Little do you know that your mentality and mindset mean a lot at work. Your attitudes, moods, or beliefs in which you approach work can draw out how productive and effective you would become eventually and this would in turn impact the experience of work both for you and your teammates.
In a bid to be positive and be optimistic about issues, we make the mistakes most times to look into attitudes that can actually help us work well or fulfill things at work like positivity or proactiveness. We probably sub consciously less often think of the negative things that make work hard for us. You can never get the answer to a problem you don’t know.
This article would talk on five mindsets or attitudes that could be holding you back from working well and how to identify and tackle them by reframing your thinking.
- The pessimistic mindset: a pessimistic person is someone who believes and acknowledges the tendency to focus on the negativity of a situation or someone who always believes the worst is always yet to come. When you are at work with a pessimistic mindset it could maneuver you to think and believe that every little change or new events at work could be a negative one or could divert your focus into thinking of a way to move past something you are expecting to go wrong (even when nothing wrong is happening). Most times it could be you subconsciously thinking in this negative direction, so take a pause and examine your thoughts and try to figure out a way to reframe or redirect these thoughts into something a little bit more focused and leave out why it should not work and focus on why it should. Channel your energy into figuring out if you can turn a problem you probably see ahead, into an opportunity instead of dwelling on the problem. This does not give a camouflage to something bad happening, instead it makes you prepared and focused on riding on the wave of the problem.
- Giving your emotions the wheel of your actions: we cannot be humans without emotions, they are what makes us humans in the first place and being open and free about how we really feel would enhance our communication and relation with each other. Sometimes when emotions like anger or frustrations push us to lash out or flare up or lose temper at work, it can result in situations that negatively impact you and others and could be tagged unprofessional and could attract a query or perhaps a sack letter eventually. When you probably find out you have problems handling strong emotions like anger, it is best you go in search of methods to help you work through them, for example anger management classes. This could even be as easy as just running some deep breaths exercises with you counting from 1-10. It could even go as far as making a conclusion with yourself to not answer an email right away until you probably cool off. It could even be taking a walk to steam off or simply asking for a break to think or to later revisit the issue when you are much calmer.
- Being unwilling to get along with your colleagues: it is normal for work to put you into situations or scenes with people you would probably never spend time with otherwise. There’s really no doubt that working with people who have different opinions, approaches, mindsets or mentality can be really frustrating. Nobody is saying you have to be friends with your colleagues by force, but there should be a level of mutual respect and harmony between you and your colleagues. Disrespect and conflict or friction can reduce or slow down productivity in such a workspace.
- An overly apologetic attitude: it could be an attempt to sound polite but we don’t know that saying sorry always doesn’t make you sound polite instead it could be sending an impression that you lack confidence. You probably subconsciously start every statement with sorry, or you apologize even when you are not at fault. All of these are screaming zero confidence to your colleagues and the company at large. Sometimes over apologizing could be a reflex but should be worked on and curbed to the barest minimum especially when it is not warranted at all. The best thing is rework your statements to something polite and professional asides from sorry.