post about it. We didn’t make it public. We just  watered each other silently and our quiet gardens. Not for the sake of approval, recognition, or glory – but because we felt equally called to be better managers of our lives. And of course, we would share close things with other friends as well. But knowing when we shared them with one another, it was with a deeper understanding; we were fellow students learning the art of mastering ourselves, and submitting to God.

In our case, because we were both Christ-centered in our intentions, we were learning from and consulting with the same master for our “cooperative trainings.”

After almost a year of checking in, we in one of our conversations over coffee assessing our progress and she says “I didn’t even know it was possible!”

In that moment, I realized I had almost given up hope that it could be.

Assessing the current inventory:

1. Who is willing to commit with you?
2. How often will you communicate?
3. What questions will you ask on check-in?
4. What resources and tools will you use for insight?
5. How will you maintain confidence and boundaries with one another?