15 Habits That Cripples Your Potential to Succeed

If you’ve ever felt like you’re trying too hard to succeed but not making the progress you crave, chances are you’ve developed self-sabotaging habits that are dragging you back farther than your efforts are moving you forward. Any of these sound familiar?

1. You complain all the time

You complain about life, the people around you, strangers, and even your own self. Nothing is ever quite to your liking. When things are fine, you find something to complain about, when they’re not, you complain anyway. The dangerous thing about this habit is, your become oblivious to possibilities, potential and the opportunities that surround you as your mind is shrouded by the negative.

2. You don’t acknowledge your mistakes

You see your mistakes as the fault of others or as a result of something outside of your control. Where you’re supposed to learn from them and change strategies, you doggedly persist out of pride.

3. You delay taking action

You’re always waiting for things to be perfect or the time to be right before you take action. But since things are never quite as perfect as you want them to be, you get stuck in the waiting stage, postponing and postponing until it becomes too late.

4. You don’t sleep enough

You regard sleep as the least of your priorities or worse—as a waste of time. When you’re supposed to be sleeping, you work, party, watch movies, or chat away on social media—content to live on only 4 to 5 hours of it. But research has shown that inadequate sleep not only reduces your mental and physical capabilities, but its effect is also lasting. This leaves you in the least resourceful state to succeed.

5. You resist change

You want to stay the same way and do the same things. You’re not willing to put in the effort to improve or change, but you want things to get better. How’s that? Success doesn’t exist within your comfort zone.

6. Your happiness is attached to results

You’ve postponed your happiness to some unknown time in the future when you’ll achieve your goals. As a result, you don’t actively try to be happy in your present moment. But happiness shouldn’t be one of those things you sacrifice on your path to success because it is in fact, a necessary condition, not a consequence of success.

7. You try to do everything

You have no clear priorities or boundaries. Everything that has the vaguest relevance to your goals become critically important. You end up wasting so much time and energy doing the wrong things and getting only abysmal results.

8. You take advice from the wrong people

You cannot differentiate between those to take personal advice from, those to take a professional advice from or those to take no advice from whatsoever. You take advice from people on the basis of their good intention alone and you end up being misguided all the time.

9. You’re ungrateful

You’re aware of the blessings that surround you day in day out but you’re not grateful for them, in fact, you hardly notice them at all. But gratitude makes you happier, healthier and more likely to attract more blessings into your life. It puts you in a more favorable disposition to succeed.

10. You’re addicted to distractions

Distraction isn’t something you indulge in when you get the most important things out of the way, it is something you’ve allowed to suck up most of your time. I define distraction as any energy-leaching, attention-sucking activity that doesn’t make any positive contribution to your life.

11. You don’t plan

You like to rush into things spontaneously or sporadically without planning only to realize when it’s probably too late that you’ve wasted so much time and have accomplished nothing but stress and frustration.

12. You second guess yourself often

You allow previous failures to dictate your perception of self. When you’re supposed to trust your gut and your abilities, you’re quick to dismiss or berate yourself as inadequate. Without a reasonable confidence and belief in your abilities, your potential to succeed is greatly hindered.

13. You have an abominable eating habit

You eat to survive, not to nourish your body and increase your well-being. Eating food to you is about being hungry, not about giving your body the nourishment to perform optimally. As success relies not just on our mental capabilities, but also on the physical, and to a great extent the mental draws from the physical, keeping our bodies nourished becomes critical to success.

14. You’re a perfectionist

You’re always caught up in the re-doing stage of something because you’re never quite satisfied with the result. But perfectionism is nothing but a mental trap. You cannot be successful without making progress. You must be willing to make mistakes at some point and learn from it.

15. You take everything personally

When you fail, you say it’s because you can’t do anything right. When you’re criticized, it’s because you’re inadequate. When you’re rejected, it’s because you’re a complete loser anyway. But this attitude only leaves you vulnerable, bitter and self-loathing; the bottom of the pit as far as your potential is concerned.