Think As Inc

CHANGE YOUR HABITS

March 11, 2010 on 1:03 am | In career coaching, life coaching | No Comments

Biting your nails, arriving late to appointments, and overeating are obvious bad habits.  However, there are some habits, which are not bad outright, but which over time might have negative consequences.  If you have a habit of seeing the same friends, that is not bad, but it likely means your network is limited and like-minded.  If you take the same route to work each day, you may miss a better view or a more efficient way to go.  Even good tendencies can lead to bad habits, if you allow yourself to fall into a rut and be blinded to new possibilities.

Because ruts are unconscious, you need to make a conscious effort to break them.  Look at your career over time, and see if any patterns emerge.  Is there a recurring reason for your job dissatisfaction?  Are you stuck with projects you don’t like?  These patterns exist because you are doing something to perpetuate them.  Your bad habit might be not speaking up, waiting to be assigned rather than volunteering, or simply going from job to job without a clear sense of overall career. 

Whatever you identify as the problem, think about ways to change this.  If your problem is bad projects, find ways to transition to better ones.  This means delegating the bad projects or at least minimizing your time spent on these, identifying the better projects, and ensuring that you get these better projects.  How do you get the plum assignments?  Find out how they’re assigned.  Then, move out of your comfort zone to get them. 

Your comfort zone is a bad habit if it keeps you from what you want.  There is nothing wrong with being comfortable, if it also means satisfied and content.  We all know people who are never satisfied, and that’s not a better alternative.  However, if your comfort zone keeps you settling for less than your ideal, then comfort is a habit worth changing.