How to NOT sabotage your career success

Has there ever been a time in your career when you've stopped yourself from applying for a job? Or hesitated about putting yourself forward for promotion? Or you've procrastinated until it's too late to self nominate for an award?

Often when I talk to women about their career journey, they tell me about the time they held back from promotion. Or they took a job that wasn’t really what they wanted. Or they volunteered to get involved in a project that wasn’t valued by the business.

Do any of these sound familiar?

Sometimes we sabotage ourselves and our career success … not deliberately, not knowingly, but we do it all the same. Very often it's because of unhelpful beliefs that we have about ourselves and our ability. In the coaching world, we refer to these as 'limiting beliefs' because they are beliefs that limit what we do, what we say and therefore what we achieve.

Limiting beliefs is something that comes up time and again in my Complete Career Confidence programme. We all have limiting beliefs. Very often we're completely unaware of them and don't even realise that we are sabotaging our own success.

Let’s explore this a bit more and then I’ll share how to not sabotage your career success with your limiting beliefs.

What are limiting beliefs?

Our thoughts and our beliefs – underpin our feelings. How we feel determines how we behave. If you're angry about something, you might shout and stamp your feet. If you're excited, you might start to talk really quickly and very animatedly. Make sense?

Your behaviour and your actions get results. Whether they are the results you want, depends on those underpinning thoughts and beliefs (which in turn affects your feelings).

So far, so good.

The thing is … sometimes we are not aware of our beliefs or thoughts – they are unconscious. We have thousands of thoughts going through our heads every day and we mostly don't notice them.

The good news is that when you identify those limiting beliefs, you can work on them and change your beliefs to something more positive or more helpful.

You can purposefully think different thoughts. When you think differently, you’ll experience different emotions and feelings. You might feel happier, braver, more enthusiastic, more confident etc.

When you feel differently, you take different actions, and of course you get different results.

Do you need a degree to get promoted?

Let me give you an example. A few months ago, I worked with a senior HR manager in a law firm – she had been encouraged by her outgoing director to apply for his job.

This sounded like a wonderful opportunity. Her director was thinking about succession planning and had identified a fabulous candidate with international experience to bring a fresh approach and new perspective to the role. But she needed to apply for the job.

My client was really reluctant to apply for the job even though it was a brilliant promotion opportunity. And she didn’t know why. The application deadline was the next day.

She booked a 60 minute Career Power Hour with me. It took some time to dig deep and figure out what was holding her back.

She believed that to be an HR Director, you need a degree. (Like me, she doesn’t have one). This limiting belief was ignoring her 20 years experience and her more relevant CIPD qualifications. And in her head, even though the director was encouraging her to apply, she just couldn't accept that she was 'good enough'.

Her belief about the need for a degree was holding her back and stopping her from applying for promotion. This limiting belief was sabotaging her career success.

Once we figured it out, she was able to choose a more helpful belief, and take the appropriate actions to reinforce that new belief.

This is all part of working on your mindset. It’s not always easy however it is incredibly powerful.

How to prevent limiting beliefs sabotaging your success

In order to prevent limiting beliefs from sabotaging your success, first become aware of what those beliefs are. You can do this on your own - simply start to notice what you notice about your thoughts and beliefs. What thoughts do you have that are positive and helpful? What thoughts are not?

The powerful thing about our beliefs is that, unchecked, they become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For example you might be thinking “I’m rubbish at doing client presentations”. Because that's what you are thinking, you get nervous and anxious, fuss over the slides and you end up doing a poor presentation because you're flustered and nervous.

What you can do instead - tell yourself “Every time I do a client pitch, my presentation is more polished and I feel more confident”.

Afterwards, note down what worked well, what worked better than last time … This is positive affirmative action that gathers the evidence to believe you are getting better at client presentations.

Over to you and your limiting beliefs

Now over to you … if somebody talks to you about applying for a new job, going for promotion, or taking on new responsibilities, what are the first thoughts that pop into your head?

If those first thoughts are unhelpful, how does holding onto that unhelpful thought hold you back? What does it stop you from doing or being?

What would a more helpful thought be? What do you need to believe to think and feel differently? How will it help you? What would you do differently if you held a more helpful belief?

Everybody has limiting beliefs 

Don't think that because I’m a career confidence coach, that my mindset is all hunky dory. You’d be wrong. I work on my beliefs and my mindset every day.

Of course it takes longer to figure out the limiting beliefs when you’re doing it on your own because it’s easy to avoid asking yourself the questions that matter.

Where do limiting beliefs come from?

Limiting beliefs aren’t logical. They often don’t make sense. And often we have no idea where they’ve come from. It may be something you heard as a child; an unfair comment from a previous manager (might not even have been about you); a mistake you once made; seeing somebody else make a mistake.

Our brains are amazing and we can rewrite the stories in our head, change our limiting beliefs and stop sabotaging our own career success.

I’d love to hear from you if you recall a time when looking back, you can see that limiting beliefs held you back and got in the way of your career success?

And if this article on how to NOT sabotage your career success resonated, please do share with someone you know to see if it helps them too.

p.s. if you'd like some hands on help with identifying and rewriting your limiting beliefs, let's talk

About Sherry Bevan

An author, coach and speaker, Sherry Bevan is a former Global Head of IT Service for a City law firm. After 25 years in the City, she created The Confident Mother, an independent coaching practice. She works with individuals and organisations in technology and professional services, to help ambitious women who want to manage their career with confidence and purpose.

?If you enjoyed this article and you want to work with an experienced career coach, Sherry offers two ways of working with her: a one-off Career Power Hour or join her 12 week Complete Career Confidence programme. More information here.