Friday, May 15, 2015

Stop These Career-Killing Attitudes

When we have unpleasant experiences, many of us tend to put our minds into autopilot and start imagining things. For example, when you do not get the promotion you have all along been thinking you will get, you may immediately come to the conclusion that you are not good enough for getting it. Still worse, you may think that you will never be good enough during your entire career and so, you will never get that promotion.

If such a self-depreciating thinking is an isolated incident, you need not worry. But if you allow a torrent of such thoughts to wreck your life, this is an attitudinal problem. They are also known as cognitive distortions. You must therefore stop them because they may kill your career. If you have this problem, you may tend to interpret a simple event in such a manner that it may cause extreme mental stress. 

The greatest problem with this attitude is it may negatively impact your self-esteem. Eroded self-confidence will affect your productivity. You should therefore know about some of the cognitive distortions so you can stop those attitudes.

Projecting an isolated failure upon every endeavor you undertake

During the course of doing your job, you can not rule out failures. But projecting an isolated failure on future endeavors is wrong. Experts call this as "Black-or-White Thinking."

For stopping this, you must learn to listen how your mind speaks. When you hear your mind speaking such an extreme and unrealistic language, you must push those thoughts out. You must instead recall your past endeavors in which you achieved success. You can also recall the promotions you got or the occasions when you were showered with heaps of praises by your managers and co-workers for well-executed tasks..

Failing to take control of situations when something goes wrong.

When you face a tricky situation and if you allow your negative imagination to fly high, you will not be able to think in the right perspective. Not only that, you may conclude the outcome of the situation may be catastrophic. Such Catastrophic Thinking will not allow you to take control of the situation. 

So, when you face such situations, you must study the situations well to know if there are any areas that can be controlled. You can be certain that regardless of the seriousness of a situation, there may be certain steps upon which you may have control. Therefore, take appropriate action and do your best. This will reduce your stress.

Not allowing the positives to influence your thinking

Risks of failures will always be there. As experts put it, only if you do not take any action, you can avoid failures. But it you fail in a particular task, it is not that you will fail in whatever you do. In fact, you may have accomplished many things in your career. You must not forget those positives. If you forget them, you will be allowing only negative thoughts to reside cozily in your mind. 

The right approach to get rid of this problem is to to forcibly tune your focus only on your positives. You can keep a journal that contains all your accomplishments. Whenever you are staring at a failure, you should immediately take out the journal and go through its contents so you will not allow negative thinking to take on the reins.

Coming to conclusions without knowing the complete facts

When you come across a situation, you should not come to conclusions without studying all the facts completely. This may lead to a lot of stress. You must therefore ask yourself whether you have all the facts and if you have studied them fully. In short, your conclusions should be based only on facts and facts alone.

External control may be a fallacy

Many a time, all of us think that we become victims of circumstances. For example, if you have failed in an interview, you are only responsible for that. You may not have prepared well for the interview session. There is absolutely no external control here. In fact, when you analyze any situation, external control may be a fallacy. You should therefore not blame your circumstances or others for your failures. If you do so, it shows you are not taking responsibility for your life.

To summarize, only if you recognize that you have such attitudes, you will be able to overcome them. You must implant new and different thought patterns in your mind so you can push out the distorted thoughts. If you learn to challenge these career-killing attitudes, you can not only get rid of your stress but can build your self-confidence as well. This will go a long way in helping you climb your career ladder.

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