This post is part of a series. To get the full experience, start here.

Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions.

Merriam-Webster

In elementary school, we had a ritual that laid the foundation. At the start of each day, a short greeting and some specific instructions echoed from the loudspeaker at the front of the room: Stand beside your desk, say the Pledge of Allegiance, and repeat this mantra:

“I am special.
I am responsible for my actions.
I am going to do my best work today.”

I repeated those three sentences every day from kindergarten through fourth grade, so I can’t say I’m shocked they stuck. Add in a Black mama who didn’t play about decorum plus my Virgo sun sign and the “A” in my initials might as well stand for Accountable.

I’ve always felt an obligation and a willingness to accept responsibility for my actions. It is my duty to hold myself accountable to my own personal convictions and be the person my mama raised me to be, a kind, generous, productive, contributing member of society. I also really like being the person who does what they say they’ll do, someone others can rely on. When people think of me, I want them think of someone who says what she means, means what she says, and isn’t afraid to admit when she’s wrong.

It frustrates me that others aren’t as accountable. I know I hold myself to some pretty high standards (I am very, very much a Virgo) but sometimes I wonder why some people refuse to take the tiniest bit of accountability. Too many folks make excuses, act wishy-washy, or have a million and one reasons why everyone else is at fault but them.

I’ll use myself as an example! I wholeheartedly intended to post updates to this series every week. But for a whole host of reasons, this post didn’t go up when I wanted. I didn’t do exactly what I said I would.

I could blame my job for keeping me busy. Or my husband and dog for needing my attention. Or even my iPad for not having enough battery!

But that isn’t accountability.

Instead, I will acknowledge that the post is late (which it is). I will apologize if that upset anyone (sorry about that y’all). And in the future, I’ll do my best to post on time (and hopefully y’all will give me grace if I am late sometimes).

Nobody’s perfect, but we can all try to hold ourselves accountable for our actions. We can all take responsibility for the actions we take and the energy we put into the world, even when we mess up.

As promised in my last post, I’m back to share my 8 core values from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead list. The values I hold most deeply are:

• Accountability
• Equality
• Financial Stability
• Honesty
• Independence
• Loyalty
• Perseverance
• Reliability

To get to this list, I narrowed the full list of over 100 values down to 24 finalists. My final 8 came from those 24. In the original version of this activity, you should narrow down even further to just 2 or 3 values. However, my therapist recommended choosing 8 because our value system can be complex. And let’s be honest- choosing just 2 or 3 values wouldn’t make of a blog series. 🙂

I expected this exercise to be difficult, but holy dang! A lot of introspection and reflection went into just narrowing the list down. I also really thought about what each value meant, searching for definitions and critically assessing what that word meant to me.

I highly encourage everyone who is on a path of personal growth to identify their own top 8! You can view the full list of values here. By examining our thoughts and motivations, we can better understand ourselves and each other.