When you use your executive center, you give rise to your executive function, the smart, thinking part of your brain. It reflects, stops, thinks, anticipates, strategically manages, strategically plans, considers the pros and cons, and wisely acts. Learn more about the impact of accountability on executive function development and why accountability, no matter your age, is essential for your self and life mastery.

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All of our distractions in life are all of the impulses and instincts,

the pleasures and pains of a polarized perspective because we're not doing

what's really meaningful to us.

I'm going to first define accountability.

When people think of accountability if you look on the dictionary,

it'll typically say,

when you give somebody some action and responsibility to do it,

they'll be accountable to get it done. And that's true.

There's no doubt about it. But the question is,

is why is it that some people seem to get things done and other people

procrastinate, hesitate, frustrate, why are they not being accountable?

And this leads me to a topic that I address most every week.

And that is human values.

Whenever you're doing something that is really, really important to you,

that's truly high on your priorities and your values,

you're spontaneously inspired from within,

and disciplined from within to get it done. And therefore,

if somebody asked you to do something, you're likely to get it done,

you'll be accountable. Cause it's something very important to you.

But if somebody was to ask you to do something that really wasn't important to

you and you felt maybe an obligation to do it, you think you 'ought to' do it,

'supposed to' do it, 'should do', 'got to' do, 'have to' do, 'must do',

instead of 'love to' do, you're probably going to procrastinate,

hesitate and frustrate.

You're not likely to continue to do it and you'll give up if it becomes

challenging, and therefore you're not accountable.

People are only accountable to what's really, really important to them in life.

And the thing is, is finding out what that is,

is crucial if you want to become an accountable individual. Now,

let's relate that to the brain, because that's what the topic is today.

Now everybody has a set of priorities, a set of values that are unique to them.

Whenever they're doing something that's very highest on their value,

they're accountable to get it done. But in addition to that,

whenever they're doing something that's really high in their values, the blood,

glucose, and oxygen goes into the forebrain,

and the forebrain is called the prefrontal cortex, the media prefrontal cortex,

the telencephalon, it's got different titles,

but it's the most advanced part of the brain.

This part of the brain is involved in inspired vision, strategic planning,

executing those plans, and self-governance.

So you're automatically more accountable when you're setting goals and

objectives that are really aligned with what you value most in life.

And this so often is overruled by you trying to fit into

what the collective associations around you are trying to impose.

If you have people you're comparing

yourself to and exaggerate them to you and then expect yourself to be somebody

you're not and expect yourself to get things done that aren't really important

to you, and then you'll end up being quote "unaccountable."

Now what's interesting is when people think of accountability,

they very commonly think of people working in an organization or a company and

they need to be accountable to get the job done or maybe in government,

they need to be accountable to do what they're saying and having walking their

talk, not limping their life.

But this is again goes back to the value structure.

If a manager is managing and leading people and hiring

people for a job, if they get somebody who's,

their highest value is not matching in any degree,

what's expected of them as far as a job responsibility,

they're less likely to be accountable to get the job done.

Anytime you hire somebody and you have a job description and you don't find out

what is highly highest in the values of the individual you're hiring and find

out if how those job duties are going to help them fulfill their highest value,

if they can't see how those job duties are going to help fulfill their highest

values, they're going to be less likely to be accountable,

more likely to procrastinate. They're going to end up being disengaged.

They're going to be in a sense having to be motivated and micromanaged to get

things done. And this is not what you want.

You want people accountable so you can be free to go do what's more important in

your life. So anytime you're hiring somebody,

you want to make sure that the job description is

hiring, the individual you're hiring, as aligned with what they value.

And a manager who doesn't hire wisely and gets people who are not inspired by

their job is going to end up having a bunch of people that are not accountable.

And accountability is really the ability to take into account and have a

balanced objective and doing what's really important to you.

I have a high value on teaching. You can rely on me to be doing that.

I have a very low value on cooking and driving.

You can't count on me to be cooking or driving.

I haven't cooked since I was 24 and I haven't driven a car in 32 years.

So if you expected me to do something that was low on my values,

you're going to be let down.

And anytime you hire somebody and you expect them to do something that's not

highest on their values, they're going to let you down.

