Breaking Free of Personal Traps

By Shawn Bakker

In 1999, Mel Sandler and Muriel Gray wrote a book called “Winning at Work” that outlined five personal traps that can sabotage a career. When I first read their book I was struck by how common these traps are, and how often we spring them on ourselves. While 1999 sometimes seems like a long time ago, I believe their insights still remain very useful.

1. The Taking it Personally Traps–There is often a high price to pay in stress and emotional pain for people who take what happens at work too personally. Personalizing what happens around us can lead to regrettable thoughts and actions or inaction, further decreasing our effectiveness at work. To depersonalize our thinking, we need to focus on the logical reasons for why certain things have happened. Quite often, the decisions made at work are not motivated by personal feelings but the interests of the business.
   
   

2. The Forgetting Self-Interest Traps–We often forget to focus on our self-interest and the things that are best for us. In a quickly changing world, this can have disastrous results. To avoid ignoring our self-interest we need to set personal goals and look strategically at our career. As companies adjust in order to look out for their interests, we need to do the same.
   
   

3. The Tunnel Vision Traps–When we fall into the tunnel vision trap we miss both opportunities and pitfalls, especially in a dynamic world of work. To help see things differently we need to pay attention to dissenting opinions and challenge our automatic thoughts that served us well in the past. Just because things have worked before, we cannot count on them working forever.
   
   

4. The Loyalty Traps–At work we can fall into traps if we have too much or too little loyalty. Too much loyalty prevents us from cutting our losses, moving on, and separating our identity from the companies. Too little loyalty prevents us from cultivating a purpose at work and getting the payoffs of growth opportunities within a company. Therefore, to be successful people need to direct their loyalty in several directions at once, rather than aiming all or none of it to their work.
   
   

5. The We’re Just One Big Family Traps–It is easy to develop the same expectations for our work relationships that we have for our relationships at home. However bringing family dynamics into work can get in the way of effectiveness. A manager is a manager, not a parent, co-workers are not siblings, and the people we manage are not children. Treating our work relationships too personally often gets in the way of taking responsibility for both ourselves and our work, maintaining our perspective, and staying clear about our work role.