The Impact of a Negative Attitude on Your Career

How can you go places with a negative attitude? To have success in your career, you have to be motivated and driven and believe that you are capable of succeeding. If you lack self-belief, the chances are you will struggle to get ahead in your career, since you will dismiss the possibility that you are worthy of promotion. Instead, you come to believe that maybe you’re just not that good at what you do when, in actual fact, it could be your negative attitude that is holding you back.

You don’t simply have to content yourself with the career you have if you want a higher status position and greater rewards, but you do have to be prepared to work hard and to adopt a more positive mentality. When you’re negative all the time, you may not recognise an opportunity when it presents itself, which means you won’t be able to take advantage of it. You therefore have to be ultra-vigilant and to grasp anything which seems as though it could help you get on in your career.

You don’t want to be one of those people who blames luck on their lack of success, when really it is all about attitude. As they say, you make your own luck. Sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad things happen. What affects the outcomes is your attitude. If you think things are always going to go your way, you grow complacent and can’t cope when things go wrong. If you automatically assume the worst and can’t accept when anything good happens, you will never be happy and won’t take full advantage of any opportunities that crop up.

Consequently, you need to find a balance – adopting a positive attitude in the workplace without being too unrealistic about your future. It is obviously important to be realistic when it comes to your career in order to avoid disappointment. Although you have to look on the positive side, you can’t simply tell yourself that you’re going to be a millionaire in a couple of years without actually formulating a plan and putting that plan into action. Being positive isn’t necessarily going to make your plan come to fruition, which is where hard work and perseverance come in.

It is certainly better to be positive than negative in regard to your career, though, since you will be more prepared to take chances and to work hard. If you automatically assume you will be denied promotion and that your career is going to stall, the likelihood of this increases, since you unconsciously sabotage your own efforts, as you convince yourself there is little point even trying.