Do your negative thoughts control you? Do you feel unfulfilled in life?
In Quantum Accountability, Kelley and Kevin Kramer explain what quantum accountability is and how it’s linked to your mindset and reality. They also discuss how to practice quantum accountability so you can create a positive mental and physical world that enables you to flourish.
Read more in our overview of Quantum Accountability.
Overview of Quantum Accountability by Kelley and Kevin Kremer
Many people feel stuck and unfulfilled—like victims of uncontrollable circumstances. In Quantum Accountability, Kelley and Kevin Kremer explain that these feelings come from negative mindsets that allow you to avoid accountability. Your mindset—shaped by your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, virtues, and attitudes—influences your perceptions, actions, and ultimately, your circumstances. These elements of your mindset act as unseen (or quantum) forces that shape your life. Therefore, the authors argue that to create the life you want, you must take responsibility for these invisible forces. Doing so lets you build a positive mindset, take meaningful action, foster positive relationships, and pursue your purpose.
Kevin and Kelley Kremer are spouses and co-authors. Kelley is an educational psychology writer and speaker who focuses on leadership and self-improvement. Kevin is a dentist, entrepreneur, and speaker who likewise focuses on leadership and personal growth. He’s also the founder of the Kremer Leadership Institute, which provides guidance to aspiring doctors and emerging businesses.
Part 1: What Is Quantum Accountability?
The authors explain that quantum accountability is the practice of being responsible not only for your actions in the physical world, but also the state of your mental world—your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, virtues, and attitudes. These invisible, or quantum, aspects are foundational to attaining your ideal life because they shape how you perceive the world and how you function in it—your decisions, how you treat others, and your ability to achieve purpose and fulfillment.
The authors say your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, virtues, and attitudes impact each other and work together to form your mindset. One negative aspect can bring the others down, and the more positive each aspect is, the more positive your mindset will be. They write that your mindset is a continuum: On the negative side are the “victim,” “scarcity,” and “pessimistic” mindsets; in the neutral zone is the “fixed” mindset; and on the positive side are the “optimistic,” “growth,” and “abundance” mindsets. The goal is to have an abundance mindset—the most powerful mindset you can have.
According to the authors, when you have an abundance mindset, you’re empowered to achieve a life characterized by abundance—an abundance of money, time, health, and good relationships. You’ll also have found your purpose and, as a result, will feel fulfilled, happy, and spiritually connected. You can achieve an abundance mindset by mastering quantum accountability, which will empower you to determine how you experience and respond to any situation. You can then choose to respond positively and proactively, and by doing so, can control your circumstances, reach your full potential, and live as the ideal version of yourself.
Part 2: Take Accountability for Your Mental Attributes
In this section, we’ll discuss how your mental attributes—your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, virtues, and attitudes—impact your reality and how you can manage them to achieve an abundance mindset.
Manage Your Thoughts
According to the authors, your thoughts—both conscious and subconscious—manifest your reality. For example, if you spend time worrying about forgetting answers to a test, it’s more likely that you will forget some answers due to the anxiety your thoughts create.
The authors explain that controlling your thoughts isn’t easy because they often originate subconsciously, and it’s hard to simply demand a thought to go away. Instead, the authors recommend becoming aware of your thoughts so you can encourage productive ones and discourage harmful ones. To help you become more aware of your thoughts, the Kremers suggest journaling daily: Write about your achievements, obstacles, solutions, plans, and top to-dos, while offloading anxiety by recording your worries, struggles, and potential solutions. Next, replace negative self-talk with contrasting positive affirmations. After all, how you talk about yourself impacts how you think and feel.
Manage Your Beliefs
Beliefs are the result of thoughts that are repeated over time until they shape how we perceive the world. We see our beliefs as truths, and as such, they shape our happiness and success in all areas of life. For example, a person who believes “I’m never good enough” will avoid pursuing goals and will settle for less. Conversely, someone believing “I can achieve anything” will persist toward their desires, grow, and often exceed their goals.
The Kremers explain that beliefs are hard to change because they mainlyly form in childhood during traumatic or emotionally charged situations. However, you can foster positive beliefs in adulthood by questioning the validity of your current beliefs—letting go of those that are counterproductive and building upon more effective ones. You can correct negative beliefs using positive affirmations, such as “I can achieve anything I set my mind to” instead of “I’m never good enough.” Consistently repeat your new affirmations and behaviors to ensure your beliefs stick. Finally, follow through on new beliefs by using them to guide your actions. For example, to reinforce the belief that you can achieve anything you want, take up new projects.
