Guest Post: Why Accountability Partners Work

By Kristine Meldrum Denholm

When my freelance writer friend Holly Bowne told me how she and her accountability partner have been checking in with each other every week for the past year, I wanted to know more. She told me they email 3 times a week: Monday, sharing their goals for the week; mid-week, a progress check-in. On the weekend, they post how they fared.

“It’s not so much that we nag at each other, or shake our fingers at each other if we don’t meet our goals. But it’s amazing how the simple act of writing them down and sharing them with another is a subconscious motivator,” she says.

Is this a widespread practice? Google the generic “accountability partners” and you’ll have over 23 million hits. Life coaches recommend this motivation technique. Online matching services offer finding you a goal partner. Some Christian groups have prayer partners to fight temptations. Entrepreneurs brief each other.

Why should writers consider this approach?

1. Goal-tending, and not for the NBA. Nurture your goals. Many freelancers agree that goal-setting for a writer is imperative, and you need someone to hold you to it. Alanna Klapp, of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, adds part-time freelance writing to her busy life, so she feels that having partners helps her meet goals of sending out queries and looking for fulltime writing work after a grueling day job. “I thought it would be helpful to answer to other people,” she says.
2. Money makes the world go around (or at least your house). The law of averages—or just common sense– states the more queries you make, the more work you’ll wind up with. Bowne reports her income increased dramatically since she began emailing her partner. Ditto fulltime freelance writer Steve Sears, of Bloomfield, NJ, whose goal is to triple his writing income this year and get three $1 a word clients, and says he’s already close.
3. The fear factor. You don’t want to report you didn’t accomplish anything but post a few Facebook statuses. “It’s one thing to get lazy and let yourself down, quite another to let others down,” says Sears.
4. Look, a bunny! Distraction for a writer is a part of our days. Hey, I should check Twitter! Though you can keep up with writing websites, and have CNN on in the background, it’s easy to get sidetracked. Your partner(s) will question you if you’ve reached your query goal instead. Let yourself tweet…but let yourself get back to work. (But first find me @writerandmom.)
5. A watercooler for writers. My newly-acquired accountability partners and I call ourselves “the watercooler.” Our cohorts in actual offices get to chat around the watercooler; we meet virtually once a week to compare notes and bounce ideas off each other.
6. The sounds of silence. In a quiet home office, a solo pro craves feedback. Laughs Bowne: “Until I had my accountability partner, the only one excited about anything I accomplished during the day was my dog. And really, he never looked all that enthusiastic… unless we celebrated with a cookie.”

Kristine Meldrum Denholm is a freelance journalist based outside Washington, DC, who writes about family issues, psychology, and law enforcement. Her award-winning work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, online, and the newly-released Chicken Soup for the Soul: A Dog’s Life. Check out her website at www.KristineMeldrumDenholm.com. Her accountability partners are Steven Sears, Alanna Klapp, and  Holly Bowne. 

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