Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest podcast with Small Jar Coach. This show is for anxious, almost empty nest moms who are ready to let go with love, reconnect with who they are, and embrace what's next. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins, and I'm both a master certified coach and a mom on this journey right alongside you.
Each week, I'll bring you powerful mindset tools, honest reflections, and real talk to help you feel calm, confident, and deeply connected to yourself, to your teen, and your future. You don't have to do this alone, my friend. Let's find the power to create a beautiful next chapter.
Hello friends, and welcome back to the podcast where we explore what it means to be a mom in this Almost Empty Nest chapter, and how we can find more peace, purpose, and self-trust along the way. If you've been here for a while, you've known the show as the Small Jar Podcast. The Small Jar name came from something that's really personal to me.
It's actually a tradition I share with my mom and my sister. We call our time together the "Small Jars". It's a space where we share our hopes, and our fears, and our dreams.
Sometimes in person, sometimes over Zoom, and every once in a while we get to do it together on a yoga retreat at Kripalu. The Small Jar is a space where we laugh a lot, and we share quite a few tears. Actually, I think I'm the one who cries most of the time.
But more than anything, it's a space of unconditional love. A place where you can be unapologetically yourself while also striving to be that next best version of yourself. That idea, the idea of a small, sacred space where you're seen and unconditionally supported, it's become the foundation of my coaching practice.
And this is still very much true. But today I want to share a small but important shift which you've likely already noticed in the intro. I've renamed this podcast the Almost Empty Nest Podcast with Small Jar Coach.
So you might be wondering, why the change? Ultimately, it's about being sure that the moms who are feeling anxious, frustrated, and lost as they navigate this transition between motherhood and the empty nest can find the tools and compassion they need. In coaching, we talk a lot about the power of words. And sometimes clarity starts with calling something by exactly what it is.
So if you've ever second-guessed yourself as a mom, or struggled to figure out the right thing to do with your teen, or for yourself, you're in the right place. This name change isn't about changing the heart of this podcast. You'll still get the same mindset tools and personal reflections from my life as well as stories of my clients.
But now I'll be delivering this podcast under a name that speaks more directly to the journey we're on together, the Almost Empty Nest. So thank you for being here, in this small jar of a space, as we step into this next chapter together. Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest Podcast.
Let's get into today's episode. My friend, I've told you before that I'm on this journey right alongside of you. And over the past few weeks, I've really had to dig deep into my own self-coaching.
I have been going through it. So I'm going to tell you what's going on, but my goal with this conversation is to explore the topic of the fear of failure. This has been coming up for me a lot lately, but it's also something I hear a lot from my clients.
They'll say, I guess I'm afraid of failure. We talk about it like it's so obvious that we don't want to fail. And yet we rarely examine what this even means.
So I thought it would be worth exploring this topic, not just in the context of what's going on with me right now, but also in a much broader context. And as I was thinking about this episode and connecting it to the Mindset Trap series I'm doing, I thought it was worth exploring this question. Is the fear of failure actually a mindset trap, or is it just a reasonable and very rational response to a world that is uncertain, unpredictable, and let's be honest, not always fair? So let me start with what's going on with me.
As I'm recording, it's late March of my son's senior spring. He's been in that intense, emotional time when he's waiting back to hear from colleges. And let me tell you, it's been kind of awful.
Terrible for him, waiting to be judged as worthy, having the slow trickle of emails announcing, you'll hear back tomorrow night at seven o'clock. It feels like a terrible kind of fraternity or sorority practice, where they wake you up in the middle of the night and haze you as a way of seeing whether you're worthy. It's been terrible for him to have to go through it, but it's felt terrible for me too, watching him go through it.
There's so much about this kid that I think is so incredibly special. Of course I think this way, I'm his mom. But I also believe it to be true in so many ways objectively.
But no matter how special your kid is, when you're shooting high in college admissions, you spend the majority of your kid's senior year holding your breath, waiting for what you hope will be good news. The fact is, getting into so many of these highly selective schools is basically like buying a lottery ticket. It's not just about being qualified and a good, hardworking student.
