Its distressingly easy to sabotage your own career. One ill-timed comment, a social media indiscretion, a careless joke about a former boss — all of these can mark you as untrustworthy, unstable or someone who just has poor judgment, and that can affect your career.

Here are the top five ways you could be sabotaging your career.

1. Being Negative, Confronting Co-Workers and Sharing TMI
Boundaries are there for a reason, and in the workplace, they should be respected. It is wrong to talk negatively about former bosses, co-workers or clients in a job interview or meeting in an effort to look smarter or more qualified and giving in to the urge to publicly call someone on their obnoxious behavior instead of privately providing professional feedback. Finally, displaying a lack of emotional intelligence by sharing too much information can also disrupt your career, she says.

2. Mismanaging Your Online Reputation
The horror stories are true: A photo from that crazy getaway weekend you posted on Facebook can come back to haunt you. Numerous people sabotage their own careers by failing to manage their online reputation. There is a fine line between being transparent and professional, and it’s apparent that many professionals still don’t know where that line is when they sound off on Twitter or Facebook with disgruntled posts about co-workers.

3. Letting Your Skills Become Stagnant
People have gaps in their career history for all sorts of reasons, but if you let your skills stagnate, your career will as well. Time and again people take a long career break only to find it difficult to get back into the industry. Employers tend to prefer candidates who are coming fresh off another job,but if you do take time off, find a way to keep your skills up-to-date.

4. Becoming Attached at the Hip
While its great to have a mentor, over-alignment with a boss can be a mistake. Like other good things in life, a great boss relationship, taken to extreme, can wreck havoc with your career. Smart and talented people lose credibility by over-aligning with a great boss. It is advisable to diversify your relationships in the workplace.

5. Having Conflicts
While conflict in the workplace is unavoidable, holding a grudge against another department is. Inter-departmental conflicts can bring out the worst. While inter-departmental conflicts may arise because of competition for resources or credit, they can sabotage your career. Inter-departmental conflicts boil over into full-fledged verbal attacks and inappropriate emails



SOURCE:http://www.naijasauce.com.ng/5-ways-you-can-sabotage-your-career-by-yourself/