6 Bad Habits Holding You Back From Success

You always imagined your career would be like a rocket ship shooting you straight to the stars, but instead you seem to be stuck in one place, already out of gas. Before you blame your company, your coworkers, or your boss, it's time to take a good look in the mirror. Your bad habits might be the culprit holding you back from the corner office you’ve always dreamed about.

We all have bad habits, but bringing your baggage along to the office can be the difference between soaring or stalling in your career. Below are six common workplace bad habits to break if you want to continue moving up the career ladder:

Being a Lone Wolf

Collaboration is the key to workplace success, but you prefer to work solo. While being able to work independently is a valuable commodity in any workplace, working alone shouldn’t be your only speed. If you are constantly ducking out of team projects or asking to tackle a task without any help, your coworkers will take notice.

While those around you put their heads together, brainstorm great ideas, and form connections, you’re being left in the dust. You need to show you can play well with others. After all, managers and those in charge need to be able to lead a team. Getting ahead in any office is one part skills and one part connections, and your lone wolf nature means you’re contracting your professional network instead of expanding.

Break the habit: Find a project you’re interested in and ask to be part of the team. Do your best to keep everyone involved and in the loop, and stretch those collaboration muscles. It’ll show managers and coworkers you’re more than just a lone wolf.

Saying Sorry

Are you apologizing too much in the office? According to recent statistics, the word sorry is uttered approximately 368 million times per day in the UK. Women in particular seem to have a tough time ditching the word sorry, and apologize far more frequently than men. Saying sorry about every little thing implies you are constantly making mistakes, and can undercut your position in the office and with managers.

Break the habit: You need to take ownership of your mistakes. It’s time to stop over-apologizing. (Click to tweet.) Reserve the word sorry for big mistakes and cut it out of your everyday vocabulary.

Taking on Every Project

Do you get excited by new projects? Do you like jumping in with both feet and finding new challenges? These are great attributes to any employee, but it’s time to learn your limits. If you say yes to every single project, you might soon find yourself unhappy, burnt out, and badly overworked.

Break the habit: The word “no” is a powerful thing. It doesn’t make you look like a slacker or weak to turn down a project you just don’t have time for. Be protective of your time and abilities, and know when one more task is just too many.

Being Negative

No one likes a Debbie Downer, and if you come into work with a raincloud over your head each morning, it’s not surprising you haven’t moved up in your company. Enthusiasm and passion are traits managers look for in superstar employees who get promotions and excel within the company. No one wants to promote someone who looks miserable to step into the office each day.

Break the habit: Sit yourself down and ask the hard questions you’ve been avoiding. If you hate your job, it might be time to look for another opportunity. Or maybe you feel stalled and want to learn something new, in which case you can talk to your manager or boss about opportunities to shadow in different departments or take professional development courses.Ask yourself what would make you wake up excited about your workday, and chase after your dreams. (Click to tweet.)

Doing Things the Way They’ve Always Been Done

Innovation is the lifeblood of any company, yet many workers just come into the office to punch their time cards and collect their paychecks. And this isn’t only on employees:according to a survey by Fierce, Inc., less than one-third of employees felt their company would change practices based on employee feedback. (Click to tweet.) Lack of innovation in companies, it turns out, is a two-way street.

Break the habit: Sit down with your boss and ask for an open-door policy for employee feedback and ideas. Once a month, try to submit an idea for how your company can improve and grow. Not all of your suggestions will be implemented, but you’ll make yourself stand out as someone with big ideas who really cares about the company’s future.

Being Disorganized

Every year, Americans spend on average nine million hours looking for things they’ve misplaced. (Click to tweet.) Imagine how much of your work life is being frittered away every time you misplace a report under a pile of desktop debris. People walking past your cluttered workspace are judging you for your organizational chaos.

Break the habit: The next time you have a slow day, spend it organizing your office. Set up a plan to stay more organized and stick to it. Keep in mind, the hardest part of being organized is initially cleaning up the clutter and putting things in their places. Once the hard work of cleaning up is done, it should be a breeze to keep your workspace in good shape.

Your bad habits don’t have to hold you back from career success. If you tackle these habits head-on, you might just find yourself moving on up the ladder.

What do you think? What are the worst work habits you’ve noticed? Share in the comments!

Image Courtesy of Bigstock

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The Brains of Successful vs. Unsuccessful People Actually Look Very Different

What's the best way to take control of your own life and push yourself against boundaries?

