At the beginning of 2025, I made a commitment to finish and publish the book I had been writing about storytelling and healing. I signed up Luvvie Ajayi Jones’ Book Academy to make me accountable for finishing it this calendar year.
Luvvie’s course and community are extremely powerful and generous, and I strongly recommend The Book Academy for people wrestling with their public voice, specifically how to shape that voice into publishable, marketable books.
One of the things Luvvie asked us to ask ourselves, near the end of the course, was “what is your one thing?” That question showed me places I had been hiding behind things I often and easily say that had more to reveal. While I had signed up for Luvvie’s course to create more accountability around my writing discipline, I left with a much stronger sense of what I have to say and do that I am uniquely trained – by formal education, by professional training, and by life itself – to do.
In 2021 I don’t think I knew about Luvvie yet, when I tried to do something similar to her Book Academy. I called it the Book Finishers Master Class; my intention was to bring together everything someone like me needed to finish a book they’d been working on for a long time:
- A big idea based in their own experience;
- Personal stories to frame a larger story important to a specific audience;
- A book that served as an exemplar of the book they were trying to complete;
- A community to help them tease out the idea; and
- Structures of accountability to themselves and the group.
At the time, I thought of “accountability” as getting stuff done when you say you will do it, and that’s really important. To achieve that, I created accountability partners among the people in the Book Finishers Master Class.
For my own accountability partner, I picked Rita, someone I had met in the very early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was looking for a new job. She had come to the weekly Storyhood community off and on, and I loved the way she talked about her morning tea: the color, the warmth of the cup, the steam. I imagined drinking tea with her on my mother’s porch. She and I started meeting weekly to talk about our writing, each of us walking in our own neighborhoods at first, and then when it was safe we started meeting from time to time for a longer walk and breakfast.
Rita and I have been walking and talking once a week for over four years, and I often save my big unsolvable questions to wrestle through with Rita during those weekly walks. Over time, other characters — her mom, my dad, our husbands, our kids — have emerged as we talk about them and, when things are complicated, exploring what may be stopping us, confusing us, or holding us back.
At first, as “accountability partners,” Rita and I shared TO DO lists in text messages, and encouraged one another to finish the most important things. About a year in, we shifted to a long exploration of why we work, and the things we often find hard to make happen at work. At the time, I was selling my company, and she was trying to leave the job she was searching for when we first met.
Over time, the meaning of “accountability” took a turn towards things that were closer to our hearts, each week putting aside what we thought we knew to explore the old things in new ways. In that context, “accountability” meant keeping one another on track with that “one thing” Luvvie referred to and I think of as the innate genius we ACH of us has been given to share with the world.
To be a good thought partner for that type of exploration, I need to listen better than I usually do — not trying to solve her problems, or even to think about them as problems, but to walk with her where she was, curious about what was she trying to figure out and what questions I might ask that would give her back to herself.
Last week I saw how this is the real gift of a steady, enduring friendship: “accountability” not to getting shit done, but to becoming who we are able to be, individually and together.
I invite you to explore someone who keeps you accountable to your biggest, best, boldest version of yourself:
- When did you meet this person?
- What was the relationship like at first?
- How has the relationship shifted over time?
- What are the things this person saw in you and helped you see in yourself?
- What did you help them see in themselves?
- Is there one moment in that relationship that exemplifies what others can learn from the two of you together?