10 Habits Making You Look Unprofessional

Summary: Being seen as a serious professional requires keeping good habits. Breaking those rules and letting bad habits take over will ruin your reputation.

Developing a reputation as untrustworthy or unprofessional will ruin your chances of success in your career. In order to be seen as someone worth working with, you have to keep these good habits, otherwise you will be pushed aside for other people that follow the habits to take control. Here are ten rules that you may be breaking that are causing your demise.

1. Profanity – There is nothing worse than striking up a conversation with new acquaintances, coworkers, and strangers where more curse words come out of your mouth than other words. Constantly using profanity makes you look lazy and uncreative, since quite often there is a better word choice that you could use.
2. Tardiness– Being on time shows you have respect enough for that person or event to be there. If you say you will be someplace at a certain time, be there. It really isn’t that hard. It is understandable to be late once in a while, but making it a regular event will give you a bad name.
3. Staring – You are human. You can’t help but notice the very attractive person walk into the room. However, you can control how you leer at them by keeping the look focused on their face, not their other body parts.
4. Unrealistic optimism – When a disaster strikes, don’t try to say everything is fine. It is okay to be depressed that your project failed or someone completely let your company down. Being negative about everything isn’t being professional, but neither is always being overly optimistic about everything. Life has its ups and downs.
5. Flighty – Being known at flighty means you are irresponsible and indecisive. To be taken serious at work, you need to be someone that others can rely on.
6. Disorganized – If you are getting hundreds of emails a day, then you may be disorganized. Coworkers and clients expect you to be available and on top of things. If you have so much work piling up that you can’t keep with their needs, then people will stop coming to you.
7. Inarticulate – Get to your point quickly and do it clearly. If you can’t effectively communicate with others then problems will develop.
8. Secrecy – While it is not expected of you to share all your private matters with people at work, keeping important information from clients and coworkers will not give you a strong reputation as a trustworthy leader.
9. Overpromise – Offer the maximum promise that you can, but don’t go beyond that. You can’t promise things you don’t have. Once a reputation builds of you not being able to deliver, no one will want to work with you.
10. Cheat and lie – This one is obvious. Coworkers and clients need to trust who they work with. If you are caught lying or cheating then your work is done and you are done.

Read these related articles to learn more about having success in your career:

• 11 Career Mistakes You Won’t Repeat
• 8 Tips to Achieve Reliability in Your Career
• Career Risks Not Worth Taking