What I Got Wrong Holding Myself Accountable

Where I Go When I'm Asked

I've been uneven about accountability lately. It's there, and then for stretches it isn't. Between school and work and everything else, I forget things.

But it isn't the forgetting that caught my attention.

It's what happens when someone asks me to account for something. I leave. Not the room myself. Something steps back from behind my own eyes and watches the conversation instead of having it. What's left in the pit of my stomach is a lit torch, burning in a body I'm not fully inside of.

It happens before I've thought anything.

I went looking for an explanation, mostly for myself. Three sources shaped what I found: a neuroscientist writing for coaches, a paper by a psychiatrist and two psychologists, and a leadership book. Here's what they said, and what I've made of it.

I thought accountability was a tank that empties.

Elliot Berkman runs a neuroscience lab at the University of Oregon, and in 2018 he wrote a review for coaches and consultants pulling together what brain research actually shows about why goals fail. The tank theory doesn't survive it. When psychologists tested the idea properly writing down their methods before collecting data, so they couldn't find a result by accident the effect didn't hold. And the "empty" feeling lifts after a short break. Fuel doesn't work that way.

His alternative: hard focus happens one thing at a time. You can drive and listen to music, but you can't write a difficult email mid-conversation. So the strain isn't an empty tank. It's your brain tallying what's going unattended.

That reframed it for me. My accountability doesn't vanish. It slips because I'm running one-at-a-time attention against a life happening all at once. An empty tank is a story about what I lack. A tally is information about what I'm carrying.

Accountability takes two people.

John Peteet is a psychiatrist at Harvard; Charlotte Witvliet and C. Stephen Evans are psychologists. In 2021 they published a paper arguing that accountability deserves to be treated as a personal strength in its own right something mental health care has largely overlooked. Their central point is structural: someone gives an account, someone receives it. That relationship is the whole thing. They also separate blame, which looks backward at what's done, from accountability, which looks forward because you expect something to change.

I'd been doing a two-person job alone. Asking and answering. Grading my own work with nobody to check it generous on hard weeks, brutal on easy ones, never steady.

And I'd mistaken punishment for responsibility. Sitting in disappointment with myself has weight. It feels like rigor. But it faces backward, and it made the next time harder, because now there was a record to defend.

Aiko Bethea is an equity and leadership consultant whose book Anchored, Aligned, Accountable argues that accountability only works when it sits on top of two other things knowing what you're anchored to, and closing the gap between what you intend and what you actually do. Anchored, for her, means moving toward who you want to be rather than toward being liked. That named it. The leaving isn't about what I dropped. It's about what dropping it might say about me.

The body moves first.

Being asked to account for something is a social moment, and Berkman notes the brain takes social threat seriously enough to narrow attention onto it, pulling resources from everything else.

I can't prove that's what happens in me when you go looking for an explanation of something you already feel, you'll find one. But it fits. It explains why the account I give in those moments comes out smooth, reasonable, and doesn't sound like me. I wasn't all the way there when I said it.

And it doesn't sort by category. We talk about work and life as two things on a scale. It's one body carrying one nervous system into both.

I haven't solved this. What's changed is small: I notice the leaving sooner, and I've stopped reading it as proof of who I am.

Accountability is hard. Not because we're weak, but because it asks for connection and forward motion at exactly the moment your body wants neither.

If you've been uneven about this too it's a hard thing. And we're doing it in bodies that have opinions about it.

Kelechi Olandu is a coach and co-founder of Empathy Coaching LLC. She holds a Wellness Counseling Certification from Cornell University, training in somatic embodiment and regulation, and is pursuing an M.A. in Clinical Psychology at Pepperdine University. This is a personal reflection informed by research, not clinical advice.

References

Berkman, E. T. (2018). The neuroscience of goals and behavior change. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 70(1), 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000094

Bethea, A. (2026). Anchored, aligned, accountable: A framework for transcending bullsh*t and transforming our lives and work. [Publisher].

Peteet, J. R., Witvliet, C. V. O., & Evans, C. S. (2021). Accountability as a key virtue in mental health and human flourishing. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 28(1), 49–60. https://doi.org/10.1353/ppp.2021.0009