It's about luck and timing and institutional priorities and a thousand other things completely outside of your control. And we're not just talking Ivy League, my friends. The list of highly selective schools is so much wider than when we were teenagers.
Today, schools I remembered as safety schools boast acceptance rates of only 10 or 15 percent, even lower actually. So applying to these schools, it's like buying a lottery ticket. But by the way, the system is rigged because colleges are looking to maximize their yield so they look even more prestigious.
So they really only want to accept kids who they think will have a likelihood of attending. So there's this early decision process where kids apply early in hopes of getting good news by December or January, but they need to commit to the school as a way of demonstrating, if you let me in, I'll go. So the likelihood of getting into a school if you apply early decision is statistically a bit higher than those schools overall acceptance rates, but only by a few percentage points.
So my son applied early to his top choice school and he got deferred in December. So that basically means the school delayed making a decision on his applications until the regular round this spring. It was disappointing.
I think we'd all been so hopeful that he would get in, low admissions rates aside. And so you can't help but kind of beat yourself up for feeling so disappointed as if you were wrong to get your hopes up. My son rallied though.
In December, he applied to 10 or 11 more schools on top of the four he'd already applied to either early decision or early action. Because of course there are even more complicated ways to apply early. So when my son hit submit on these applications in early January, it felt like, okay, he's done it.
He has 15 chances, 15 lottery tickets. Of course, some of those lottery tickets had better odds than others. One or two had a 40 or 50% chance of success.
A bunch more were in that 15 to 20% admissions range. And then there was a small handful of schools that he applied to that have a 5% admission rate. 5%, my friends.
Let's just sit on that for a second. So for every 100 kids who apply, 95 are told no. And many, if not all of those 95 are incredible, thoughtful, bright, accomplished young people.
It's not that they're not good enough. It's that there are literally not enough spaces for all of these kids to be accepted. And what's crazy is that this has somehow become normal.
It's not just the kids who are buying into it. It's us parents too. We're part of a system that's led us to believe that this is the path to success.
That applying to these schools with single-digit acceptance rates is aspirational and ambitious. Maybe even the right thing to do if you want to maximize your chance for success. That if your kid has the grades and the test scores and the resume, the quote-unquote right path is to throw their hat into these highly selective rings.
I'd like to think that part of this comes from a good place. As parents, we'd all love our kids to dream big and be ambitious. But while setting up our kids for this kind of failure, we risk communicating that worthiness comes from reaching high.
We equate selectivity with value, like the harder it is to get in, the more it must mean if you do. But here's the problem. When the bar is set at 5%, what we're really doing is setting most of our kids up to feel like they've failed.
You're amazing. You can do anything. Just aim high.
Even if we tell our kids it's selective, the odds are low. As a society, it seems that we're building up these dream schools so much that when success doesn't happen, the failure feels terrible. And in reality, the odds are stacked so heavily against our kids that it's almost inevitable that if they aim for the stars, they'll walk away from this process heartbroken.
It's no wonder our kids are so anxious as they go through high school, or that we are trying to help them be successful. And I can't help but have these thoughts that I've failed my son setting up for this possibility of heartbreak, of failure. That's probably the part that's weighing on my mind the most heavily.
Not the fear of him not going to one of these schools, because I am very clear that my son's worth is not tied to the name of the school he attends. My fear of failure actually relates more to the fear of having let my son down as he shoots for his dreams. Look, when it comes to the college process, we can't change the system.
But the invitation here is for us moms to take responsibility for the stories we're telling ourselves and our kids about what matters and what success looks like. And a big part of this is about taking responsibility for the way we talk to ourselves as we try to navigate how to support our kids and help them lead healthy, productive lives. When you really look at it, we are all so incredibly afraid of letting our kids fail.
And it goes way further than college or even how our kids do in school. It's about friendships and mental health, physical health, and addiction, making the wrong choices. But consider this, my friend.
This truly isn't just about how our kids are navigating their lives. It's also about us. Because we can't actually feel our kids' failure, but we can feel our own.
