Make Over Your Mornings – Day 7 Blog Along

Image from makeoveryourmornings.com

Good morning! If you’ve been with us from Day 1, welcome back! I’m so proud of you for continuing on! If you haven’t snagged a copy yet, it’s not too late to get yours and join us! Head on over to Make Over Your Mornings to get yours now. The workbook that comes with it is invaluable – not to mention the personal videos you get to watch each day featuring Money Saving Mom‘s very own Crystal Paine. You can find Day 1’s Blog Along post here to catch up. And if you’re looking for a testimony to how wonderful this program works, you can find mine here.

Have your copy and ready to start changing your life? LET’S GO!

It’s so easy to let ourselves slide on our goals and priorities when the only one that knows about them is us. If you don’t risk the world seeing when you fail, you don’t have to worry about it, right? That’s how I treated so many things in my life, and I was dead wrong.

You see, I find that I can achieve so much more when I tell someone about my intentions. Knowing that I have that extra push to show them I can succeed in my plans can really make a huge difference in meeting my goals.

For instance, I’m going to admit something I’m not very proud of. In fact, I’m a bit ashamed. Have you ever seen this meme?

While my care was never quite that bad, it certainly got pretty close at times – especially when I was in High School! Yikes, right?! The only reason it improved over the years, I’m sure, is because my kids had to sit somewhere.

Needless to say, one of my goals definitely needed to be to clean out my car and keep it clean. I’d finally gotten myself to the point where it was a majority of the kids’ toys and junk that was continually being left in the vehicle that created the mess, but I still had to make it a priority and a point to not let it happen.

I did a thorough cleaning on my car and informed not only my husband but my children that the car was going to remain that way from now on. I knew that if I could just make it to the 30 day mark of keeping it that way, I’d be set for life! The funny thing was, my husband had heard it from me before, and he wasn’t so sure I could do it.

Well, I’m happy to report I’ve long since passed my goal of 30 days of keeping the car clean! I made it a priority that no matter what else was going on or how big of a hurry I was in, as soon as I arrived home each time, I cleared out whatever had been put in the car. We made a rule that the kids couldn’t bring any toys with them into the car, and that has helped A TON! And guess what? My husband was impressed and astounded that it’s remained that way!

Making myself accountable to him made a world of difference in keeping that goal on track and eventually meeting it. Like we talked about on Day 5, Brandon and I have also agreed to have a weekly meeting on Wednesday nights to discuss where I am with my goals. I have absolute faith that these weekly meetings will keep me focused and driven to achieve success in my goals!

Crystal mentioned having an accountability partner for waking up on time in the mornings. When I first went through the course this past summer, I told my best friend about it and asked her to be mine. The plan was that I would text her when I woke (I had set my wake time for 6am), and that would keep me accountable. It was a great concept, but I found that sometimes, family and friends tend to be extremely forgiving or find ways to excuse your “tardiness” until it becomes acceptable to just not stick to the plan. For instance, if I had a couple of days where I just didn’t feel like getting out of bed on time, I didn’t really feel that much more accountable to go ahead and push through because I knew my friend would see it as no big deal. Don’t get me wrong, there are days when life happens. But, I also didn’t want to take a lackadaisical approach to trying to make over my mornings. If we go in with the attitude that it’s no big deal if we don’t follow through, then we simply won’t follow through, and what is the point in that?

If you have someone you’re thinking of as being your accountability partner but you know they’ll bend the rules for you just like my friend did for me, I’d recommend thinking of another avenue. Sometimes, it’s even better to have a stranger holding you accountable because we’re more likely to do things that “impress” or don’t let down a stranger than we are our own circle of friends. If that’s you and you’d like an accountability partner that’s not in your inner circle, I’ll be more than happy to be that for as little or as many people as would like! We can plan to let each other know our wake times and send a text to one another every morning when we get up. We can be there to encourage and support each other, and reassure on the days we don’t quite make it.

I’ll also be back here tomorrow with my experiences and thoughts from Day Eight! And don’t forget, if you still haven’t gotten your hands on a copy of the Make Over Your Mornings e-course, you can do that here.

So, tell me, who is your accountability partner and how do you plan to keep that relationship going? Daily text messages, weekly coffee dates, periodic lunch meetings?