Self-Accountability For Self-Mastery

I have always believed in holding myself to higher standards with everything that I do in life.

I have never felt like average was an option for me.

From the time I was a kid, I recognized that I was different.

Growing up being raised my a single mother and being the only boy in a house full of women, I locked myself in my room and learned to be creative.

The only time I would get any sense normalcy was on the weekends when I would have hockey games or could escape my house to go to my childhood best friends house because he had a normal family environment. This childhood best friend is still one of my best friends to this day after 22 years.

We grew up playing hockey together and everyone in his family grew up playing hockey because his entire family is from Pittsburgh. If you are not familiar with sports in Pittsburgh, just know that they live and breathe their sports teams because it is literally all that they have there. Hockey in Pittsburgh is more relevant than Mass on Sunday's is for Catholics.

I looked forward to going over to his house every weekend because he had an older brother and a father that were both tough - they were hockey players.

As soon as I would step foot into his house, I would immediately get the shit beat out of me by my friend and his older brother, but I loved it! It was just boys being boys.

We grew up playing hockey together and playing on the same team for the first 9 years of my career. We were extremely competitive growing up and we shared the hardship of playing competitive sports from a young age.

When I look back on my life and think about all of my friends that I have the strongest bonds with, I realize that the men that I am closest to are all men I shared  hardship with.

Whether it was playing competitive sports, having quality training partners in the gym, or going through relationship troubles with women - all of the men I shared and continue to share real hardship with, are all of my closest friends to this day.

The quality of people that I surround myself with is a standard that I have set for myself from the very beginning.

One of the most important things about being a man is having a genuine circle of men that have your back, no matter what.

When men surround themselves with other men, all with a common goal in mind and work hard towards that goal - there is an evolutionary bond that takes place. This bond is something that lives in our DNA. If you have a group of men working hard towards something, things get done. These are men that will hold you accountable - another lesson that playing team sports taught me.

Surrounding yourself with people that hold you accountable is the first step towards self-accountability. People that genuinely have your best interests at heart and aren't afraid to tell you to your face if you're fucking up.

There is a certain level of respect to be had for people that hold you accountable.

Every relationship one has with other people needs to be an equal exchange of value. If all you do is give and receive nothing in return, what purpose does that relationship or friendship serve in your life?

I need to be around people that are willing to go through hard shit with me so that we build stronger together. I need to be around people that want me to be the strongest version of myself because that is having my best interest at heart.

I have spent a large portion of my life alone. From growing up and locking myself in my room, dreaming about becoming successful - to the past 5 years I have been living alone since I first moved cross-country to pursue my dreams.

One thing I have learned from spending much of my life alone is understanding the true meaning of self-accountability.

I have analyzed my life and why I am the way that I am from every perspective and continue to do so.

Everything I have ever gone through has been analyzed in great detail and I genuinely believe that is why I am so focused on becoming the strongest possible version of myself that I can become.

I have quit things before and these thoughts still haunt me to this day. The thought of quitting something that will make me better doesn't exist in my mind at this point in my life.

I have always had an extremely small circle of people that I know I can trust. These are people that have always been accepting of me and who I am as a person. Everyone that knows me, knows "that is just Pat".

The journey of self-mastery ensures that the people I choose to allow in my life are people that hold me accountable and want to see me succeed to my fullest potential.

Remember what I said earlier about equal exchange of value - people that want me to succeed to my fullest potential, receive that same value in return from me. I want the people in my life to succeed in everything they set out to accomplish.

I will always tell you how I see it. I will always hold you accountable because that is the standard that I have set for myself - I expect the same in return from those who I allow to get to know the real me.

Being able to recognize your own faults is a hard conversation to have with yourself and I believe that is why self-accountability is a rare commodity in today's day-in-age.

Everything everyone does is now portrayed to the world through a false lens - that is social media.

People refrain from having these hard conversations because everything is constantly being compared to something or someone else.

One thing that I learned from my years in the entertainment business is that portraying yourself a certain way to people is only going to paint a picture in their minds of how they should look at you.

It is no secret that you attract what you put out into the universe. If your goal is to achieve self-mastery, you will attract genuine people into your life that want to see you succeed. In the same vein, if you portray yourself as someone you're not for likes and follows, no-one will ever take you seriously - why should they?

If you can't take yourself seriously, no-one else will.

If you can't hold yourself accountable and work to be the best version of yourself that you can be, surround yourself with people that provide actual value to your life, then you must accept whatever it is in your life that you don't agree with.