Most ladders come apart for dull reasons. The bottom rung was somebody else's idea of easy. The wording came out of a manual. Nobody said you were allowed to stop. Or the practice was so spread out that every attempt started from cold. If you are drawing one up, check it against those six before you climb anything.

There is an order that works. Say what the problem actually is, in one sentence. List some options without weighing them yet. Then go through what is good and bad about each, pick one, try it, and look at what happened. The listing has to come before the judging, or the second option never gets said out loud at all.

Sending someone into a peer group without the ordinary moves risks a genuinely bad afternoon, which then teaches exactly the wrong lesson. Practise the mechanics first. An opening line, something to do with your hands, a way out. Then the exposure is testing a fear rather than testing a skill nobody ever gave them.

One child dreads the bus and is fine once inside the building. Another would happily ride the bus all morning and cannot get through the front door. A borrowed hierarchy gets this backwards. Rating each step yourself also leaves you something to compare against later, which is how you notice that the thing that was an eight has quietly become a four.

Each round adds a little pressure while help is still to hand. Imagining it stirs the fear enough to show whether your plan holds up. Acting it out puts the words in your mouth, so your body has been through it once already. Both of them turn up the flaws cheaply, which is a great deal better than finding them in the corridor.