The Mental Piece of Project Management #13 – Self Sabotage

Human emotions can get the best of us during all areas of our life regardless of the situation. Arguing or disagreeing with teammates, leadership, and/or customers can bring out the worse in us, and it doesn’t stop there sometimes. Your work can escalate the stress you’re already experiencing into your personal life causing your emotions to compound.

Sometimes projects fail, lose money, never get delivered, or don’t rise to the original expectation. This reality is hard to grasp with especially if you’re one who’s dedicated to your craft, a perfectionist, or has a hard time accepting defeat. In this instance, the worst thing you can do is hold onto the negative.

?Holding onto the negatives of your project forces you to lose sight of all positives that occurred. You tend to minimize the value that was added because you’re only looking at the big picture. Yes, the big picture is critical and essentially is what matters to your organization’s future, but on a personal level it’s what is in the weeds that helps you grow, helps your team improve, and the lessons you learned that can be applied to future projects.

The longer you hold onto the negatives, you can start sabotaging your own career and personal growth al while losing the trust of your team. You may tend to lose sight of the purpose of your contributions and ask yourself if you should continue down this career path. Multiple project results of this similar nature will only compound as times goes on.

Challenging as it may be the realization that each new project is a fresh start should help in letting go of the past project negatives. Where you may deem a past project area as a failure, you’ll now be able to change your approach, see the situation through a new lens, and plan for the unknown and unpredictable.

Self-sabotaging can be complex since the result could mean holding a grudge on a past project that lost as little as $100 all the way to destruction of your career path, loss of trust in your organization, and can be detrimental to your personal life.

The self-awareness of your actions to the negatives is the first step. Reflect personally and with your team on the situations that caused the project to not meet its objective. Honesty and accountability will lead the discussion and will help to create a path forward for future efforts. This is especially important with your customers and leadership team as your level of accountability will show not only your dedication to future projects, but to your confidence level in yourself and your ability to improve on past results.

You may realize you’re not alone and that other team members are experiencing the same issues. That support system will grow as your team evolves. What’s worse than self-sabotaging is your entire team following suit. We all have room to learn, grow, and overcome the negatives experienced from past projects.

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