We all have bad habits that we’ve developed over the years. Some bad habits are more detrimental to your future and your life than others, but no bad habit is good to keep up. There are several bad habits that can hinder your future success, but we’ve narrowed it down to the top five that, if not snuffed out soon, could have adverse effects on your overall success.
1) Seeking approval
You will never achieve a high amount of success in life if you seek approval with everything you do and every decision you make. You can’t be a leader, manager, or very successful without confidently making decisions for yourself. Being too concerned about this can also cause you to lose focus in moments when it really counts, like job interviews.
It can cause you to be so concerned about what they’re going to say next that you inadvertently tune them out, missing the last thing they said. In order to curb this habit, you need to do your best to focus on the conversation or task at hand and remind yourself that you can’t control how others react or seek approval for everything you do.
2) Making excuses
Blaming others or making excuses for your own mistakes or behavior is a bad habit that will definitely hinder your overall success. Employers don’t like to see this behavioral trait and neither do potential friends. You’ll find it incredibly difficult to achieve success in your business life as well as your personal life if you continue with the bad habit of blaming others or making excuses for your own mistakes.
3) Giving into self-doubt
Self-doubt is the leading killer of dreams and success. The only sure-fire way to never succeed is to never try. Self-doubt easily creeps into your thoughts, making you doubt decisions you were previously confident about, causing you to stall or delay an important and potentially time-sensitive decision.
More severely, self-doubt can even cause you to miss out on huge opportunities for your future. Your self-doubt can take over and keep you from going for certain jobs, performing, and doing things you love.
4) Catastrophizing
If you go into any event thinking it’s going to be awful, chances are you’re going to have a bad time. The same is true if you go into something important you have to do with the idea that you will fail.
You may not think that mindset could have such a large effect on the things you do, but let us assure you, it certainly does. You can psych yourself out before any major performance, speech, interview, etc. by convincing yourself that you’re going to do poorly.
5) Not listening
Practicing poor listening skills can have an extremely adverse effect on your future success. Not listening can get you into trouble in a number of ways, but it can also hinder you from furthering your career or your life in any way.
If you’re too busy thinking about what you’re going to say next to hear what someone is saying, tune them out frequently, or find yourself asking them to repeat what they said most of the time, chances are people don’t think to highly of you. They won’t want to promote you or befriend you, hindering both your business success and life success.
Bad habits and destructive behaviors can lead to a number of problems in our daily lives and, unfortunately, we all have our fair share of them with which to deal.
Some bad habits are simply annoying, while others can be detrimental to your future. We hope that, through this list, we’ve been able to help you identify bad habits that could hinder your overall success in life.
