Anticipating attacks on your success requires you to understand the motives behind them.
The more success you achieve in life, the more visible you’ll be to people who engage in deceitful, dark, behaviors. The ladder upwards toward success is not without its battles along the way. The mindset one needs to have is an educated but defensive one, if they want to effectively protect what they’ve worked hard for.
This article is not an advocacy for adopting a darker frame of mind in life, but rather an encouragement to understand the people who do. In no way are you encouraged to develop a sense of paranoia about the people whom you surround yourself with.
Being tuned in and protected is what the ultimate goal is. You’ll meet a variety of people in life, and their interpretation of you can differ in a variety of ways. Understanding the darker traits of the human mind may expose vulnerabilities in your way of conducting yourself.
This article is aimed at reducing your chance of victimhood.
To Protect Against Attacks You Must Understand Them
If your neighborhood has been struck with an increased rate of home break-ins, what steps would you take to protect your home from being broken into? You would first need to analyze how, when, and why these break-ins happened – thereby attempting to understand the mindset of the perpetrators.
Dealing with protecting your success and reputation is much the same. It’s best to attempt to fully understand the motives behind any possible attacks, and place yourself in the shoes of the perpetrators. In order to do so, you’d be required to constantly process negative, dark traits of human intuition which often remain untouched by the more innocent minds around you.
Attacks on your successes and reputation are never blatant and easy to get a read on. The word ‘attack’ may not describe them effectively. They are more intricate schemes than they are attacks, so you should be aware of the many moving pieces.
First, analyze what makes you susceptible to envious behavior from others (behavior which may cause harm to things you spent time building – such as your reputation). What about you is something that other people want to have? Are you in cahoots with the boss? Is your salary substantially higher that that of your co-workers?
Be honest with yourself in what about you is likely to be the target of dark behavior from others. To do this, place yourself in the shoes of those observing you. Are you in any way enticing deceitful behaviors of others by being flashy and outspoken about your successes? Where would you, if you were a perpetrator, attack yourself to put a dent in your successes?
This is a rabbit hole which twirls down into dark depths of human psychology. If you take this exercise seriously you will begin to notice just how ill-intentioned the thoughts of someone viewing you from the outside can become.
The desire to be protected can become addictive. Allow yourself to be reminded of others’ ability to act in malicious ways, but do not become obsessed with it. Be reminded, then go back to your everyday focuses.
What should give you a sense of comfort, and what has saved you from these dark psychological attacks up until this point in your life, are the traits of your observers. Just as you are thinking about how to grow and maintain your success in the venture that you’re taking part in, so is every person that you see in your day-to-day life.
The fact is that not many people have the time to completely focus on denting someones career, family life, or reputation as a whole. Therefore if you simply care more about defending these things than the average person cares to try and attack them, you will be in the clear.