Some behaviours and thoughts can only be described as toxic. They are habits that poison our personal and professional growth and our relationships with others. We have all acted in some of these ways at one point or another in our lives, although many people have made no effort to change or improve this kind of thinking.
These are the 10 behaviours and habits that can drastically ruin your life
1. Envying everyone else
We have all envied someone at some point. I envy some people myself, for how competent they are at what they do and how they do it. I envy the way they can do something easily that takes me much more work, and I envy many of the achievements their skills have brought them.
But I don’t use that envy to criticise; I use it more as admiration, to try to become as good as they are. It is what is called “healthy envy”, and it helps you improve by watching how those people do things.
The problem is that many people feel plain envy, and that kind of envy is naturally self-destructive. If you live only looking at others without learning from them, you end up competing against ghosts, when in reality you should be competing with, and comparing yourself to, who you were yesterday, so you can measure your progress. Admiring other people is very positive, but there is nothing positive about constant envy.
Many entrepreneurs focus so much on the competition that they forget to improve their own company. They are always chasing their competitors because they imitate what they do, but they don’t learn the skills or make the effort to be more creative.
2. Taking everything personally
Toxic people think that everything happening around them is a direct attack on them, as if the world were conspiring to make their life harder. They can see constructive criticism as a missile launched to destroy their ego.
In reality, even when people talk about you, whether they think you are amazing or awful, it says more about them than about you. That doesn’t mean ignoring everything others say, but you can’t live your life based on what people say about you. Likewise, being let go by a company isn’t always personal. Sometimes it is simply a round of layoffs and you were one of the cheapest people to dismiss.
In business, a customer choosing a competitor’s product doesn’t make that customer a son of a b****. As a rule, it means the competition sold to them better, made them a better offer, or we simply did a worse job of presenting our case.
3. Always acting like a victim
A sense of victimhood makes you see yourself as someone with no power over your own life or the direction it takes. Even people who have suffered a serious accident end up finding the courage to keep looking ahead.
When you stop complaining and refuse to see yourself as a helpless victim, you will probably find that you have more power than you thought to change everything.
A victim usually plays defence, and to stop being a victim you have to go on the attack.
4. Holding on to pain and loss
A failed marriage, the loss of a loved one… It hurts, but life goes on. Sometimes you have to let go emotionally of things that once meant a great deal to you; otherwise you would be living in the past. And you can’t live in the past.
If we apply this to our careers and to business, we will see the odd failure, and we can’t keep repeating the same old “I used to have… I once did…”. The past has to be left where it belongs, and we must focus on the present so that, in the future, we don’t regret the toxic behaviour we are indulging in today.
5. Obsessive negative thinking
The mind is very powerful. If you are one of those people who are always talking about the terrible things that could happen to you or that have already happened (the snubs, the failures, life’s injustices), that is what you will attract.
Remember that your mind can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Always look for positive lessons. People who ran into financial ruin, fell apart and entered a self-destructive spiral still haven’t come out of it, while those who drew lessons from the situation are at least on the road to recovery.
6. Lack of emotional self-control
Being unable to control your own emotions can be very toxic for the people around you and truly harmful to yourself. People like this can burst into anger or tears over a trivial problem and manage to escalate it to far more serious consequences. Sometimes we insist on staying where part of us knows we shouldn’t be any more. This happens very often in relationships: we insist on drawing water from a well that ran dry long ago. We even blame ourselves for things that never depended on us.
Imagine a relationship in which one partner has been distant and cold for some time, and the other wants everything to be as it was. They start blaming themselves for their partner’s indifference. Am I doing something wrong? Am I not enough for my partner? Sometimes the answers are right under our noses, but we stubbornly try to rescue something the other side no longer wants rescued. It would be easier to get off that sinking ship, but we decide not to.
In other cases the explanation is much simpler: if our partner is cold and distant and hardly makes time to see us any more, it is quite possible that the problem isn’t us. Think of it this way: if you have ever been in a hot shower and noticed the water getting weaker and a bit colder, what might be happening is that someone else has turned on a tap somewhere else in the house.
So simply accept the situation and make the best decision you can. These decisions should be more rational than emotional, and if you keep control of your reasoning, you will to some extent be controlling some of your emotions.
7. Cruelty, or a lack of empathy and compassion
Treating people cruelly comes close to psychopathy, because it stems from a total lack of empathy. More and more, we can see on the internet itself how devastatingly cruel and hurtful people can be to others, simply because they can. After all, the internet is a concentrated reflection of real life.
A Twitter account that behaves like a jerk is, as a rule, run by someone who is a jerk in real life.
It is true that as you move further into the business world or take on more responsibility in a company, you tend to think more coldly and set feelings aside. But you should always treat everyone with respect, so if you ever notice that you are starting to behave too cruelly towards the people around you, stop, because it isn’t worth it.
8. Cheating and deceiving simply because you can
Deception is a choice, not a mistake or an excuse. If you decide to succeed through immoral shortcuts and illicit methods, sooner or later it will catch up with you. Two things define people: integrity and honesty. If you lose them, you are no longer an honest person. And nobody likes dealing with people who lack integrity and honesty.
As I always say: “Make sure you can explain how you achieved success without being ashamed of how you did it.”
9. A constant need for validation
Many people get trapped in the need to prove their worth over and over again, and constantly need to win over everyone around them. But success isn’t about what you achieve in the eyes of the crowd; it is about what you achieve for yourself. In life, unlike at school, we no longer have to sit exams. We are the ones who assess ourselves.
10. Pretending everything is fine when it isn’t
We are not talking about putting on a front for others, since there are times when not everyone needs to know our situation. The problem is that we sometimes fool ourselves to avoid facing the real reason why we wake up with no energy, why I get up with no enthusiasm, and so on.
Every so often, we need to ask ourselves whether we are really living the life we want to live. Am I happy where I live and with whom I live? Do I like what I do for a living? Am I fighting for my dreams? Am I really happy? What do I need to be happy?
Pretending that something is going well can be even more toxic in romantic relationships, because living with people who don’t really fulfil us can harm every other area of our lives.
Stay realistic and aware at all times, both in business and in your personal life, and ask yourself whether you have yet to shake off any of these behaviours or ways of thinking.
See also: The 5 best books ever written for changing bad habits
Further reading
- Life is like a game, and this is how you play it
- 9 things you can do every day to become smarter
- 16 hard things you’ll have to do to achieve success
Featured image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder / Hieronymus Cock, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
