Transcript:

0:00

SHANNON: At its core, self accountability is looking at yourself, looking at your values and your choices, and seeing are those, the choices that you're making every day, to see if those are aligned with your values. So you're trying to say, you know, did the choices I make today, align with who I want to be? And there's always going to be a gap between that, because we're never our perfect visions of ourselves. But that, you know, if there's something that I did that's fundamentally outside of who I want to be and what my values are, self accountability gives me a tool to be able to look at that and say like, oh that's not who I want to be. What do I need to do to clean that up? What do I need to do to take care of that? And that each of us building that individual skill is actually how we collectively get to a place where we can create communities where accountability is possible for other people.

00:44

KIYOMI: That might be a concept that is a bit of a shift for people. When we talk about accountability we're so used to talking about accountability meaning like, I'm gonna go get that person who did something wrong and accountability is gonna happen to them. And I've heard you talk a lot about how that can be kind of a setup. And so I'm just curious about sort of that shift to self accountability. Why (and you started to talk about it), but why is self accountability the focus there, in addition for survivors but also for anyone?

01:15

SHANNON: Yeah, self accountability is essential in my opinion, because it is so common for people to want to rush to holding other people accountable. People are so much more comfortable to say, how can I hold that person over there accountable? And in my experience, no one wants to also be held accountable by someone who's not doing their own work. And that self accountability is the building block for accountability on a community level. People get very interested in the how of self accountability. And I think this is one of those things that's simple but not easy. There isn't sort of, like a magic answer, that if you just did this one new thing it would solve all of the problems. It's much more a set of skills and tools that people are already using. I think it's essential to have some kind of daily practice. And that practice can look like lots of different kinds of things. For me, that's dancing, that's movement, that is hanging out with my friends, hanging out with my dog. Also one of the things that I do to support myself in in the task of being responsible for my choices, in this task of self accountability is to look and see you know, were there things I said and did today that were outside of my values? And then to be reflecting on are there things I need to do to clean that up? So that might just be like, hey I was rude to you yesterday. I was short, I'm sorry. That was not who I want to be. Sometimes it's, there are bigger things. And often when there are bigger things I find it really essential to get help from my loved ones, from the important people in my life, and particularly someone who's not involved in the situation. Because it's really hard to see things when you're inside of them. It's hard to see the answers to something that's really up close to you. So getting support from folks, having a daily practice of, kind of reflection of whatever that looks like, I think are some of the core pieces. And frankly, you could probably spend your lifetime just practicing those, and get pretty far. Sometimes there's an idea of like, just because you practice it a lot it should feel easy. And it's not. It's hard. And the work of it is turning, is turning back towards it over and over again. And so it's like, oh that wasn't exactly what I want to do, let me try again. And so it's instead of being perfect, it's just continuing to try to do your best approximation of who you want to be.

03:36

(Music)