Cognitive restructuring
'Cognition' is a word used to denote a thought or belief, and 'restructuring' involves challenging a cognition by looking at the evidence for or against it. The basic idea behind cognitive restructuring is that thoughts themselves are not facts; you need to consider whether the thoughts you are having are true and to consider whether there are any other ways to thinking about a particular situation. At first this can be a real challenge: we often believe what we think and don't question our own thoughts. However, often our thinking is biased, and with perfectionism it can be biased towards thinking too negatively and harshly about yourself.
Failing serves an important function: it teaches you what not to do. Failure is a form of feedback, it tells you when something isn’t working, and from there you can take steps to do something different next time.
If every attempt you made were successful, you would not learn why some things work and some don’t, you wouldn’t learn to adapt and make changes, and you wouldn’t have the opportunity to find better solutions.
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The most important skill which can be honed from making mistakes is resilience. Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from a challenge or failure, and only by experiencing adversities can resilience be demonstrated.
This next exercise is a chance for you to consider when failure has been important in your life and what you might have gained from the experience which you wouldn't have if you'd been successful.
The importance of failure
If you set out with the mentality that you will make mistakes, that you won't mind making mistakes, and that you are supposed to make mistakes, you are mentally in a far better position to be able to learn from your experiences.