Our own sense of worry and disappointment if we see our kids struggle. Our own sense of responsibility seeing them in pain. And we want so much to avoid this.
There are so many other ways this fear of failure shows up, so let's talk about a few other examples. Sometimes it comes up in really obvious ways, like when our kid doesn't make the team or bombs a test or gets rejected from a college. And boy, am I feeling this now.
But other times, it's much more subtle. For example, we might notice that our kid doesn't have many friends and we get the sense of discomfort seeing what we perceive as their loneliness, the fun they're missing out on. Or even more, the fun they'll miss out in the future because they don't seem to have the skills to put themselves out there socially.
Notice how we can have this expectation that our kids be connected socially in some very specific ways. And when reality doesn't match this expectation we have in our own minds, it feels like something's gone wrong. In this case, failure looks like what we perceive as our kid's loneliness or isolation.
We could also see our kids putting off getting a job, not going to classes in college, or maybe playing video games for long periods of time, or just locking themselves up in their room, not doing much of anything as far as we can tell. Again, we have in our mind an expectation of what a successful, productive life should look like at this age. It means going to class, wanting to earn your own money, and not wasting time on mindless gaming or scrolling.
And so again, when reality doesn't meet expectations, we see a problem. We might start to judge that our kids are lazy or unmotivated. But it's actually not even just about what's happening right now.
Although it can be frustrating enough when our kids aren't meeting these basic expectations. But notice how we make this behavior mean something about their future success. We feel the weight of the responsibility to make sure they avoid missing out on reaching their full potential.
We have this fear of their future failure. On the other hand, some kids aren't lazy at all. In fact, they work really hard.
But in these cases, maybe we see that they're staying up really late studying or obsessing over their grades. On the one hand, it might sound like a nice problem to have. But seeing your kid feeling anxious and stressed is hard in a different way.
What if they can't handle the stress? What if they work really hard and still don't achieve the success they're hoping for? We worry about the pressure our kid is putting on themselves. Maybe worry that they're looking for validation in the grades rather than knowing they're worthy and enough. We can fear that perfectionism will keep our kids from finding happiness in life.
In this case, failure can look like stress and burnout and disappointment. A lack of self-worth. Of course, grades aren't the place our kids can try to find validation.
Our kids can also seek validation in relationships. Maybe our kids get caught up with a crowd that we don't think is good for them. Or maybe it's a relationship we don't think is good for them.
We see our kids getting serious too fast. Maybe they're changing in ways we don't like. Compromising who they are.
Settling. Maybe risking pregnancy at an early age. This is just one more example of how we can see what's going on with our kids right now and not simply think of it as a right-now concern.
But we project into the future what these relationships or what their behavior is going to mean for them in the future. A few years ago, I remember Googling what is the statistical likelihood of high school sweethearts getting married. I don't actually remember what it said as the statistic.
It was definitely a low number. But it still didn't make me feel any better at the time. My son was in a relationship I didn't want, and there was still a possibility in my mind that it would last into the future.
A chance that this relationship that I thought was so bad for my son in high school would have a lasting impact on his happiness and success in life. In all of these examples, notice how we imagine the long-term consequences of short-term decisions and actions. And before you know it, in our minds, our kids' choices feel really high stakes.
It's not just about right now. It's about what kind of life they're building, and whether they'll end up safe and happy and whole. My friends, our kids can be doing everything right, and we can still find reasons to worry that they don't seem happy.
Maybe they're too quiet, or they don't seem as easygoing or happy as they used to be. Growing up is hard. I think, honestly, even harder these days when you have social media readily at your fingertips to give you ways to judge and compare yourself.
The other day, my son was waitlisted at a school, and within minutes, he knew the probability of getting off the waitlist, and that it was less than 2%. We were blissfully ignorant when we were this age, my friends. You can for sure find Reddit feeds and TikToks with kids sharing their struggles as well.
But more often, our kids are seeing the feeds of the influencers who seem to be making millions posting get-ready-with-me TikToks. The bar for what success is supposed to look like can seem so ridiculously high. How is it actually possible for any one of us to reach it? And in the meantime, even when our kids are just processing the regular stress and uncertainty of life, we worry that they're doing it wrong, that they should be more resilient or move on more quickly.
