Life's A Journey

Don't Be a Loner

I used to think that I didn’t need anyone to help me do anything. I didn’t need people to “support” me and hold me accountable. I could do that on my own.

I have learned through the last two years, that not only do I need others, but by allowing others to help me, I am learning to be self-sufficient in a way that’s not self-destructive, and it’s helping me to stay accountable to my goals, both writing goals and non-writing goals.

Having friends who hold you accountable – not just for your goals, but for your thought patterns and stinkin’ thinkin’, will really help a person out.

Don’t get me wrong – being alone can also benefit one, and being independent can be a good thing. But I have learned over the last couple of years that too much of anything might lead to disastrous results. Let me give you a prime example of how not having a support system has hurt my writing:

I set myself a goal of writing a blog entry every week in 2017. However, that did NOT happen. Why? I could come up with a million excuses:
I didn’t have time;
I couldn’t think of anything to write;
No one cares about what’s going on in my life;
I don’t feel like writing it today; I’ll write it tomorrow.
And the list goes on and on. But the truth of the matter is that I didn’t have the self-discipline to manage my time well enough to hold myself accountable to the goal.

Now here’s an example of how it affected my personal life outside of writing:

I set a goal of making sure to do my daily Bible study every day. However, again, I came up with excuse after excuse for not getting it done – see the excuses listed above. This one, however, had more of an effect on me than just not writing a blog entry. I began to become distant from God. I became more easily frustrated, frightened, ticked off, and offended. Even things that shouldn’t have bothered me began to really piss me off. I began to feel as if my life didn’t matter – and that I was a total failure, that there was no way God could love me. Then I got to a point where I began to blame Him for the things that were going on – even when it was something that was caused by my own poor choices.

However, I noticed that on the days when I did my daily study first thing when I got up – oh, okay….be technical….after my first three cups of coffee, I seemed to have better days. I didn’t get frustrated very easily. I wasn’t as scared of what I couldn’t see coming in the future. I wasn’t feeling like so much of a failure. And I started to believe again that God loved me and that my life meant something.

So you see, having an accountability partner or a friend who can help encourage you to reach your goals and keep up with your daily goals can be a very good thing, especially if you are someone like me who tends NOT to have self-discipline in these areas.

So do yourself and everyone around you a favor. Quit being a loner, get an accountability buddy or ask some of your friends to help you, and start reaching your goals and feeling better about yourself. You will find in the long run, you will be much happier.