Or you're going to have to keep motivating them,

reminding them and incentivize them to do it.

You have to give them rewards to do it or punishment if you don't.

And that's not the way to run a business or run your life for that matter. So,

accountability is an expression of living congruently and aligned

with what you value most. And anytime you're not able to do that,

and you're having to put out fires, doing low priority things,

you can guarantee that you're not going to get around to doing the things that

really are meaningful to you.

So don't hire somebody unless you've identified what their values,

go on my website,

do the Value Determination process on anybody you're about to hire and find out

what they value.

Then take a clear idea of what the job description is and make sure it's clear

and concise of what you're expecting from them. The actions,

the daily actions you're going to actually have them do.

Then go and find out how specifically is these actions going to help them

fulfill they value most.

If they can't answer that fluently and congruently and see how what they're

going to do is going to help them fulfill their highest values,

they're not going to be accountable. You're going to have to micromanage them,

push them uphill,

you're going to have to remind them and motivate them and you're going to be

frustrated. But that's a managers, as Drucker said,

that's the management who hired that individual,

it's not the problem with the individual,

there's nothing wrong with the individual. If you know what their values are,

you know what you can expect.

And if you've got a person that's not matching a job, you hired them.

So the wise thing to do is to find out what they value first.

Please go on my website and take advantage of the Value Determination process on

anybody you're about to hire, and do it for yourself for that matter.

And ask yourself, how is my job duties helping me fulfill my values?

If I can't see how my job, daily job duties is helping me fulfill my values,

I'm not going to want to go to work. I'm going to be drained.

I'm going to be frustrated. I'm going to be distracted. I'm going to get,

I want to be go off and, you know,

get distracted by things and eating and food and distraction and shopping and

looking on the internet or whatever, because I'm not engaged.

You're only engaged in what you value most,

you're only reliable and disciplined and focused on the things that you value

most.

You're only really going to be really accountable on the things you value most.

And by the way, when you're doing something that's highest on your values,

you're more objective. Objectivity means balanced oriented.

You see things more neutrally. And whenever you're doing that,

you're more accountable because you've been brought into accountability,

both the positives and the negatives, equally.

Many people when they're not doing something that's inspiring to them and

they're unfulfilled and they go and they bring the blood, glucose,

and oxygen down into their amygdala. The amygdala wants to avoid a predator,

seek a prey, avoid challenge, seek ease, avoid pain, seek pleasure,

and it wants immediate gratification. And that's the thing that distracts us.

All of our distractions in life are all of the impulses and instincts,

the pleasures and pains of a polarized perspective because we're not doing

what's really meaningful to us. And the second we're doing something meaningful,

and doing something that's important in our values,

the executive center comes online, we become more objective, we're more neutral,

we're more resilient, more adaptable, we're more accountable,

and we get things done and we walk our talk, not limp our life.

We wake up our leader instead of becoming a follower.

We trust our own decisions and actions and not have to rely on offloading our

decisions to others, which is the follower's mentality.

And we're now an unborrowed visionary instead of a borrowed visionary.

Living in the shadows of others

instead of living on the shoulders of giants is the difference.

If you want to make a bigger difference, you want to be authentic,

you want to be inspired by your life,

you want to live by highest in what's priority,

and learn to delegate lower priority things.

That allows you to get the forebrain,

the executive center to come online and not your amygdala.

Your amygdala is your survival center.

Your executive center is your thrival center. If you want to thrive,

if you want to be master of your destiny and not victim of history,

you want to prioritize your daily life. And as long as you're prioritizing it,

you're going places. I've seen people who've gone through,

taken a list of what they're doing for the agenda for the day,

prioritize it for the day,

stuck to it one after another and kept a priority in the day,

knocked it out of the ballpark, said no to things that were lower in priority,

said no to all the opportunists, said no to all the distractions,

the sales people and all the things that distracted them,

and stayed focused on what was most meaningful and important to them,

and they were accountable and they got amazing things done,

at the end of the day, they were resilient, adaptable, they came home,

they loved their family, they were not reactive,

they were not dumping and downloading all their emotions onto people,

they're present.

And that's what's possible when people take command of their priorities.

