Cut These 7 Tiny Habits If You’re Sick Of Feeling Unsuccessful
Do you want to feel successful? Try cutting these habits out of your life.
lil artsy, Tom Eversley | Canva, Mel Poole | Unsplash I know the feeling. We can often be our harshest critics.
We see others succeeding, and then we look at ourselves and judge that we’re not doing ‘good enough.’ This is especially common in ambitious people.
I’ve struggled with this self-judgment for decades.
Here are 7 habits to quit if you're tired of feeling unsuccessful:
1. Believing every thought in your head.
Newsflash — we lie to ourselves. We do this in one simple way: we give credence to a fictitious thought.
We see a negative thought float up about our lot in life, and we dare to sit there and believe it.
Do you believe that? Don’t be a dum dum.
See thoughts for what they are.
2. Being a sucker for what society believes is ‘successful.’
It’s a heady elixir we’ve been gulping down since Mom first dropped us off at Kindergarten.
What is considered success seeps into our minds like osmosis from our friends, teachers, and families.
And we fall for it, hook, line, and sinker. And we carry these standards into adulthood and pollute our hoy with our fears of falling outside the line of what society considers successful.
Your task? Sit down for thirty minutes and question what success is.
Can you be successful in ways most people haven’t considered?
3. Criticizing others as a personality trait.
Sure, I like to have a moan about others with friends now and then.
But don’t make this part of you. Get in the habit of complimenting and lifting your fellow human.
Not because you’re a goody two shoes.
But because you know at an atomic level, we are all connected.
This has extremely relevant psychological consequences. If we’re criticizing others, we’re projecting our insecurities onto others. No one who is truly happy in themselves needs to bring others down.
Quit doing it, and the color will return to your cheeks.
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4. Viewing a failure as a ‘step back.’
Human beings have even crafted a clever little word to emphasize the false nature of failure — we call it a ‘setback.’
No failure is a setback.
Let’s say you’re trying to build a log cabin. Maybe you do the cement mixture for the foundation wrong.
If you didn’t know how to do it right, you’ve now learned a lesson. You didn’t go backward. You gained ground.
You don’t gain anything if you don’t work on the log cabin when you otherwise could have. You don’t gain new lessons from failures, and you don’t gain in the accrued building of the cabin.
When you welcome failures, you’re far more likely to take action, because now you’re not out to berate yourself for making a mistake.
Yes, take care, but don’t hold back from gaining valuable data.
5. Making bad habits into regular habits
Instead, turn those habits into one-off rewards.
I know you enjoy the thing. I know you just can’t stop. But it isn’t because it’s so hard to quit that you can’t quit the thing.
It’s because secretly you don’t want to quit. If you did, it would be easy. As the quit-smoking guru Allen Carr says, it’s not nearly as hard as we make it out to be psychologically.
You don’t want a bad habit to be a regular habit. If you can enjoy it as an occasional one-off, great, but otherwise quit.
When we do, we see ourselves in a new light — we’re not constantly self-sabotaging.
This sends out a clear message that you’re not to be screwed with.
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6. Tolerating cycles of self-judgement.
You could say this is the big bazoomba in all the bad habits.
Judgement gets a bad rap. It is a useful thing. If we see something that isn’t working in our environment, and we judge it as bad, and then we take action to change it positively, that’s great!
The issue comes when we get into patterns of thinking harshly about ourselves without breaking the cycle.
There comes a point when we must ruthlessly turn away from these judgments. That’s all there is to it. There’s no particular action you need to take. Just stop judging yourself so much.
The void this creates will be filled with a warm sense of self-respect.
7. Feeling the insatiable need to ‘get ahead.’
It seems counterintuitive to drop what looks like a very healthy drive to outcompete others around you.
It’s something I’ve grappled with most of my life. And when I’m particularly strong in this mindset, I am rarely happy.
It just puts me into comparison mode — ironically sapping me of my drive to do much else. Know the feeling?
Instead, focus on enjoying the work you set your heart on doing. Do one thing at a time, with enjoyment, absent of the continual keeping up with the Jones-esque comparison trap.
When you do it this way, you become significantly more effective and surge forward anyway.
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Alex Mathers is a writer and coach who helps you build a money-making personal brand with your knowledge and skills while staying mentally resilient.