Career mistakes to avoid are not what usually comes to mind when you think of driven, successful women. Driven women know how to make goals happen. When you want something done, you turn to these women to get it done. They are the barrier breakers of the world who take massive action to create change.
However, driven women don’t always get what they want. There are times when a goal doesn’t happen for them. When this occurs, it can be gut-wrenching.
If YOU are a driven woman who wants to achieve even more of your goals, make sure you avoid these top 3 career mistakes that many driven women make. Once you learn how to overcome these career mistakes, you’ll become even more unstoppable in your life.
The Top 3 Career Mistakes to Avoid
Career Mistakes to Avoid #1 – Not prioritizing your mental health
While many driven women are thriving in their lives, mental health STILL needs to be a priority. Unlike what society typically teaches, you don’t just take care of your mental health when there’s a problem. Instead, you should spend intentional time daily to manage your mind so you can feel even better in your life and be even more efficient.
For driven women, they’re on the go so often that burnout can happen. When burnout does happen, it can take weeks or even months to recover. Taking care of your mental health NOW can diminish if not stop the pattern of burnout from happening.
How to make your mental health a priority
The easiest way to make mental health a daily priority is to spend 5 minutes a day getting your thoughts down on paper, especially around circumstances that were emotionally triggering.
It’s as simple as:
- Writing the emotionally triggering circumstance, like “My boss said I wasn’t meeting my deadlines fast enough,” on the top of a page.
- Then writing the thoughts you have about that circumstance like, “I’m overwhelmed. I can’t do this. What a jerk. No matter how hard I try, it’s not good enough.”
- When you see those thoughts down on paper, ask yourself if those thoughts serve you and if they may not be fully true.
- If they don’t serve you and you can see how they’re not true, intentionally create and think thoughts that WILL serve you, like “I am doing the best I can. I need to ask for help. He’s just doing his job.”
When you see your thoughts and potentially swap them out for thoughts that better serve you, it creates feelings that allow you to feel better and to take more intentional action. Like I said earlier, you feel better and become even MORE efficient.
Career Mistakes to Avoid #2 – Equating achievement to self-worth
Most driven women have been succeeding since a young age and have learned early on that getting good grades and high achievements get them more positive attention from their parents, teachers and society.
This way of living likely works for them UNTIL they don’t achieve something they wanted. When this happens, there can be many feelings of disappointment and sadness, not just for the result that didn’t happen, but for themselves.
While feeling the feelings of disappointment and sadness is normal and healthy, many driven women beat themselves up in a way that isn’t helping them. They internalize the result of not getting what they wanted to mean there’s something wrong with them. If this is you, please note, this just isn’t true.
While logically most driven women KNOW deep down there’s nothing wrong with them, emotionally it can be hard to let those thoughts and feelings go.
How to release feelings of unworthiness
If you want to minimize the negative thoughts from your inner critic, you must learn how to love and believe in yourself no matter what results you create.
As corny as it sounds, this starts with saying intentional positive thoughts to yourself daily like “I love you exactly as you are” and, “I am more than my accomplishments.”
Daily hugs, high fives and FEELING these intentional thoughts as you say them make a difference too. Start with saying one or two of these intentional loving thoughts daily for 21 straight days.
Most women discover that they LIKE speaking to themselves in this way, and they start to see and feel a positive change after this exercise. The emotional hits and dips they would have felt before start to become less debilitating until they can easily brush themselves off, which creates more momentum in their lives.
Career Mistakes to Avoid #3 – Not asking for help
Everybody counts on driven women to make it all happen, and driven women LOVE to achieve. However, these women too often have too much on their plates and asking for help can feel like a sign of weakness. This HAS to change because driven women are burning themselves out in the process of making the magic happen for everyone else in their lives.
For many women, delegation and asking for help isn’t happening simply because they aren’t used to doing it, but with intentionally practicing this it will become easier and highly enjoyable!
Deciding what you need help with
It’s important that you find what your areas of expertise – the activities you are the best at and enjoy the most – and operate in those areas while delegating the rest. You find your areas of expertise by taking notice of the things you do that feel natural to you and you may even lose track of time when you do it.
Releasing negative patterns will catapult your success
We are constantly bombarded with messages like “be smart, but not too smart. Be pretty, but not too pretty. Be a great mom, wife, and working woman who is an exceptional homemaker too.” It’s ridiculous and not realistic. We can’t ever be or do enough.
Unfortunately, driven women are the ones that feel these messages the most because they’re doing the most and realizing they simply just can’t do it all. They feel like they can’t win.
But, just by taking small, uncomfortable steps every day to ask for help, work on your mindset, magnify your self-love, you’ll soon find that you can easily avoid these three mistakes. You will achieve more goals more quickly and powerfully. It also just so happens that you will feel better than ever in the process.
Please share this article with all the driven women you know in your life. Driven women are what make our world a great place. We need them to be operating at their highest potential AND feel amazing while they do it.
