Accountability is Overrated – Develop Strength Alone

This section is meant to show you why accountability is overrated and why you should build strength alone. In a world where group effort and feeling good about yourself is praised, we are going to focus on developing our own strength. If we improve our personal strength, we increase the overall strength of the group if and when we return to them.

“Only in solitude can any great work be done”

Pablo Picasso

Always use your own mind. Do you think accountability is overrated? Why or why not? What are the pros and cons of accountability?

I – Religion overplays accountability because it is easier than personal responsibility.

When I am with the group, I feel better, have more focus and more motivation. When I am alone, I feel weak and have to rely on my own strength. Relying on my own strength is hard because it requires me to hold up all my own weight. I cannot go to a friend for help, I cannot lean on an ally. It is much harder for us to rely on our own strength, but it is much more beneficial as well. This is one of the reasons that religion places such a heavy emphasis on accountability and group strength.

It is easier to perform well when I have friends around me. If I am the average guy in the church, I do not want to contribute much effort to holding myself up. And if I have the group to support me, I do not have to! I do not have to worry about one single thing when I am with the group because I absorb their strength. This may feel good in the moment, but it is disastrous in the  long-term.

It is easier to stay motivated when I have support.

When all my friends are training or “being spiritual”, it is easy for me to be motivated to do the same. At that point, being spiritual is equal to being part of the group. Best of both worlds in the minds of some.

But what do you do when are alone? Where do you go to gain strength when there is no one around you?

What are you capable of doing with your strength alone? Accountability gives the illusion of strength and comes at the expense of any kind of personal development.

When we are part of a group, the group’s strength masks our personal weaknesses. We never have to fix the chinks in our armor because our allies are covering those chinks for us. This is great for group warfare, but again it is dangerous for individual battles. As we will discuss later, we are almost never attacked when are with the group, we are almost always attacked when we are alone. And at that moment, we cannot rely on the group, can we? They are not with us and we are alone, so where do we go for strength? If we cannot rely on ourselves and on our own personal strength, we will be crushed.

When I am with the group, it is easier to delude myself into thinking I have strength when in reality I am feeding off the strength of my peers.

Just like a student can trick themselves into thinking they have mastery over a certain subject matter because they continue to read it and think “I understand this”. When in reality they have not been tested and therefore do not know their own level of knowledge. The same is true for the man who thinks he is strong because he spends much of his time around his friends. He does not know that he is simply leeching the strength from his peers and that he himself is actually quite weak.

These are a few reasons why accountability is overrated. And we are just getting started with this subject matter. Again, the religious world spends far too much time on accountability and group effort and far too little time on individual effort and personal strength.

II – I know what you will think, “Well how is being stronger as a group a bad thing? How do you know that accountability is overrated?”.

It is certainly not a bad thing to be stronger together. The problem is that is simply unreliable because you will not always be with your allies. Again, I am not saying to never use accountability, but I believe it should be used sparingly, at a rate of 20% of our training time. By that I mean when it comes to training, 80% of the time we should be working on building our individual strength. The other 20% of the time can be used for accountability. No more volume of accountability should be used because then we begin to develop the illusion of personal strength rather than genuine strength. We mistake the strength of the group for our personal strength.

It is not bad to use accountability, but it should only be a small percentage of our training.

The religious world has gone in the opposite direction. They spend 80% of the time talking about accountability and group strength and 20% of the time on developing personal strength. Then they follow that up with plenty of material about guilt and repentance. Usually because spending disproportionate amounts of time on accountability inevitably leads to failure. The reason this is unwise is because it does not reflect real-life combat scenarios, as we will discuss in the next section.

III – The Enemy Attacks When You Are Alone.

The reason it is inefficient to train as a group is that we are almost never attacked as a group. The enemy always attacks us when we are alone, isolated away from our fellow men. Let me ask you this, what good is group strength at this point? Is accountability going to help you when you are all by yourself?

You may say “Yes, because I know I would have to report back to my fellow men about if I failed or not”.

And that may be true, but that is assuming you both have a group of men holding you accountable, they are willing to actually hold you accountable and you are willing to tell them the truth about what happened. There are multiple ways to disable the effectiveness of the accountability group and lies are one of them.

Any time I attend some kind of church camp I always end up making the statement in some form or another that the camp is like an oasis from temptation. The levels of temptation you face at camp compared to the temptation you face in the waking world are like night and day. Of course, you will still have your bad apples who like to spoil the event for everyone else. But overall, there is almost a protective field around the event that keeps the adversary at bay.