My friend, here's the thing. All of this, these fears, the projections, the meaning we attach to the way our kids are showing up and their choices, it's not just about them. It's also about us.
Because even if we intellectually know that our kids aren't going to be happy all the time, and of course they're going to be disappointed and make mistakes sometimes, and maybe we even realize that sometimes they're going to fail, we intellectually know all of this, and we know we should give them the space and the freedom to figure things out on their own. Even when we know this, it is still so hard to let them struggle or make a choice we don't think is right. In fact, I think this is one of the hardest things we'll ever do as moms, overcoming our fear of our kids' failure.
It can feel like we're standing on the sidelines of a game that really matters, watching, powerless as our kids make decisions we wouldn't make, facing pain we wish we could prevent. Everything in us wants to step in, to give them advice, and to fix it, to try to prevent the failure, or just to soften the fall. It's not because we're trying to be controlling or overprotective, or even that we don't trust them to figure it out on their own, although this could definitely be a part of it.
But first and foremost, this is hard because we love our kids so much. Their pain truly feels like our pain. So watching them struggle, whether it's with friendships, motivation, decisions, or disappointment, it can honestly feel like a punch in the gut to us.
I've been feeling this way for a few weeks now. Every instinct in my body is telling me to try to protect my son from disappointment, even though in this case in particular, the college process, and maybe this is why it's such a good example, there is clearly nothing I can do to change the outcome of the college decisions. I feel like I'm sitting here waiting for a train to either come pick us up and take us on a fabulous adventure, or maybe just run us over.
I feel completely helpless. And as I've been thinking about this topic and feeling the weight of my powerlessness, I realize when it comes to the fear of failure and my sons, it's truly not just about them. If I'm being really honest with myself, it's about me.
It's about my pain and my discomfort, what I make my boys' struggles and disappointments mean. The story my brain is offering up goes something like this. My first instinct is to wonder whether or not I've done something to let my son down.
Is there something I could have done in the past to support him more? Or some advice I could have given that would make him feel better about the weeks to come? Even though I know I can't change the past, I notice my brain still wants to go there, to make me feel guilty for not being able to predict the future, as if I wasn't doing my absolute best all along. I notice my brain also wants to shame me by wondering how I let the outcome of the college process mean so much to my son, as if I have power over his mindset about the college process. The thing is, I want my son to know how worthy and incredible he is, and that where he goes to school truly doesn't matter.
There probably isn't a day that's gone by when I haven't tried to send him one of these messages about his worthiness. And even though I don't have any control over how he receives my messages, my brain still wants to tell me I do. Ultimately, our brains unconsciously go to that place.
Even if rationally we know we shouldn't think this way, we can't help but have thoughts questioning if we did something wrong, trying to find ways to fix what we wish were different. Although we might not realize it because of this responsibility to protect our kids from failure, we can't help but look at our kids' pain and choices and wonder if it's somehow evidence of our failure as a parent. And even when we get to that place when our kids do fail, we're still taking responsibility because then we feel this driving need to fix it.
We judge how quickly or how well our kids bounce back from disappointment or from failure. It's like, okay, that didn't work out the way you hoped, but you'll be fine. We can fix it.
We can feel this almost desperate need to see signs that they're going to pick themselves up and move on from the disappointment, as if our kids' ability to be resilient is also somehow a reflection of our success as a parent. I think we need to be honest with ourselves about how much we're judging our own success and failure against what our kids do and achieve. And that honesty can feel uncomfortable.
It's one thing to want the best for our kids, but it's another to realize that part of our fear, our anxiety, and even our disappointment comes from the belief that their success or failure reflects something about us. Even if it's simply our ability to feel emotionally at peace and happy. Even if it's simply that we tie our own happiness to our kids being okay.
Because notice how dependent we are then on our kids living up to our expectations, just so we can be okay. This isn't just about the responsibility we feel to support our kids. It's about how much weight we put on our kids' shoulders to make us feel happy and whole.
