The Accountability Coach Who Needed an Accountability Coach

Some of you know I run an accountability and coworking community for creatives, called The Creative Spirals. My main gig is literally holding people's feet to the fire on their biggest creative bucket list projects - for example, if you tell me you will finish a project by June 30 and you miss the deadline, you pay $666 to a charity you hate.

It's fun to make my living helping other people finish their things. But I struggle deeply with holding myself accountable for my own work.

I have an unfinished album, a half-assed podcast idea, and several business offerings I have yet to launch.

It feels completely ironic. Or maybe it just makes perfect sense.

I have to tell myself that it's unfair to ask a personal trainer to be their own personal trainer. It is unfair to ask a therapist to be their own therapist. And naturally, it is unfair to ask a creative accountability coach to be her own coach.

That's why we need community. We need each other.

I am a singer-songwriter. A few years ago, I released an EP called Part-Time Agnostic. I started to write a bit on a Substack under that same name. I even partnered with a fellow Epiphany Space member to throw a house concert in LA that was like church for the unchurched. 

It was awesome. But then I just ran out of steam. I put the project on the back burner. I kept putting all my personal projects on the back burner.

I am ready to pick up that brand again. I have ideas for podcasts, TikToks, and more music centered around the deconstruction-reconstruction theme, and more house concerts. 

But I needed a stronger deadline than one I could just assign myself. I needed actual consequences for my own work. I needed to do exactly what I tell my clients to do.

So here is how I am doing it. I am externalizing my deadlines. I am booking body-doubling coworking sessions on a website called Focusmate to force myself to sit down and do the work. I am using my own communities (like Epiphany Space and The Creative Spirals!) to coordinate different projects and bounce around topics.

I also heard May 29 is known as Release Day in the CreativeMornings community.

That is as good a deadline as any!

There are more details about it here: https://creativemornings.com/releaseday

So, whether you officially sign up for Release Day, think about making May 29th a deadline you can use for your own creative projects.

As for me, I think I'm going to release a project I've been wanting to work on for years. I'm calling it a minimum-viable podcast. We'll see how it goes!

What about you? What's your big bucket-list project you want to release soon?