Manage Your Feelings
The authors explain that feelings influence our reality through a cyclical process: Our thoughts create physiological responses (emotions) that we interpret as feelings—the labels we give to emotional experiences. Feelings in turn shape our thoughts, which influence our reality. For example, suppose you’re at a party, but your friends aren’t there, so you think you won’t fit in (thought). Your heart rate increases and you feel uneasy (emotion). You interpret those sensations as anxiety (feeling), which leads to more anxious thoughts, like “Everyone else knows each other.” You then stand off to one side, don’t engage much, and feel out of place—your thoughts manifest as a reality that a party without your friends is uncomfortable.
The authors explain that feelings get in our way of reaching an abundance mindset because we often interpret emotions using a handful of feelings we’re familiar with like fear, joy, or sadness—we stick to these feelings because we know what to expect, and that predictability makes us feel safe. However, doing so also limits us, causing us to mislabel our emotions and create unnecessarily negative experiences. For example, your increased heart rate at the thought of your friends not being with you at a party might be from uncertainty, but you assign it to fear because that’s most familiar to you. This negative interpretation then discourages you from mingling, even though it would probably be a positive experience.
The Kremers say that to overcome these habits, you must get more in touch with your feelings, which will help you take accountability for them. First, identify your feelings’ triggers and find ways to avoid them or mitigate their impact. For example, mitigate anxiety from new social situations by using methods like positive self-talk: “I’m going to enjoy myself and make new friends.” Also, you should pause to identify the emotion you’re experiencing before assigning a label to it. In the case of the party, reflect on what could be causing your increased heart rate before immediately attributing it to fear.
Manage Your Virtues
The authors explain that virtues are values that tell us what, when, and how to do things based on our morals and expectations for ourselves. For example, a virtue might be honesty—you’ll tailor your actions and decisions to ensure you act with honor and integrity. Remaining accountable to your virtues is crucial to an abundance mindset as it fosters peace and fulfillment. Conversely, acting against your virtues brings feelings of dissatisfaction and chaos. Because feelings impact your thoughts and perceptions, staying aligned with your virtues helps you embody the peace that leads to abundance.
To hold yourself accountable to your virtues, the authors say you must first identify your five main virtues. Constantly reflect on and potentially re-evaluate your virtues throughout your life. Hold yourself accountable to these virtues by creating boundaries to ensure your actions and decisions align with your virtues. The authors recommend forming boundaries for six major areas of your life: physical well-being, emotions, mentality, relationships, spirituality, and finances. For example, emotional boundaries may include avoiding certain types of media that provoke negative feelings, while relationship boundaries may include cutting off those who don’t respect you.
Manage Your Attitudes
The Kremers explain that attitudes are composed of thoughts and emotions that shape how you interact with and respond to your environment. While a positive attitude results in positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that foster abundance, negative attitudes like comparison or bias result in behaviors like gossiping, denying accountability, and being disrespectful—acts that take you further from abundance.
To foster a positive attitude, the authors emphasize embracing gratitude, or appreciating what you have. Gratitude makes people happier, more optimistic, and more resilient, and it increases feelings of self-esteem and love. It also makes people healthier and reduces anxiety and depression. To practice gratitude, use deliberate focus—concentrate on gratitude to increase its presence in your mind. The authors recommend keeping a physical object on you that will remind you to practice gratitude every time you see or touch it.
Part 3: Take Accountability for Your Actions and Decisions
According to the authors, once you’ve taken accountability for your mental world—your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, virtues, and attitudes—you can take meaningful action in the physical world. In this section, we’ll discuss how you can take accountability for six areas of action: your decisions, roles, time management, focus, finances, and energy management.
Take Accountability for Your Decisions
The authors explain that your attitudes and feelings largely impact how you make decisions, so making effective decisions requires you to take full accountability of these mental attributes. Conversely, if you’re not accountable and thus allow negative thoughts and feelings, you’ll make bad decisions.
The authors offer a few guidelines to ensure your decisions are based on productive attitudes and feelings. First, determine whether you should make a decision alone, with the help of your support system, or with the help of experts—don’t over-estimate your abilities, expertise, or the weight of the decision. Second, spend the right amount of time making the decision. Usually, it’s better to act swiftly rather than to dwell on an issue; however, some issues will require you to research and reflect rather than acting on your instincts (or feelings).