We can tell ourselves that we don't care who they date, but when it doesn't look like what we hope, we feel the need to give them advice and tell them what type of a relationship they should have. Because if they would just do that thing, meet our expectations of what a happy relationship should look like, well, then we can feel better. We can tell ourselves we don't care about grades, that we just want them to do their best, but we have opinions about what our kids' best should look like.
We have opinions about how much they should engage with friends, the way they should talk to us. When you really look at it, our fear of failure can actually look like our failure to get our kids meet our expectations of them. Oof, that is a lot of honesty right there.
So if we're willing to go there, to really look at the possibility of this truth, what do we do with it? Well, first, we don't shame ourselves. This isn't about us being selfish. We don't need to make ourselves wrong for caring deeply about our kids.
We're wired to care. It's actually a part of what makes us really great moms. So my child, you're welcome.
I care. A lot. But I also think there's a really valuable opportunity here to consciously untangle our identity and well-being from theirs.
Look, we can't help but have expectations for what we think success looks like for our kids. That's everything from where they go to school to how resilient they are when they fail. It's the type of people they should hang out with, the way they spend their money, how they speak to us on the phone.
When you really look at how many expectations you have for your kids, it's really no wonder we find ourselves frustrated or hurt a lot of the time. Because in life, our expectations just don't match reality a lot of the time. But that's not about our kids or life, although we can certainly blame our feelings on all of that.
And look, if we could somehow master the art of helping our kids do exactly what we think they should be doing at all times so that they just lived up to our own vision of what success looks like, well, that would be amazing. But it's also not going to happen. So let me shift briefly to another area where we experience a fear of failure.
And this is in the context of our own lives as moms approaching the empty nest. This is a big, long transition for us too, what I call the empty nest straddle. Our role seems to be constantly and inevitably changing.
And so we're left with a lot more space to contemplate what we're doing, wondering whether we're doing the right thing with our kids, also questioning what comes next for us, maybe even feeling at a loss for what we even want with our own lives as our kids leave home. It's possible that we could be dreaming big dreams where we fear actual failure. But even more, this fear can show up as us thinking we don't know what we want and wondering if we even have what it takes to figure it out.
We could even question if we've somehow missed our chance to do something meaningful with our lives outside of raising kids. When our kids are home, we can tell ourselves we're just too busy to think about it, that we'll focus on ourselves once the kids are launched. But if we're honest with ourselves, sometimes it's just easier to stay focused on our kids rather than face the uncomfortable possibility that we don't know who we are outside of being a mom.
Our fear of failure can show up as us putting off going to work or putting off exploring a passion because there's something in us that wonders if we'll be any good at it. Maybe we tell ourselves that we don't want to pick the wrong thing or waste time, when really what we're worried about is that somehow we'll choose something we end up regretting. I've even heard it in my clients' words as they tell me they regret choices they've made about being a full-time mom and not continuing to work along the way.
Or them telling me that they should have gotten that degree a long time ago, as if they're telling me, I've already failed. I can't take it back. I wasted time, missed opportunities, settled when I shouldn't have.
So my friend, whether it's about our kids or our own lives, this fear of failure shows up everywhere. It's not just a passing thing, it's a thread that weaves through so many of our daily decisions, our emotions, even our own self-concept. It shapes how we show up for our kids, how we relate to other people in our lives, and especially how we talk to ourselves when no one else is listening.
The fear of failure touches our identity, our expectations, our hopes for the future, and our grief over what hasn't turned out in the way we hoped. So with all of that said, is this just another one of those mindset traps? Is the fear of failure being caused by some unproductive thought that's just keeping us stuck in pain? Or is it a reasonable, protective response to a world that is unpredictable and unfair? I believe the answer is a little bit of both. First off, our fear of failure actually makes perfect sense.
We love our kids so deeply. We care about how things turn out for them. We've invested years into nurturing these baby adults and helping them be kind, responsible, productive, and hopefully happy people in the world.
When we're faced with uncertainty about how all of that's going to turn out for them, and even when we're facing the uncertainty of our own lives, fear is a very normal, natural human response. In fact, you could even say it's the response we have without even thinking about it. It's automatic and protective.
