Empowerment Exercise #2: Being Accountable

Empowerment Exercise #2: Being Accountable

Section
Lifestyle Strategy
Category
Your Environment

Learn how being accountable can help you become an empowered, enlightened force to be reckoned with - on and off the tables. Sure, being accountable isn't always pleasant, and it can force us to admit some things about ourselves we'd like to ignore, but ignoring a problem never made it go away.


If you’ve been with me up to this point in our journey to empowerment, you’ll have already navigated the five levels of awareness and should have identified what, exactly, it is you’re looking to improve in your life, and by extension, at the tables. 

Now we’re going to talk about learning to be accountable of and for our actions, and our reactions. You’d think that after a few decades on this planet we’d understand enough about ourselves to have a solid handle on how we feel – really feel – about certain things, but the truth is, the things we’re often most clueless about are things that relate directly to ourselves. 

This is where learning to be accountable will help. 

The exercise is easy. If you don’t already have a journal or a poker journal, I want you to get one. Hell, staple some pages together and make one. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to be cohesive.

Once you have your journal, I want you to take notes throughout your day about what you do, and how you feel after you’ve done it. Start as soon as you get up and jot down a few notes on how you feel. Feel lousy? Consider the quality and duration of your sleep.

Write down what you eat for your meals and snacks. How do you feel after eating certain foods? Likewise, write down how you feel after doing certain activities, like exercising, washing the dishes, getting a hair cut – whatever. 

Fear not, undertaking this exercise doesn’t condemn you to a life of endless chronicling of your every move. In fact, you don’t need to write about everything you do – I know that’s impossible. Just keep your journal on you and write when you can.  You don’t even need to journal for long. As little as a week or two can do the trick. 

Connect the Dots

Once you’ve been journaling for a bit, you’ll start to see patterns arise. You’ll see that you’re constantly sluggish after eating or drinking certain things, or perhaps if you stay up past 10pm you’re distracted the next day. Maybe a 20 minute power nap makes you feel great, but anything longer makes you feel groggier than you did before the nap. Maybe you’ll see how interacting with certain people drains you and leads you to make poor decisions, and how other people energize you. The point is taking note and then noticing these things will give you a clear ‘how-to’ guide for your life. If you want to feel good and play optimally, you’ll know exactly what to do. If you want to feel like ass and waste your time and money at the tables, then you’ll know how to do that too. 

It’s that simple, and the pay-off is huge. Stay tuned for your next step toward empowerment.