But if they did not do that,

they're afraid to say no that they get inundated by all these unexpected things,

they're putting fires out, they're doing lower priority things.

They're basically disengaged. They're back in their amygdala.

They're now wanting to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

Everything seems to be distressful instead of eustressful.

Now what you're doing is you're running your body down.

You're causing what is called entropy, disorder. You're highly emotional.

You're in what is called systems 1 thinking where emotions and feeling before

you're thinking, you're reacting. You're saying things you then regret,

you're living in fantasies and avoiding nightmares. You're basically,

basically disempowered in your life.

And at the end of the day, you're just a bear.

And now you downloaded on your family. You download on your frustrations.

Your self-worth is depleted. You're drained.

You want to go out and drink and party and escape at night instead of being

inspired and being focused on a vision, being present with your loved ones.

So this is the difference between living by priority or living by lower

priority.

Higher priority actions build self-worth and build accomplishment and bring the

master out of you. And lower priorities automatically make the mess,

and become part of the masses, mass awareness.

You become part of the herd instead of going out and being heard.

So it's so important to actually take the time to go and go online and do the

Value Determination process and find out what's really important to you.

And don't try to be somebody you're not. Remember,

your identity revolves around what you value most,

your purpose revolves around what you value most,

your inspirations revolve around what you value most,

and you learn most around what you value most. And if you stick to that,

you excel. Literally your brain is setting up, is set up,

to organize your life in a way where you can fulfill your authenticity.

Your identity revolves around your highest values.

So the most authentic life is living by priority.

I basically delegated everything off my plate in life except teach, research,

and write, those are the three things that are absolute highest on my values.

The top one is teaching. So I spend my day doing that,

in whatever capacity I'm doing that.

And that way I've delegated everything else,

got those things off my plate and allowed me to focus on that. And people say,

'Well, yeah, but that's fine because,

well you have the money to do that.' No backwards.

I got the money because I did that. When I was 27 years old,

I got a book by Alec MacKenzie called The Time Trap. And prior to that,

I was just scraping by and getting by month after month.

The moment I started to prioritize my life,

finding out what was really important, what really produced the most,

what really had the most meaning,

and started to delegate the lower priority things and hiring people,

I gave job opportunities, I got to pay more taxes to the government,

got to end up having more people employed, more people able to go to school,

I mean, families were born,

I got to be free to go and do what I really loved to do in my practice. I mean,

it was amazing. And I made a tenfold increase in income,

from literally a 970 square foot little office, one moment,

reading a book, applying the delegation process, sticking to priority,

18 months later I had five doctors, 12 staff members,

and a tenfold increase in net income. It pays to delegate properly.

But if you hire somebody that's not inspired,

that's not high on their values and you got to micromanage them,

that's not delegation.

That's you releasing it to somebody who's incompetent who doesn't really want to

do it. And that's not fair to them. It's not fair to you.

It's not fair to the customer. It's not fair to anybody.

So it's very important to be accountable.

And that accountability is going to be a reflection of how congruent you are

with what you value most.

And the accountability in your business or the accountability in your family or

accountability in your social structure,

is going to be to the degree of their congruency.

Don't ever expect somebody to do anything other than what they value most,

or you're going to be betrayed. And betrayal is not what somebody does to you.

Betrayal is what you do to you when you project an expectation on other people

to live outside their values, and in your values.

So many people in relationships are both in their amygdala. They're unfulfilled,

they're down in their amygdala.

The amygdala is involved in the addiction to pride and fantasies and immediate

gratification, addictive behaviors.

And so both people are sitting there in their amygdala.

They're both living in a pride mode.

They're both projecting their values onto each other.

They're both expecting each other to live in the other person's values and read

their minds. They both are in clash.

They both are into fight flight modes and they're not learning how to love and

appreciate the people for who they are.

The only thing you can expect anybody to do is live and try to fulfill what they

value most.

I learned a long time ago if you expect anybody to do anything other than try to

fulfill what they most value in their life,

you're going to end up being defeated. It's not going to happen.

If you expect me to do anything other than teach, research, and write,

you're probably going to be let down and I'm going to delegate the rest away.

Now I'll get it done through other people, but I'm not going to do it myself.

And if you are going through life, if you want an inspired life,

it's not going to happen by doing lower priority things.