Take Accountability for Your Roles
People play numerous roles in their personal, professional, and social lives—parent, spouse, friend, business owner, and so on. The authors explain that these roles can bring great fulfillment when you’re mentally accountable and actively choose them. On the other hand, if you lack mental accountability, external pressures often push you into undesired roles that leave you feeling unhappy and stuck. These feelings then make you want to escape responsibility for those roles, leading to destructive behaviors.
Therefore, the authors explain that you must actively choose, manage, and draw boundaries between your roles—ensure you’re prioritizing the right things and spending your time and energy where it’s most beneficial. For example, if you get offered a promotion but feel more fulfilled in your current position, tell your boss you want to stay. You should also create boundaries between your roles to give each one proper attention—don’t let your professional role take time away from your parental role; when the work day concludes, put your laptop away. Finally, communicate your boundaries with the people around you so they understand your priorities and obligations.
Take Accountability for Your Time
Next, the authors explain that how you spend your time should be guided by what you believe is most important, and that you should perceive time in a healthy way—percieving time as infinite leads to procrastination and prevents you from reaching your potential.
To manage your time, the authors recommend planning out how you’ll spend it. First, designate time for the most important things—like relationships, health, and life goals. Once you’ve allotted time for these things, you can then allot time to secondary priorities like your career and hobbies. With your remaining time, you can accomplish lesser tasks and chores. Be sure to include breaks to prevent overload. Dividing your time in advance will not only help you be more productive, but will reduce the stress of deciding what to do in the moment.
Take Accountability for Your Attention
The authors explain that there’s a cyclical relationship between attention and mindset—the strength of one impacts the strength of the other. When you’re accountable for your mental state, you can better control your attention. When you better control your attention, you better control what enters your mind, which shapes your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, virtues, and attitudes. Thus, better attention control can lead to a more positive mindset, which in turn gives you better attention control. For example, by blocking out unreliable media sources that spread misinformation and drama, you can protect your mental qualities, which will in turn let you pay attention to other, more positive, things.
According to the authors, controlling your attention is also important because it allows you to reach flow—a state of intense focus and productivity which is the key to achieving your potential. To reach flow, clear a time and space for your work, limit distractions, determine what exactly you’ll work on and which benchmarks you want to meet, then focus strictly on the task at hand. Don’t multitask, let your mind wander, or get distracted.
Take Accountability for Your Finances
Next, the authors explain that your mindset and beliefs largely shape your perception of and access to wealth—limiting beliefs and a lack of personal accountability often create barriers to financial success. To overcome self-imposed barriers, review your beliefs and the other elements of your mindset to ensure they’re enabling rather than restricting you.
For example, consider your beliefs about money—rather than seeing wealth as positive or negative, see money as a neutral tool that can help you achieve certain ends. Remember that as you have control over your mental world, you can control your physical world by taking accountability for your actions and circumstances. You’re not at the mercy of the world or other people; rather, you have the power to achieve what you want.
Take Accountability for Your Energy
Finally, the authors explain that taking accountability for your energy is crucial because energy management dictates your success. Many believe that the more time you have, the more success you can gain; however, this thinking is flawed because time can’t be created. The solution is to use time wisely by using your energy more effectively—conserving it when possible and spending it on things that will give you the biggest returns.
The authors provide tips to help you manage your energy. First, determine your most productive hours of the day and work within them—for example, early in the morning or after lunch. Second, conserve energy by prioritizing tasks, simplifying them, delegating when possible, and setting boundaries to prevent burnout. Finally, make sure that the people you spend time with fuel rather than diminish your energy.
Part 4: Be Accountable in Your Relationships
The Kremers explain that reaching your full potential requires more than just focusing on yourself. You must also look outward and hold yourself accountable for how you treat, feel about, and communicate with others, as well as how others perceive you. When you fail to do so, you’re likely to damage relationships, cause misunderstandings, and create negative emotions for yourself, impacting your personal and professional success.
The authors explain that to hold yourself accountable for your relationships, you must develop emotional intelligence (EI)— including self-awareness, self-management, motivation, empathy and compassion, and social skills. EI enables you to make effective personal and professional decisions, communicate effectively with others, and build and maintain relationships. We’ll discuss each of the five components of EI in the following sections.
Self-Awareness
Developing self-awareness entails understanding your emotions and feelings and how they cause you to act. The Kremers write that learning self-awareness is the first step toward changing your feelings and behaviors for the better. It’s also one of the hallmarks of healthy relationships because it allows you to acknowledge your actions and their consequences so you can hold yourself accountable.
