Latest / The Quiet Between with Juliette Pasquet / I Need Someone to Hold Me Accountable
Transcript
- "I need someone to hold me accountable." How many times have you heard that sentence? I've said it myself, so guilty as charged. But I've heard many others say it, too, in all kinds of contexts. It may seem innocuous at first, right? What could be so wrong about being held accountable after all? I'm Juliette, and this is The Quiet Between. There's nothing wrong with accountability. Let me say that right away because I can already see the very driven, goal-oriented people coming for me. So bear with me, guys. I love accountability. I could have literally invented accountability myself. As a tool, it is incredibly useful. It gives us structure, support, and sometimes the extra push we need to follow through. The problem begins when accountability stops being a tool and becomes a way of life. If you pay attention, its logic follows us everywhere: into work, sport, relationships, and even the goals we set for ourselves. It becomes pervasive in a sense. And once we turn accountability inward, we're no longer using it simply to measure what we do. We're using it to measure ourselves. And it starts shaping the way we move through our days and set the standard for what a good day is supposed to look like. I know exactly what that means for me. It means getting things done and feeling like I'm on top of everything. I swear, on those days when I'm able to tackle a decent amount of work, when I'm emotionally available for my kids, when I maintain the house and the routine to a T, get dinner ready, and even spend a little quality time with my husband, I feel invincible. Like I'm acing life, you know? But then what if I haven't managed to tick all the boxes? What if I feel I'm behind? Because if I feel accomplished when I do, then what am I if I don't? And what does that say about me then? That I am failing? That I'm not efficient enough or worse, that I'm lazy? I can think of one example that says a lot about me. I hate being sick, but again, who likes it, right? No, but really, I make a terrible, terrible patient because being sick forces me to stay in bed and do nothing, and I get incredibly frustrated. But if I'm being honest, part of me feels guilty too. Guilty for being sick. How screwed up is that? So I started asking myself, "When did that become the measure? When did being become secondary to doing?" I think repetition is what allowed that shift to happen. When the same standard is reinforced across multiple areas of our lives, measuring ourselves against it becomes automatic. And what begins as an external structure becomes internalized. So we no longer need someone else to monitor or evaluate us because we begin doing it ourselves. And that's when the measure shifts from what we do to who we believe we are. If we do well, we're enough. But if we don't, something about us falls short. Let me give you an example, and I have my sixth grader to thank for it. Today, on our way back home from school, she told me she got a B in English, and she added that she didn't want to disappoint her teacher by getting a B, which she considered a bad grade. Bless her. As far as I'm concerned, I'm perfectly happy with B's as a parent. But the point was not the grade itself. So I replied to her, "Well, honey, your teacher graded your paper, not you." She was so confused because she could not see the difference between the work she had produced and herself. To her, they were the same. Do you see what I mean? So what's striking here is how subtle it is. My daughter had identified herself through her work. I did it too, and maybe I'm still doing it. So at some point, accountability stops acting as an external sparring partner because we take over. We become the ones measuring, evaluating, judging, still asking, "Is this enough?" Or maybe somewhere underneath, "Am I enough?" Now, you may not recognize yourself in that. You may use accountability exactly as it is meant to be used, meaning a healthy and effective tool without ever allowing it to become a measure of your self-worth. And I can respect that. But there's still a question worth asking. What happens when the way we organize our lives around accountability gets passed on to our children? Behavior is learned, and what we repeatedly model carries far more weight than what we tell our children. So when we make our children as busy as we are, busyness becomes the norm. We don't have to tell them that a full life is a busy one. They learn it by watching how we move through our days and by living the schedules we create for them. Take my kids again. Their days are filled with schoolwork, after-school activities and sports, playdates and birthday parties on weekend, and so on and so forth. But they're not the ones managing the calendar or deciding how much is too much. We are. And of course, we do it with the best intentions. Everything they're doing seems important, either to them, to their development, or to their social integration. Their schedule fills up gradually, one activity after another, until suddenly there's almost no space left. No time to be bored. No time to let the day settle. No time for the questions to emerge. And you know, questions take time to emerge, especially with children. They rarely come on command. When my children come home from school, they can't necessarily tell me about the whole day right away. They're often still caught up in whatever is happening now or what happened a few minutes earlier. The rest of the day needs time to come to the surface. It's a little like being in a dark room with a flashlight. Everything that happened during the day is already there. It just needs time for the light to reach it. And we as parents need enough space too to be emotionally available when they're finally ready to talk. I think there are so many conversations that could happen if only we weren't too busy to arrive at them. So I remember thinking, "Is this what we wanna teach our kids? That living means filling every minute of the day. That you'd better run because walking's not enough." So the question isn't whether accountability is useful, because it is. The question is how much power we wanna give it. Accountability itself is not the issue. The problem is the standard it can reinforce, the efficiency, the performance, the idea that we're either acing life or falling short. But can we walk a middle path here between those two extremes? Can we let accountability guide what we do without letting it define who we are? And more importantly, can we model that same balance for our kids? I don't think it's about lowering our standards. It's about refusing to let either extreme tell the whole story, because most of life is lived somewhere in between. If you'd like to stay in touch, you can find my writing at read.thequietbetween.space. Thank you for listening to episode number two. I'll talk to you soon.