This is excellent and a reprieve from the war of life. The problem is that it is not real life.

Camp demonstrates an important point, that we are almost never attacked as a group. We are always targeted as individuals when we are separated from the rest of the group. In those moments, what good is the strength of the group?

We come and train at these camps to improve, but we end up focusing on the development of group strength instead of individual strength. As a result, the gains we make do not carry over to our individual life. Sure, we learn a little more, perhaps we are “on fire” for a few weeks, but we come down. We have to go back to our individual lives and wage war all alone once again.

This is why there is the classic “repentance parade” on the last day of these camps.

On the last night, everyone and their grandma come forward to repent of some vague, unspecified wrongdoing like “being mean to their friends”. A few weeks after the repentance party these people are living exactly the same as they were before they came to camp. Because camp is not reflective of real life. That momentary motivation will not last, just like in every other facet of life. What these kids need to discipline, not to be fired up, highly emotional feeling they get from camp.

The question is, do we have the strength to fight this war while we are alone? Not is the only training we engage in is group strength training. There has to be a shift in focus from group strength to individual strength.

IV – 3 Quick Exercises for Personal Strength

A – Sitting with the adversary.

Simply sit and endure a wave of temptation. One of the reasons we fail is simply because we cannot sit still and handle a wave of temptation. It does not matter what the evil is, we fail to win because we feel the need to move or do something.

Think of being tempted as being shelled with mortar fire.

You simply have to sit there and wait it out. By developing the patience to just sit with temptation, you can defeat any temptation.

So, the next time you are alone and tempted, just sit with that temptation. Detach and consciously observe the feelings going through your body. What do you feel? Where are your thoughts going? Here is a checklist for you to observe your body during a battle of temptation:

1.  What do I feel in my head? Is it hot? Throbbing? Tingling? What is the sensation?
   
2. What do I feel in my chest?
   
3. How fast am I breathing?
   
4. How deeply am I breathing?
   
5. What do I feel in my gut? Am I breathing into my gut?
   
6. What do I feel in my junk (penis/testicles)? What temperature are they?
   
7. How tight are my muscles? Am I tensing muscles anywhere from head to toe? Am I gritting my teeth?

Just by running through a short checklist like this, you not only sit with the temptation, but you detach from your body. This detachment allows you to distract yourself and ride the wave of temptation instead of being pummeled by it.

B – Detach from emotions.

If you run through the checklist above, you will be able to detach from your body. But what if you want to detach from your emotions? We fail because we get emotional. When we get emotional, we cannot see the long-term or even short term-consequences. This is a spiritual fog of war.

By detaching, taking a few deep breaths, slowing the heart rate we can elevate our perspective. When we elevate our perspective, we can see those future consequences and begin to weigh them rationally in our minds. Weighing the positive and negative consequences of any action is critical. But this evaluation cannot be done if we are waist-deep in our emotions. To detach, ask yourself the following questions:

1. How am I looking right now?
   
2. What are the emotions I am feeling right now? Are those emotions useful?
   
3. Am I being weak at this moment? Do I look like the hero I want to be?
   
4. Am I feeling “hot in the head”? What temperature is my body? Is it getting warm?
   
5. Am I maintaining perfect control over myself right now?
   
6. Where is the enemy? What is my position? What is the best decision to make?

Again, these questions are nothing special. But having a brief protocol that you can use will allow you to break the attack of the enemy and reestablish an advantageous battlefield position.

C – Affirmations.

We all talk to ourselves, so we might as well be intentional about what we are saying. Write some affirmations for yourself. I like mine to be in the present tense and describe what I want to be, instead of what I already am. So, If I get nervous and anxious about events, I could make my affirmation “I am calm and in control of my emotions”. It is as simple as that. These can seem silly, but they are very helpful especially over the long run.

Try the following:

1. I am stronger alone.
   
2. I can crush the enemy, bring him to me.
   
3. Now, I am in total control of my mind, body, and emotions.
   
4. I am unmoved as the waves of life crash upon me.
   
5. Today, I bring the purest elements of war to the spiritual battlefield.
   
6. I am the champion warrior of my own soul and cannot be moved.
   
7. No weapon on the earth can touch my skin, I defeat all who oppose me.
   
8. My strength and power allow me to withstand every enemy assault.

Again, reading, saying, or listening to affirmations is going to feel pretty silly for a while. But your subconscious mind is going to hear these statements and make you better for it. Try these three tips out for a week and see what you think about it. Do you think that accountability is overrated? What are the pros and cons of accountability that you think about? Leave your comment below.