(taken from Burns)
- All-or-Nothing Thinking. You evaluate your personal qualities in extreme, black-or-white categories. All-or-nothing thinking forms the basis for perfectionism. It causes you to fear any mistake or imperfection because you will then see yourself as a complete loser. This makes you feel inadequate and worthless. The technical name for this type of perceptual error is “dichotomous thinking.”
- Overgeneralization. You arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again. The pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization.
- Mental Filter. You pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative. When you are depressed, you wear a pair of eyeglasses with special lenses that filter out anything positive. All that you allow to enter your conscious mind is negative. Because you are not aware of this “filtering process,” you conclude that is negative. The technical name for this process is “selective abstraction.” It is a bad habit that can cause you to suffer much needless anguish.
- Disqualifying the Positive. You transform neutral or even positive experiences into negative ones. Burns calls this, “reverse alchemy.” Disqualifying the positive is one of the most destructive forms of cognitive distortion.
- Jumping to Conclusions. When you jump to conclusions, you arbitrarily jump to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation. Two examples of jumping to conclusion are “mind reading” and “the fortune teller error.”
- Mind Reading. You assume that other people look down on you, and you’re so convinced about this that you don’t even bother to check it out.
- Fortune Telling. You imagine something bad is about to happen, and take this prediction as a fact even though it is unrealistic.
- Magnification and Minimization. When you magnify, you look at your errors, fears, or imperfections and exaggerate their importance. This has also been called “catastrophizing” because you turn commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters. When you minimize, you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny such as your own desirable qualities or others’ imperfections. This is also called the “binocular trick”.
- Emotional Reasoning. You take your emotions as evidence for the truth. Your logic: “I feel like a dud, therefore I am a dud.” This kind of reasoning is misleading because your feelings reflect your thoughts and beliefs.
- Should Statements. You try to motivate yourself by saying, “I should do this” or “I must do that.”
- Labeling and Mislabeling. Labeling refers to your tendency to create a completely negative self-image based on your errors. Mislabeling refers to your tendency to describe an event with words that are inaccurate and emotionally heavily loaded.
- Personalization. You assume responsibility for a negative event when there is no basis for doing so.
- You vs Skill. You attribute a lack of skill or the journey to acquire a skill as indicative of who you are as person. It's very possible and honestly probable that you will have skills that need feedback and improvement. But it's your tendency to attribute to that to your own self worth that is the problem.
- Fixed Mindset
- Bad KPIs
- Validation Seeking
everything