According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, it's all about your mindset. Successful people tend to focus on growth, solving problems and self-improvement, while unsuccessful people think of their abilities as fixed assets and avoid challenges.

Dweck says that there are two basic categories that peoples' behavioral traits tend to fall into: fixed and growth mindsets. This infographic by Nigel Holmes summarizes these differences.

Image Credit: Brain Pickings

A person with a "fixed" mindset tends to view themselves with static traits and a deterministic outlook. For these people, intelligence, character and creative ability all cannot be changed in any meaningful way, while success is seen as affirmation of those given abilities and traits. The fixed mindset views the human almost like an already-completed spreadsheet, with things like intelligence and personality operating as unchanging, fundamental characteristics. Thus, "striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled."

A person with a "growth" mindset, on the other hand, sees challenges as things to overcome and views failure as an opportunity for growth and personal development.

In the end, Dweck says, how we approach life can determine our success and happiness. She writes her "research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you commit to and accomplish the things you value." Going into more detail, Dweck argues the following:

"Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you'd better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn't do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

"... There's another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you're dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you're secretly worried it's a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you're dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience."

Image Credit: Shirley Clarke / Bullitt Schools

The science: This isn't just another self-help book; Dweck has the science to back it up. In anow-famous 1998 study, Dweck and Claudia Mueller separated 128 children aged 10-11 into two groups. Each group was asked to solve mathematical problems; one group was praised for their innate characteristics ("You did great — you must be really smart") while another was praised for their effort ("You did great, you must have tried really hard").

Next, they were given a harder set of problems — so hard, in fact, that many subjects barely got even one question correct. All were told they had done worse. This was followed up with a third set of once-again-easier questions to see how failure impacted performance.

The result? The children who had been praised for their intelligence did roughly 25% worse on the third test than those praised for their work ethic. The intelligence-praised group was more likely to blame their inability to solve the problems on their lack of ability or the difficulty of the question rather than not having tried hard enough. They also enjoyed working on the tests less and gave up sooner.

Overall, Dweck and Mueller's research "[supported] our hypothesis that children who are praised for intelligence when they succeed are the ones least likely to attribute their performance to low effort, a factor over which they have some amount of control ... [such praise] does not appear to teach children that they are smart; rather, such praise appears to teach them to make inferences about their ability versus their effort from how well they perform."

Dweck and Mueller performed five other, similar experiments and found that the children who were told they were intelligent rather than hard-working learned to measure their own intelligence from the praise. In fact, they seemed to take low performance as an indicator that they simply weren't up to the task. The children praised for their effort seemed to learn that intelligence was "malleable" and defined it in terms of "motivation and knowledge."

In another study, Dweck and other researchers offered children a choice between redoing an easy jigsaw puzzle or trying a more difficult one. Those with a fixed mentality redid the easy puzzle, expressing the belief that smart kids don't make mistakes, while ones with a growth mentality were confused as to why someone would want to repeat the same puzzle and saw tackling new problems as a way to advance themselves.

Other research has shown that attitudes towards a task matter just as much as a person's actual ability to perform them. Soldiers about to embark on a standard 25-mile march, for example, were given different information about the length of the route they had to complete. Those told it was going to be 37 miles, or told nothing about the length, psyched themselves out and did worse than those given an accurate description or told it was only 18 miles. The authors concluded that "what mattered was how closely the anticipated challenge matched the soldiers' actual capabilities," saying that "If we do not believe we can make it, we will not get the resources we need to make it." The results were confirmed by measuring stress hormones in the soldiers' blood levels.

What's this mean for me? Here's how Prof. G. Richard Shell summarizes the results of Dweck's field of research in his book Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success:

"… Repeated experiments have demonstrated the value of praising effort rather than innate talent. If you are praised by others in the right way, this can lead you to praise yourself based on your genuine effort when you accomplish something significant and discount comments about the role of your natural ability. You should ignore any result — good or bad — that comes after you put in only a halfhearted effort. And you should be proud of any result that follows hard work — even when the result is not what you had hoped."

Or as to paraphrase Dweck, people with fixed mindsets tend to shy away from challenges. Their perceived deficiencies seem permanent and in the face of setbacks, they tend to be less resilient, believing they've reached their potential and can't go any further. In the long run, fixed minds will achieve less. 

Those with a growth mindset, on the other hand, don't necessarily think "anyone can be Einstein, but they understand that everyone can develop their abilities and that even Einstein wasn't Einstein until he put in decades of dedicated labour." Challenges help these people improve and setbacks ultimately motivate you to work harder and move forward. 

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