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Six Ways to Sabotage Your Career
By: By Rebecca Nerison, Ph.D.
You may be committing acts of career sabotage every day without even knowing it. The following "saboteurs" can be tricky to spot, but they are worth identifying before they wreak havoc with your career:
1. Procrastination
Hands-down, procrastination is the bane of professionals everywhere, the number one internal obstacle to performance and satisfaction. Why? Because humans naturally avoid that which is scary, boring, or unpleasant. Procrastination leads to poor performance, unhappy customers, and stress.
2. Perfectionism
Yes, it’s good to be thorough and careful in your work because mistakes can be costly to customers (and to you). But missed deadlines or paralysis won’t win you points. Effective professionals find a happy medium: get the job done well enough for its purpose in a timely fashion.
3. Neglecting Growing Your Skills
Professionals are valued for their skills. Keeping them current and fresh is the best way to ensure your employability, as well as your enjoyment of the work.
4. Staying When You Should Go
Sometimes you know that a job, or even a career, doesn’t match your strengths, abilities, or interests. But you stick with it because you don’t know what else to do, or you need the money, or you feel you’ve invested too much to change course. But if your deepest intuition is telling you to go, you should give the idea serious consideration
5. Over-Using Substances to Mitigate Stress
Many professionals find themselves using increasing amounts of alcohol or other substances to cope. While addiction to coffee and cigarettes probably won’t cost you a job, they can mess up your health. Addiction to alcohol or drugs, on the other hand, is a one-way ticket to career implosion.
6. Ignoring a Mental Health Issue
Most work is stressful in some way. Unremitting stress over time can result in physical problems, but it can also cause depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and relationship problems (to name a few). These issues in turn distract you from your work, or they can even render work impossible. When this happens, you may have difficulty completing projects or doing your best work. Many high-level professionals wait until the problem is out of control. This is sad because in many cases the resulting career implosion was preventable.
Coaching can help prevent career sabotage because it creates the urgency and structure needed to address important, but not yet immediate, issues. Working with a professional who is dedicated to your success and happiness can speed the process along or help you get unstuck.
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