To foster self-awareness and improve relationships, the authors recommend understanding your triggers—the things that make you feel and act in certain ways. This way, you can take responsibility for your feelings and responses rather than blaming them on someone else’s actions. For example, acknowledge that your partner going out with friends (trigger) might make you anxious (emotion) but doesn’t give you the right to direct anger toward them (feeling and reaction) because they’ve done nothing wrong. Further, make sure you’re correctly labeling your emotions, as we discussed in Part 2.
Forgiveness
Another reason self-awareness is important is that it’s the foundation of forgiveness. The Kremers write that forgiveness requires us to look inside ourselves to identify and release negative emotional patterns we feel toward ourselves and others. Forgiveness is necessary for both a healthy mindset and positive relationships: It helps us move toward abundance by allowing us to release negative feelings that bring us down, and it fosters positive relationships by allowing us to move past toxic feelings and reestablish trust.
Self-Management
Managing your reactions is crucial for maintaining and improving your relationships. Self-management builds on self-awareness—once you’re aware of yourself and your impact, you can work to change how you feel, behave, and communicate with others. The authors explain that one of the first steps to managing your reactions is pausing before you respond—take a moment to understand your thoughts and feelings so you can express yourself in a respectful way rather than acting on impulse. You can also adopt techniques to soothe and regulate your emotions like practicing mindfulness or going to therapy.
Motivation
The Kremers explain that motivation enables you to work steadily toward long-term goals and resist instant gratification. It’s also what allows you to be an inspiring leader—when you’re committed to a goal, you lead by example, inspiring your employees to rally around a shared vision and do the same.
Empathy and Compassion
The authors explain that empathy and compassion are crucial for building and managing relationships. Empathy is understanding the emotional experiences of others, and compassion is using that understanding to extend kindness and support. In personal relationships, these help you foster stronger connections by showing others you care about them. In professional relationships, empathy and compassion help leaders understand their employees, resolve conflicts, and understand what will motivate and inspire workers.
Social Skills
Finally, the authors explain that social skills are one of the most important components of EI because they dictate how we communicate with others—how we express ourselves, how we’re perceived, how we handle conflicts, and how we connect with others. Failing to effectively communicate can cause misunderstandings and mistakes that can damage relationships.
To practice effective social skills and communication, the authors say that you must first practice active listening—give the other person your undivided attention and ask clarifying questions to make sure you understand properly. Also, think about how you’re going to express yourself before you speak: Be concise, choose the appropriate medium (some conversations should be in person rather than text), and use your knowledge about the other person to try and communicate in a way they’ll receive well.
Part 5: Uncover Your Purpose and Reach Your Potential
The authors explain that uncovering your life purpose and holding yourself accountable for spiritual growth is crucial to achieving true fulfillment. Doing so will guide your decisions and help you take intentional and meaningful action that helps you reach your potential and benefits your community. In the following sections, we’ll discuss the three components of living your purpose and reaching your potential.
Identify Your Life Purpose
First, the authors say you must identify your life purpose—a journey of discovery and fulfillment that spans across some (or all) of the six main areas of your life: relationships, time, self (health and well-being), spirituality, finances, and career. Following your life purpose is crucial because it provides a unique sense of fulfillment. To identify your life purpose, take the following steps:
- Identify what makes you feel passionate.
- Consider your unique skills.
- Reflect on your virtues.
- Consider how you can help others.
- Look for recurring themes in your life.
- Ask loved ones their perspective on what your purpose might be.
- Try things out to test what feels right.
Embrace Spiritual Growth
The Kremers explain that a key step in fulfilling your life purpose and reaching peak accountability is embracing spiritual growth and your Quantum Purpose. They explain that your soul chose to be incarnated on Earth to learn spiritual lessons that help you understand your oneness with the universe and evolve—learning these lessons is your Quantum Purpose. Whereas the impact you make on earth is your life purpose (which we discussed in the previous section), your Quantum Purpose is the spiritual meaning for your soul’s existence.
According to the authors, spiritual growth is crucial for fulfilling both your Quantum Purpose and your purpose in life. Spiritual growth requires you to gain a deeper understanding of life by acknowledging your connection to the universe—you are not isolated but rather a part of an interconnected whole. This realization sparks compassion, responsibility for your impact on others and the environment, acceptance of things you can’t control, the ability to learn from both good and bad experiences, authenticity, and more. These characteristics culminate into Quantum Accountability, the ability to achieve your life purpose, and the lessons needed to fulfill your Quantum Purpose.
