 One of the most common questions I get here is what is the number one way you stick with your habits when honestly it's not going that well, you hate doing them, or you find yourself doing it well for a couple days or a couple weeks and then you just get off track? Like how do you get yourself to do the stuff you know is going to change your life when you frankly don't really want to do it? Well in this video I'm going to share truly the number one habit I've done for five years straight every week with very few weeks missed that takes one hour per week and by far is the best accountability habit I have ever seen for reaching your goals. Hey guys Alex Hine author of the book Master the Day. Now one of the best ways you can get started with being more accountable is starting to actually write your goals out because then you're going to force yourself to compare yourself to this vision you have. The first link in the description is for a free best year planning worksheet. When you download that you're also going to get an email every few days on how to use goal setting to completely change your life. So check out the first link in the description there below. So what was that big habit that I've been doing? The number one habit truly has been having a mastermind group and I've mentioned it here before. A lot of you have asked me about it and a lot of people talk about mastermind groups but there's the idea that a mastermind is like some evil genius scheming to take over the world and what a mastermind group really is is when multiple people come together to solve their problems or one collective problem. So just imagine the old you versus the new you. The old you wants to lose 20 pounds, wants to maybe start a YouTube channel, wants to get into a good college, wants to do well at school or at work, wants to improve something about their financial life, wants to make more friends or be happier but then as soon as they do something for a week or two and they're not seeing results or they're tired that day or they're not sure if they're doing the right thing or somebody makes a negative discouraging comment then they're back at square one. The new you. Imagine though if all that crap happened during the week and then Thursday rolls around and Thursday at five o'clock when you get off work, you get on a phone call with three of your friends or your mastermind buddies, whoever they are and you're like this is my goal for the week. I sucked at it. This is what I've got to do next week. Or I don't know what to do next week. Do you guys have any ideas? Every single week at the beginning of my journey, the mastermind call was the only thing that motivated me. Like for me, building a business was such a difficult process. That was the thing I emphasized in my mastermind. But these days, my mastermind emphasizes whole life success. So not just business, even though we're come together through business, we're all talking about our businesses. But we talk about relationships and health and fitness and all that kind of stuff. The big difference is that when you feel like crap on your own, unless you're pushing yourself and you know you can push yourself, you won't do it. But when you've done it, and you've said that, and you have accountability for I didn't do what I said I was going to do, then guess what? You have other people that are going to push you that are going to hold you accountable and that are going to give you ideas. So for me, there's really a three step process for creating your own mastermind group. The first step is to figure out who you want in there. I would say the biggest thing is to limit it to five people. The reason being, if you have each person talking for five or 10 minutes, if you have five people, that's usually a 30 to a 60 minute call. And you generally don't want to go longer than that unless you really love it and unless it's something that's really going well. You know, for me in my mastermind group, there's four people, each person essentially goes on for as long as they need. And that usually ends up being no more than 10 minutes. But the best part of masterminds is that sometimes you get off on these life riffs, like you're talking about what is success or what is fulfillment or how do you actually be fulfilled and successful. And these life riffs, they can just go on for hours sometimes. Now, if we have the time, we go on for hours. But usually it's a maximum of one hour. The second thing is what you used to actually dial in. So chances are your mastermind may not be all your local friends. They may be people you found on the internet. And so I would recommend whether you're finding people through an online form you're part of, through YouTube, through friends locally, at work colleagues, friends at school, other people you follow, whoever it is. For me, my first mastermind came out of a personal blog I had called milkthepidgin.com. And I had some other people following me who are really into improving their life, and really wanted to find other hungry, ambitious people. And so my number one goal was to find very ambitious people who were doing the work. I didn't care if they were successful yet. I wanted to find people who were actually doing it and not just talking about it. And so I just reached out to three people. One had a new business, one was a blog follower. And one was just another category through a friend. And through one forum, I found another aspiring entrepreneur. We picked one day a week, we set up a recurring reminder on the calendar. And then we would all dial in using a service called Uber conference. So you could use Skype, you could use just landlines, use your phone, you could use any other online service. But one of the reasons why I use Uber conference now is that number one, the free plan is pretty sweet. And I think even the free plan will actually record your calls for you. So if there's great stuff or advice you get on there from your friends, you can listen to it later. The second thing is that it will even dial out to people. So if people get busy or they aren't prioritizing the calls, Uber conference will literally just dial out to their phone. That's a pretty sweet perk that I love. Now the second part of the mastermind is what's the structure for each week. So for me, the structure has always been the same. We go into what are your goals you're working on. For me, I always only present three goals. What were the good and what was the bad? Like what worked? What didn't work? So I said, I was going to cook breakfast. I was going to make eggs in the morning instead of eating a donut. I didn't do it. Okay, simple example. I said I was going to write a blog on my blog, but I didn't write the blog post. Here's why. So my goals, the good and the bad, what worked, what didn't work, and then the new habits for this coming week, what I'm going to do differently. Sometimes you don't even know what you're going to do differently because you don't even know what to do. And that's where you say, do you guys have any ideas? And then you can have that as your like, your true mastermind is like a mind bigger than yourself. We're getting all these ideas from other people around you. So it could be a really complex creative task. It could be really simple. But your friends will often give you really good advice. So my goals for the week, the good and the bad and the ugly. And then these are my new habits I'm going to work on. And I write them down in Evernote as we're talking. So this mastermind habit really has been my number one accountability habit. My number one accountability habit isn't discipline. It isn't writing my goals. It isn't any of that stuff. It's actually having to be on that phone call and not look like an idiot because I said I was going to do stuff and I'm not and I didn't do it. The other thing is we actually increase the stakes. So if you miss a call three times, you're out. If you're not executing over a period of months, you're out. So we like to keep it very competitive and we want to make sure people are performing and forcing themselves to perform because that's the benefit. Like if you were doing it on your own, you would have done it already and you wouldn't have needed the accountability. So we like to make it high stakes, high performance. So I hope that helps guys. A good way to get started with improving your life is really just that. If you're not doing the journaling yourself, just do a call with a friend. It'll force you to show up and do something differently the next week. Now of course the next best thing if you're alone is to just start writing out your goals. The first link in the description is for a free goal-setting worksheet. If you click that link and download it every few days you're going to get another email on how to use goal-setting to totally change your life. So check out the first link in the description and then check out my last related video there.