The Mentality of a Successful Career Success is all in your head. If you want to control your ability to have a lucrative, fulfilling career, it's imperative to control the way you think.

By Ken Sundheim

entrepreneur daily

This story originally appeared on Personal Branding Blog

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Success is all in your head. If you want to control your ability to have a lucrative, fulfilling career, it's imperative to control the way you think.

Those who can't control their emotions and inner monologue never reach their full potential.

The long-term solution to sub-par success, lack, and limitation lies in our ability to turn our inner potential to reality. Among other things, this means not allowing outer circumstances to control our emotions. It means understanding that no amount of money or physical objects creates happiness or cultivates success.

Rather, our recruitment experts have seen that a better career begins with self-improvement; self-improvement starts with a healthy thought process that promotes creativity and spurs action.

Related: 5 Ways Millionaires Approach Their Careers

Below, you'll find three strategies to cultivate a mentality conducive to you achieving your goals, thus allowing you to cultivate a career based on leveraging the skills you possess and learning the ones you don't.

1. Our mental conditions make us who we are.

The more time you waste worrying, fretting and complaining, the worse off you will be.

Just the minute you are aware of thinking a negative thought, immediately change it to a positive. If you start to think of failure, change that thinking to success.

Often, people fail to live up to their potential because their failures are met with despair and they expect their rewards to come to them instead of actively pursuing those goals.

2. Focus on cultivating the right habits.

Nobody but yourself is responsible for your habits. Throughout our career, you'll develop both productive and destructive practices.

The problem with destructive habits is that they are easy to form yet are hard to live with. Understand that as we become older, habits become more ingrained with whom we are as individuals and, thus more difficult to overcome.

But regardless of our age, our methods and approaches can be altered. In order to overcome undesirable habits, it's imperative to step back and analyze all of your actions from a neutral perspective.

Determine which ones are preventing you from achieving your goals. After you define those goals, try to understand why you do them.

Finally, make a commitment to overcome these efforts. Every time you don't give into the temptation to repeat a destructive habit, you strengthen your resolve.

Related: 5 Steps for Becoming an Indispensable Leader

3. If you want to cultivate a mentality of success, it's important to gain a basic understanding of who you are.

Our self-image, which is the picture of ourselves that we hold in our minds, becomes the key to our lives.

However, many times our beliefs and the way in which we see ourselves are entirely false. Our egos will often trick us into thinking and, thus acting in a way that is not in our best interest.

For instance, if our thought patterns say, "I cannot achieve getting the promotion I want," we subconsciously create conditions that correspond to these ideas.

We begin to stop negative thought and behavioral patterns when we begin to accept and learn from the past rather than use it as a basis to negatively judge ourselves. The past should serve as a source of learning not self-judgement.

In the End

No one limits us but ourselves. In order to become a success, it's imperative to avoid becoming the victim of negative ideas. Strive more to please yourself and worry less about pleasing others.

By assuming our own identity, we are bound to make others angry or jealous, but most importantly we make ourselves happier and set up the circumstances conducive to a successful career.

Related: 15 Behaviors and Traits of Great Leaders

Ken Sundheim is the CEO of KAS Placement Sales and Marketing Recruiters, a sales and marketing recruiting firm specializing in staffing business development and marketing professionals around the U.S. Ken has been published in Forbes, Chicago Tribune, AOL, Business Insider, Ere.net, Recruiter.com, Huffington Post and many others. He has also appeared on MTV, Fox Business News and spoken at some of the country's leading business schools on HR, job search and recruitment.

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