Every time you do low priority things, you devalue yourself,

you bring your blood, glucose, and oxygen down in your amygdala.

You go into immediate gratification. And the amygdala is involved as I said,

in impulses and instincts, pleasures and pains, seeking and avoiding,

all the distractions.

Every distraction you've ever had in your life is an amygdala response.

And every focused attention that's a mean,

and a dream that's meaningful to your life, is in that executive function.

So if you really want to make a difference and become the leader that you have

inside you, you have an inborn leader waiting to come out,

it start living by priority. If you want to be accountable,

that's what it means.

Accountable means to be able to bring both sides of the equation into

accounting, a balance sheet if you will in finances. Well,

what happens is you have,

when you're infatuated with something you're conscious of the upsides,

you're unconscious of the downsides. When you're resentful to something,

you're conscious of the downsides, unconscious of the upsides.

Whenever you're doing that, you're going to be seeking and avoiding,

and you're going to be distracted, and you're in your amygdala,

and that's running you. You're run from the external world, not run from within,

you're run from the outside, you're extrinsically driven.

But the moment you actually prioritize your life and get in focus,

get the blood, glucose, and oxygen in the forebrain,

you start having more balanced objectives.

You start mitigating risks with strategic planning.

You start seeing the vision of what you can do,

and you're more poised and present and more objective, not subjectively biased.

And in that state, that's when you're least reactive, more proactive,

get things done,

build incremental momentum towards greater achievement and end up saying,

thank you. In fact,

the executive center of the brain is called the gratitude center also.

So you're grateful for your life, the moment you live by priority.

And people think that they're looking for some sort of magic bullet instead of

looking at what really works and what works is sticking to what's priority in

life. And if you don't take the time to make a priority list about what's really

important.

I learned from Mary Kay from Mary Kay Cosmetics almost 40 years ago that,

I asked her,

what advice could she give a young man who's aspiring to travel the world and

teach? And she said,

write down the six or seven highest priority actions

fulfill your dreams in life.

And I wrote these things down and then I went through them.

I kept them on index cards and I went through hundreds of those over days,

over a number of years.

And I basically extracted out the highest priority of the highest priority,

the highest priority, the things that kept showing up highest priority.

And for me, it was teach, research and write, and travel. And so I just said,

all right, I'm not going to do anything lower.

How do you expect to have an inspired life if you're doing lower priority

things?

How do you expect to have a meaningful life if you're doing things that are

meaningless?

How do you expect to be a leader when you're sitting being a follower?

How do you expect to be an executive function where you have governance over

your life and not emotionally reactive like an animal if you're not living by

priority? So all I know is that I followed her advice.

I narrowed it down to those things. I delegated the rest away.

Between The Time Trap by Alec MacKenzie and what Mary Kay told me that day,

I merged those two principles, they led to the same outcome,

found out what was really most important to me, gave up on the rest of it,

said I'm not doing the lower priority stuff,

I don't want to live my life in desperation, I want a life of inspiration.

And I'm not going to do that if I don't fill my day with inspiring actions that

are meaningful to me. So I found myself more accountable.

I'm very accountable for teaching, researching and writing.

You can rely on me to do that. I don't let people down in that area,

but ask me to cook, ask me to drive, ask me to do pretty well anything else,

clean the house or anything like that, those kind of things I don't do that.

I learned that every time I do something, that I could pay somebody 10, 20, 30,

40, 50, a hundred dollars, $200,

anything less than what I'm capable of making in an hour,

if I have a job that pays less than that,

for me it's wise to delegate it. I did accounting

when I first opened up my business many years ago, I stopped it at age 27,

because I realized I could hire somebody for 20,

25 to $50 an hour to do the counting for me and to do the bookkeeping for me and

write all the checks and do all the payroll and do all that kind of stuff,

while I could go make thousands an hour.

So once I realized that I'm going to be,

every hour I'm doing that I'm devaluing myself and stopping me from doing the

thing that produces the most income, I'm working against myself. So once I did,

I never turned back. I let it go and I hired people to do it.

And sometimes that would take me two or three people to get the right person on

the bus. As Jim Collins said. I didn't care,

whatever it took to get that off my plate and onto what's priority.

