5 Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success

I laughed when I read this article .

First, I laughed because it assumed people were smart.?At least, those people who might read the article.

In my opinion, the author assumes that to be someone who would be ahead in business and be accomplished in some way would be smart.

And the author further concludes that this person would sabotage their intellect in certain ways.

Now this may or may not be true.

But for the sake of argument, let’s make it true.

Because for the sake of this article the author makes the point that smart people behave in certain ways which can sabotage their success in certain ways, listed below.

But I wouldn’t be having my say if I didn’t espouse that I learned about sabotage in therapy.?I learned about the subtle, subconscious sabotage we all do from time to time which is so enervating, which can undermine everything we do, from work to parenting to relationship to health to, well, you get the gist.

Some ways the author describes sabotage are as follows:

Smart people sometimes devalue other skills, like relationship building, and over-concentrate on their intellect.?

?Said another way, for me, this might mean; I would walk through my front door and as my wife once said, she was expected to bow down as if Jesus had walked through.?It wasn’t necessarily that I thought I was exceptionally smart, I was a BIG DEAL. I was, after all, a partner at Price Waterhouse, yada yada yada. ?

And if the family didn’t behave as if they knew and appreciated this fact, they were toast.

So, not only did I devalue other skills, like emotional intelligence, I was arrogant and inflated about my work.?I certainly wasn’t smart.

Teamwork can be frustrating for very smart people.

I’m a control freak.?No two ways about it.?I’m much better working on my own.?No two ways about it.?

But what I can do, and what I am excellent at, is delegating.?This is a smart skill, and I don’t sabotage.?I excel.?

Smart people can attach a lot of their self-esteem to their intellect. ?

This hopefully is obvious.?I can become arrogant, especially if I perceive someone has more intelligence in my area of expertise.?Here, I am obviously linking intellect to my area of expertise.

But the interesting thing here is this:?If I attach a great deal of elf-esteem to this area of?

expertise, I am foreclosing on my options of greatness.?What about learning other things? ?What about listening to another’s area of expertise, maybe even linking some of the information they give me to my own area?

How many of us know people who wave us away – literally wave us away with their hands! – if we start talking about something they claim might confuse them, or clutter their minds with excess?

And the last tendency, and this one really impressed me, because it is a difficult problem for my spouse, is:

Smart people sometimes see in-depth thinking and reflection as the solution to every problem.

My wife will be the first to tell you she ruminates.?She sits for hours, thinking over and over about the same thing.?She becomes way way WAY too mental.?She thinks things to death (over-researching every decision and anguishing over every wrong decision).

The author suggests something interesting to break the habit of obsessional negative thinking:?he suggests doing something entirely different which absorbs the mind, like a puzzle.

I’ve been told to take breaks and move the body, but then, over-thinking isn’t my problem.?NOT thinking enough is more my style. ???It can be the opposite side of the same coin, right?

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Do you personally relate to any of these tendencies??Do you fall into any of these traps?

I would love to hear from you!!

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