The same response we have when we touch a hot stove or get near the edge of a cliff. Our brains automatically sense danger and we're triggered to go into protective mode, maybe even fight or flight. But when we notice this happening, particularly in these areas of our lives with our kids and our own future, where we see these patterns coming up again and again, when we see how our fear of our kids' failure, or more to the point, our own failure, when we see how that leads us to try to control or to force our kids to change to meet our expectations, to make our kids responsible for our emotional well-being, or if that fear causes us to shut ourselves off from opportunities or to delay, to basically stay stuck.
When we see these patterns, it's an opportunity to stop and ask yourself, is this fear actually protecting me, or is it exacting a cost? Is it causing me to limit myself or worse, my kids? Or is it causing me to put responsibility on my kids for my own well-being? While fear might feel like it's keeping us safe, what it often does is keep us stuck. It keeps us in a loop of worry, overthinking, and stuck in self-doubt. It convinces us that the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable, and that we need to control it and fix it or do everything we can to avoid it altogether.
But when we make our sense of peace and success dependent on whether our kids meet our expectations, we lose the chance to truly see and accept our kids exactly as they are, not just what we hope they'd be. So many women have told me that there are parts of their kids' lives that they feel shut off from, because their kids don't want to disappoint them, or they're sick of the nagging and the constant pressure. When we're so focused on our own version of success, we put pressure on the relationship we have with the people we love the most.
And maybe worst of all, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to love unconditionally—not just them, but ourselves. Because if our children’s success is the only thing standing between us and disappointment, then we’re always going to feel like we’re one step away from pain. We have to be constantly vigilant. And that is exhausting, my friend.
The fear itself isn’t the problem—but if we let that fear go unchecked, it becomes the lens through which we view everything. It’s like wearing glasses that only let us see risk and danger and disappointment. But what if we could see failure not as something to avoid at all costs, but simply as part of life. Part of the process of our kids growing up. And us growing into our next chapter as well.
I realize that the fear of failure is actually a kind of emotional reasoning—and this is a trap I explored at the start of this mindset trap series. Emotional reasoning is when we FEEL afraid and therefore we tell ourselves something is definitely wrong. Or if we feel disappointed, that it means we definitely made a bad choice or should have done something to avoid the feeling.
But what if we felt fear and understood nothing has gone wrong.
So how am I dealing with the fear of failure during my son’s senior spring as we wait for college acceptances? Well, I am making an intentional decision to acknowledge my fear and know that nothing has gone wrong.
My son is going to get news from colleges. I have no control over any of these decisions. I also understand that I don’t have any control over my son’s reaction to these decisions. As much as I deeply want him to be ok, I can’t control his thoughts about what happens or how he feels about any of it.
No matter what happens, what I am intentionally deciding to believe is that my son will be ok. As I'm recording this episode, I have absolutely no idea what next week will bring, what kind of news he will be getting. We could be over the moon celebrating or nursing deep disappointment. It’s easy to see the choices as binary. All or nothing.
But what’s interesting to notice here is that there is actually nothing to fear in life but an emotion. And if I can let my son feel. To allow that this is his journey and he is a person with human emotions who gets to feel and nothing has gone wrong when that happens. If I can just let him be in that space, what happens for me is that I let go of my own fear of feeling emotions. Because although I know it’s possible I could feel my own pain seeing my son in pain, I can also know if that happens that nothing has gone wrong. I don’t have to make his pain about me. I don’t have to make it my responsibility to fix. Certainly not something that I could have done anything to prevent.
It’s just life. And instead of making his life and emotions about me, I can just decide that I’m going to be here for him and love him no matter what. Through the joys he experiences in life and through the pain.
And isn’t that what we signed up for, after all? To love our kids no matter what?
So as we walk into the firestorm of college decisions, I am deciding to just love my son. That part isn’t hard.
No matter what happens in life, I am going to be here to love and support my sons. And you know what, when I think about that, I know it’s true. It’s all going to be ok.
Until next my friend.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