That allows me to be inspired.

I can't wait to get up in the morning and go to work. And as Warren Buffet says,

you get to tap dance to work.

He basically doesn't sit down and do low priority stuff, Warren Buffet,

he focuses on reading, looks at the financials,

look at business you know,

financial statements and things and decides what his

be.

He spends his day doing what is meaningful and inspiring that's fulfilling to

him. And there's absolutely nothing stopping you from doing that.

I've trained thousands of people how to do that.

I've been teaching a program called the Breakthrough Experience for 33 and a

half years, showing people how to determine their values,

how to structure their life, how to prioritize their life,

how to delegate lower priority things,

how to use the Demartini Method on how to get out of the amygdala and back onto

the executive function, to dissolve the emotional baggage and to get focused on

what's important, to liberate yourself from the, the quiet life of desperation,

to live a life of inspiration and to be accountable for what you say,

to walk your talk, not limp your life. That's totally doable.

I've been teaching people in that program for 33 and a half years.

I've taught it 1,148 times now.

And I'm absolutely certain it's trainable, translatable, transcribable,

any human being can do it.

It's just a matter of taking the time to prioritize your life and to learn how

to dissolve the baggage that occurs when you don't.

And a lot of the baggage that we have in our life is a result,

a feedback mechanism to guide us back to authenticity.

So if you're not living by highest priority,

you're adding more emotional baggage,

you're storing more in your subconscious mind, you're becoming more animalistic,

but the second you prioritize your life and give yourself permission to shed

that and use the Demartini Method I teach in the Breakthrough Experience on how

to break through that,

to move you from the amygdala back in the executive center,

amazing things happen in your life. You can take command of your life.

There's absolutely no reason why you can't have an inspired life.

And I lived in the streets when I was a kid.

I know what it's like to be overwhelmed when I was at 20 something years old.

But once I learned these tools and started applying these tools,

it liberated my life and allowed me to do what I do today.

And I've been blessed today because I've learned how easy it really is.

It's not that difficult. It's not rocket science. We make it rocket science.

We make it complex because we're afraid of rejection from other people we're

afraid to say no to what they expect. There's all kind of things.

In the Breakthrough Experience I give you all the excuses that why people come

up with reasons why they can't do what's really important to them.

And as long as you let those excuses run your life and not take command of your

life, well, you're going to have a quiet life of desperation. Now,

I just wanted to make sure I gave you something on accountability today.

But I want to let you know that the Breakthrough Experience,

the program I just mentioned.

If you're wanting to master your mind and master your executive center,

so you can master your life, I've giving you,

I will be teaching in this program seven proven personal development tools on

how to do that. The Demartini Method is a gold mine. Right now,

we're in the middle of filming a movie and a documentary on it because of it's

empowerment. I want you to be able to take advantage of this tool,

this method I've been working on for nearly 50 years.

I've been doing anything that can maximize human awareness potential.

I've been trying to synthesize and synchronize and put

and model.

The Demartini method is a very powerful tool to help you dissolve all the

emotional baggage that's holding you back in life,

and to help you get in the executive center and stay there.

Take advantage of this opportunity to do it.

Let me show you what I've showed thousands of other people on how to break

through these limitations.

Let me show you how to be accountable in your life and show you how to live an

inspired life, not a quiet life of desperation.

Take advantage of this opportunity, come and learn the Demartini Method.

It's a tool with a thousand uses.

You're going to be using it the rest of your life. It's a gold mine.

And let me show you how to define what your values are,

structure your life accordingly so you can live an inspired life,

not one of quiet desperation. So that's my message for the week,

until next week, thank you for joining me. Please just sign up now,

take advantage of this opportunity. I know you will say thank you.

I've asked people at the end of the Breakthrough Experience for three,

three decades, four years or whatever, almost, I've asked,

'How many of you learned something this weekend you could've gone your whole

life and never,

you would never have learned if you hadn't been here?' Every hand goes up week

after week after week. So please take advantage of this great information.

It's a distillation of nearly 50 years of research,

and I know I can help you save you enormous amount of times if you want to

master your life.

If you want to live as an executive taking command of your life and not live in

the amygdala, having the world around you run,