How You Hinder Your Own Success with These 5 Habits
#5. You Crave Perfection Instead of Progress
We all sometimes develop destructive habits that not only make us unhappy at the moment but also hinder our success.
It doesn’t matter how self-aware you are. You have blindspots. You can hold yourself in chains without knowing.
So every once in a while, someone needs to remind you. Remind you of what could be pulling you down. What you’ve been holding onto. What you need to cut off to further advance towards your success.
It could be any of the following five unhealthy habits that hinder success. Check them out!
1. You Follow Other People’s Ideas of Success
The moment you start chasing other people’s ideas of success, you start losing. You’ll never reach your own idea of success if you can’t bring yourself to act on it.
In one of Gary Vee’s videos, he headlines it, success is practice, period. And remember that: every single day, you’re practicing something. So if you’re practicing being a computer scientist yet deep down you want to be an internet marketer, you’re not just failing. You’re failing every day.
Your life starts here, your idea of success. The people you genuinely admire most, the feelings you have in your life that you want to feel again — things that feel like success to you.
Success to you might be traveling the world with an ability to work remotely. Success to you might be inspiring people through art. Success to you might be climbing the corporate ladder, tales of your mastery being known in your state and beyond…
Whatever it is, unravel it and make the hard decision to follow it.
2. You Pretend to Be Someone You’re Not
You may have overcome the first habit that hinders success but this second habit might also stop you in your tracks.
Pretending to be someone you’re not can come really easily. It starts with one simple action, and then another which quickly spirals towards a habit — then an entirely false character develops.
If you pretend to be someone you are not, you may be experiencing these self-limiting beliefs:
- I’m not important
- I’m not enough as I am
- The real me is a mistake
- The real me can’t be loved
- The society thinks the real me is unacceptable
- I’m not happy with who I am
- If people think I am perfect, they’ll like me
All these beliefs create a world where you start being unrecognizable to even yourself. And if you look at the things that fake people do, you’ll realize that pretending to be someone you’re not is not only derailing your success but also ruining your happiness.
You’ll try to be whoever you wish to be so you can numb the pain of the self-limiting beliefs you have in your head. So that you may feel control in your life.
But what you might not understand is, being fake is preventing you from discovering more success.
If you have to hang out with people you don’t like in order to prove something, you’ll be detaching from the reality you need to deal with. If only you deal with your reality, you could see the next step you have to take to your success.
The famous journalist Herbert Bayard Swope summed up this point perfectly when he said:
“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure — It is: Try to please everybody.”
I’ll add “by pretending to be someone you’re not.”
3. When You Fail, You View Yourself as a Failure
Then there’s this ugly belief that may sneak in your head every time you fail. And you cultivate it as who you are. The belief that you are simply a failure, period.
It may happen when you face an intense challenge. Or when you fail to achieve a milestone while aiming at a particular goal.
You fall on self-criticism comments about yourself. You may even start recalling your past defeats to prove your point of being a total failure. And anything that goes wrong after will be further proof of the fact that you won’t acquire the success you desire.
But what you don’t realize is that, all that negativity drags you back. It’s increasing your worries, blowing up as anxiety — and it’s no good.
As you call yourself failure, consciously repeating it until your subconscious records it, you’re creating a thick blindfold for your path to success. Your challenges will become impossible to tackle because you don’t believe you can tackle them in the first place.
So SNAP OUT OF IT before you go too deep!
Gradually refresh your belief system and get back on your feet. Start reminding yourself of your victories, the time when you were happy, motivated. Fetch all the good feelings with force as much as you can and start practicing the things you want in life.
Keep in mind that there’s nothing you can grasp from thin air. You can’t earn respect while doing nothing to earn it. You can’t deserve happiness without choosing to extract it from within you —
You can’t stop feeling like a total failure if you don’t choose to work your way to success. It all starts with you.
4. You Cultivate Self-Limiting Beliefs
Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve,”
Buddha taught, “The mind is everything. What you think, you become,”
Rene Descartes said, “Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche reiterated the same concept when he stated, “A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
I could go on and on with thought quotes but one thing is clear: one of the greatest ways of hindering your success is by cultivating self-limiting beliefs through your mind.
The science of the origin of belief reveals that, “Belief has been a most powerful component of human nature that has somewhat been neglected,” says Peter Halligan, a psychologist at Cardiff University.
Therefore, you need to be careful with what you feed your thoughts. Cross any self-limiting beliefs before they go too far in hindering your success.
Remember: if you think failure, you think less of what you truly are, you are limiting your power to use your potential. Instead, cultivate being better, getting better in every process.
5. You Crave Perfection Instead of Progress
Another habit you embrace that gets in the way of your success is perfectionism.
Don’t get me wrong —
Working on a project in the best way you can in the best timeline possible is healthy perfectionism. But procrastinating the publicity of your work time and time again so you can perfect it isn’t.
Working with every tool you have to produce the best work you can is healthy perfectionism. But waiting to have that cool tool so you can start with perfect work isn’t.
Think, “What can I do to deliver the best right now,” not “What if they laugh at me, they think this isn’t enough, they don’t like it?”
Healthy perfectionism motivates you to do your best in a reasonable timeline while the unhealthy type leads to avoidance and stagnation.
When you check out adaptive (healthy) and maladaptive (unhealthy) perfectionism in-depth, you’ll discover where your perfection lies right now.
But generally, unhealthy perfectionism hinders success by stagnating you. It provokes a desire to control how others think of you to obsessive extents. It doesn’t trigger motivation but sends you down the path to self-criticism.
If you have unhealthy perfectionism, it’s time to let go. You can follow any of these research-backed tips for overcoming perfectionism and get back to winning plus failing your way to success.
At the End of the Day…
You’ll have to stop following other people’s ideas of success so that you can see your goals. You then have to follow up on your goals by refusing to pretend to be someone else and instead practice who you want to be.
Moreover, when you fail, don’t brand yourself with that vicious word for it’ll consume you. This of course means that you can’t afford to cultivate self-limiting beliefs because they’ll pull you down from your hold on success.
But while doing your thing, don’t covet perfection but instead welcome progressive moves. Do all this and you’ll no longer hinder your own success.
