Teenage Anxiety: Overcoming Fear - The Power of 'Yet' | Anxiety Specialist | @caroline-cavanagh

16 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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In this segment, anxiety specialist Caroline Cavanagh addresses teenagers' fear of failure, highlighting how the word "yet" can reframe the limiting belief "I can't do it" into a temporary state. She illustrates the point with relatable examples—learning to walk, ride a bike, and mastering times tables—emphasizing that all skills develop through practice, mistakes, and perseverance. By encouraging teens to view current inability as a stage that will change with effort, she promotes a growth‑mindset approach to reduce anxiety and build confidence.

Chapters

I know I've got lots of favourites, but this really is the favourite one. Because a lot of teenagers won't do things because of that fear of failure. So all you'll get is, I can't do it. I want you to give them one word that's got no more than 3 letters in it. And that word is— Ah! Yes. So I say to my children when they say, I can't do it, it's, yeah, but you couldn't walk once upon a time. You can now. You couldn't ride a bike once upon a time. You can now. You couldn't do your times table, but you can now. This is just another thing that you can't do at the moment, but in a period to come, you will do. And you've developed all of those skills because you practiced and you probably got it wrong. By getting it wrong, you learned to do it differently.