😁 I’m meeting my accountability buddy, Alison, tomorrow.
I’ve been talking to Alison for a couple of years now. We are both members of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading and have followed fairly similar paths in our career journeys.
🎯 Alison and I are in an accountability group together. The purpose of the group is that members set and share goals and help each other along with the momentum needed to work towards our targets.
I learnt about the existence of accountability groups through talking to authors.
⏳ It’s so easy to procrastinate. In any industry, actually.
But, with authors, their hearts and souls go into their work. It can be very easy to get derailed when self-doubt starts to kick in.
👊 But you’ve got to push through it.
One really good way of doing that is to go with group momentum.
🗓️ They’ll publish their daily, weekly or monthly word count targets and check in with each other to see if they’ve made it.
They cheerlead and problem solve and help each other to the finish line, at drafting stage and beyond.
So, I’d seen it work for authors and I thought, what the heck, I’m going to try it with editors.
🚦 A coaching call with the brilliant Lisa Carlin gave me the confidence I needed to get the ball rolling. That was back in May 2020. I put the feelers out to some fellow editors to see whether anyone fancied coming along for the ride and I formed a merry band of editorial buddies and we forged ahead.
We have an online group and there we share our monthly goals. These are very often related to the peripheral tasks involved in running a business. Or they might be related to training. Or marketing.
They are often the tasks that, if you’re not careful, slip through the cracks. (Because, in all honesty, they’re not as fun as the editing.)
But they are the tasks that, if they are not done, will mean the editing grinds to a halt — and we don’t want that!
🍀 So we publish our goals for the group to see just before the first of every month. We comment on the goals and wish each other luck, or ask questions about them if we’d like to know more.
At the end of the month, we check in and say whether we have managed to do what we said we’d do.
👩🎓 That is incredibly motivational for me. If I’ve said to the group that I will do X training exercise, or Y marketing experiment, then I make sure I get on and do it. I don’t want to lose face!
Every other month, we have a Zoom so we can talk through this kind of stuff in a supportive, collegial way. And, where we’ve run into problems, we can ask for advice from the others to see how they’ve fared with similar issues.
And, Alison, she’s been brilliant through this whole process. She’s been there since day one and we really have each other’s backs.
🌐 There have been so many messages shared, so many likes and comments on each other’s posts, and so many chats through grainy internet connections. But, tomorrow, we will meet face to face.
I’m very much looking forward to catching up and I’m sure that it’ll make our accountability bond even stronger.
❓ Are you in an accountability group? Do you think it could work in your industry?
If you are thinking about it, go for it. It’s definitely helped me move forward with my goals and it could work for you, too.
Alison Gilbert #CIEP #Accountability #CherryEdits #Editing #Proofreading
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