Hi, my name is Taylor Evans, and I am on the team with Prison Professors.
If you cannot be accountable to yourself, how can you be accountable to anyone else?
Accountability is one of the most difficult skills to master because being accountable usually has some high level of difficulties to achieve and at the end of the day holding yourself accountable is doing the right or necessary thing when no one is watching.
As you are going through the most difficult challenge of your life it is critical for you to ask yourself and your team what accountability looks like to you and how does holding me accountable helps me achieve my definition of success.
When I was going through my case I thought my lawyer and legal team would take care of everything and I could sit back and relax. That was not true at all! Honestly, my attorney couldn’t care less if I did what I told him I would do. He already received his retainer so now all he could do was report on how I was doing.
The point of that story that I shared with you is that only you can control yourself. You can say you are doing it for your family or to protect your job, but the reality is your family will not be sitting next to you when you are in court. Your boss or lawyer will not spend time in jail or prison with you. You are the only person who can control how accountable you are to yourself.
Michael shared in the video how he held himself accountable in a 10-year window during his 26 year prison sentence. He shares how his three goals were to be earn a degree from a university, become a published author, and develop a network of 10 advocates that he did not previously know.
If you read Earning Freedom you can see firsthand the trials and tribulations Michael went through to accomplish his goals and hold himself accountable. He had to deal with prison guards, wardens, and other staff members inside the penitentiary that wanted nothing more than to watch Michael fail. Some of the staff went out of their way to deny any request Michael made purposefully trying to make his life as hard as possible.
It would have been so easy for Michael to stop give up and throw in the white flag when he met this resistance. But he didn’t, he advocated for himself, researched the rules and laws around prison, and made the most of his sentence, and sorry for the spoilers, but he did accomplish all
three of those goals.
So my question for you is what is stopping you and how accountable are you holding yourself?
