I've failed over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed" - Michael Jordan
 

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly" - Robert F. Kennedy
 

For Adolescent Counseling Services at Palo Alto High School, the most common issue we saw students for last year was academic stress.  At the root of this is often a belief around being perfect fueled by extremely negative judgments about making mistakes and failure.  The cost of perfectionism and the resulting stress is extremely high, both emotionally and physically.  At a perfectionists core is a belief that mistakes are unacceptable and that their self-worth is dependent upon not making any, EVER.  The challenge here being that everyone makes mistakes so the perfectionist is inevitably doomed having set for themselves an unreachable goal and hanging their well-being in the balance of reaching it.  This leads to high levels of stress and I often point out to these students that perfectionism and mental health are mutually exclusive, you simply cannot have both.  Mistakes are nothing to fear and there's no way around them, and if you react rather than learn from them they will have served no purpose other than to further eat away at your self-worth.

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