5 Unhealthy Mindsets That Block You From Success
Mindset is half the battle to any success. Your mindset can make or break you along your journey to success, allowing you to succeed with confidence or causing you to fail with self-doubt.
But, before you can change your mindset, you have to be able to identify the problem areas within the ones you have. Weâve researched five key unhealthy mindsets that can block you from achieving success in life in order to help you identify them in yourself.
1) Blameless Mindset
We all are guilty of blaming other people for our mistakes at some point or another. Excuses come easy, after all. But most people grow out of this as they come into their maturity. Making excuses for your inability to perform to standards or complete a task is immature and will cause you to become stuck in life because you donât take personal responsibility, which keeps you from moving forward and succeeding.
Stop making excuses for your mistakes and own them; you cannot succeed if you think youâre blameless in life. Praise yourself for the good work youâre doing and the efforts you make to learn how to fix what youâre doing wrong. This will improve your performance as you go and help keep you from making the same mistakes in the future.
2) Approval Mindset
Another sign of immaturity that will hold you back from success is seeking approval from your colleagues and superiors. If you do nothing but seek their approval, you often tune out conversations, missing vital information because you were too worried about how best to respond.
Psychology Today said it best: âEvery second you spend seeking reassurance is a second you arenât focused on the task at hand.â You have to stay focused on doing your best and remind yourself that you canât control how others will respond to you or your work. Stop seeking approval and prove to yourself that you are capable.
3) Hyper-Negative Mindset
Focusing on the negative never has a positive outcome. You can easily cause yourself to choke up or jinx yourself into a bad performance/bad work by focusing on the negative. Having a hyper-negative mindset is never good; itâs the one sure-fire way to be on a path destined for failure.
Unless youâre deliberately planning solutions to dealing with worst-case scenarios that may occur, leave the what-ifs behind you. Predicting disastrous outcomes really only leads to increased anxiety and nerves.
4) Second-Guessing Mindset
Second-guessing is like poison to your decisions. While reflecting on the decisions youâve made in the past can be good, second-guessing is different altogether. Second-guessing is usually the major indecisiveness of minor decisions. These are decisions that the outcomes of which donât really matter.
Second-guessing can weaken your confidence, resolve, and ability to make decisions. While itâs frequently thought of as a way to catch errors or be absolutely certain, it, frankly, does far more harm than good.
5) Self-Doubt Mindset
If youâre full of self-doubt, the chances of your succeeding are very slim. You need confidence in order to achieve success, and confidence cannot exist where self-doubt thrives. You have to have and display confidence in yourself and your decisions to succeed. A person who is confidently wrong is more likely to succeed than someone who is doubtfully right.
You canât go into anything doubting yourself, thinking yourself incapable of handling it. This type of thinking can cause you to choke, mess up where you otherwise would have done fine. Self-doubt is poisonous and doesnât stop until you make the effort to put a stop to it.
Mindset is half the battle when it comes to achieving success. You have to put yourself in the right mindset to push past any negativity or wrong decisions. Unhealthy mindsets are like poison, once they work their way in, it takes diligent effort and time to work them out.
Itâs essential to try and keep a positive mindset when trying to achieve success. Focus on the positives, what youâre good at rather than where youâre failing, where youâve improved rather than what youâve done wrong. This can help to ensure you stay in the right mindset throughout your journey to success.
We hope this article has helped guide you towards the right mindset on your path to success.