Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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82 practices

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Once a day, take turns unloading the day's outside stress while the other just listens and supports, not fixes.

Ten minutes each on stress from beyond the relationship. The listener gives empathy, not solutions.

Twenty minutesAnswering bidsGottmanQur’an 5:2One line of research

Getting a child back through the gates is not the same as helping them. Ask what the school day is asking of them that they cannot face yet, and put your effort there.

Attendance is easy to count, which is why plans get built around it. A plan that only presses for attendance leaves the frightening thing exactly…

Twenty minutesThe cost of avoidingCBTQur’an 13:11One line of research

Most of these stories begin with one of four things: a change, a person, an assessment, or a loss. Working out which one tells you what the fear is really about.

A new school, a timetable that split them from their friends, someone who made the corridor unsafe, an exam, a long illness, a death at home, a…

Twenty minutesThe cost of avoidingCBTQur’an 6:59One line of research

Whoever is standing in the hall at half past seven needs to understand the trap as well as the child does. A plan agreed on a Tuesday afternoon will not survive a Wednesday morning otherwise.

In the moment it is happening, a parent is not weighing up what gets learned over a term. They are trying to end the distress in front of them, and…

Twenty minutesThe cost of avoidingCBTQur’an 20:114One line of research

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

What worry does

When you use something to cope

Shame and stigma

Repair after rupture

Posture and how you carry yourself

Answering bids

Your sense of time

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Structure and routine

The moment before you snap

Food, caffeine and fuel

Staff who think a child is playing them will respond in ways that make school worse. A short explanation of how avoidance actually works changes what happens in the corridor.

Explain the pattern rather than the pupil: the relief that follows getting out of something, and the way that relief quietly books the next absence.…

Twenty minutesThe cost of avoidingCBTQur’an 17:36One line of research

Heading towards the shape is the whole job. A perfect triangle is not what the pose is for, and nobody is marking it.

Perfectionism and going too hard tend to travel together, and between them they produce most of the injuries and most of the quitting. If you are…

Twenty minutesBreathingBody basedQur’an 20:26One line of research

Go slowly enough to learn something about yourself, rather than only a technique. What is worth keeping is knowing which breath does what in your body.

One round is rarely enough to tell. Try a breath for a minute or two, stop, and check what shifted: the chest, the shoulders, how loud your thoughts…

Twenty minutesBreathingBody basedQur’an 73:4One line of research

If a young person is using regularly, waiting to see whether they grow out of it is a gamble. Help early is nearly always cheaper than help later.

Families often hold off because raising it feels like an accusation. You can raise it without one: say what you have noticed, say you are not going…

Twenty minutesWhen you use something to copeDBT skillsQur’an 2:195One line of research

Not knowing how to do an ordinary thing, a bank transfer, a form, a phone call to book something, says nothing about your intelligence. It says nobody ever sat down and showed you.

These gaps hide well, because they embarrass people in a way that larger problems somehow do not. Someone can talk fluently about difficult ideas and…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 5:2One line of research

Before asking for something new, find out what has already been agreed. A great many adjustments sit unused on paper because the student was never told, or the teacher was never told.

Get hold of the actual document and read it properly. Extra time, a quiet room, not being made to read aloud, notes given in advance: these are often…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 18:95One line of research

Start with less work than they can manage, not more, and add back slowly. Break the long jobs into pieces small enough that each one can be finished and noticed.

Setting the first week deliberately below capacity feels like giving in. What it actually does is produce a run of finished things, and a child who…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 22:78One line of research

Teach the school's online system properly, once, and then treat it as something known. I do not know how to use it cannot stay true forever.

Sit down together and go through it: where assignments appear, how to see what is due, what to do when it will not load. Until that has happened,…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 27:40One line of research

Sort the room out before you sort the willpower out. One agreed place to work, television off, phone in another room for the duration.

Attention here is pulled by whatever is brightest, and a phone face down on the table still wins. Taking the competition out of the room is far more…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 12:55One line of research

Put the schoolwork early in the day and let the screens come after it. For a teenager early means later than you would like, but the order stays the same.

Effort is a thing that runs down through a day, so the demanding job goes where there is most of it left. Teenagers really do wake up later, and…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 12:47One line of research

A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.

Symptoms that arrive together are worth asking about together. If reading, mood and stomach all went wrong over the same period, that pattern is…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 5:87One line of research

You cannot decide to feel closer to people. You can decide to eat with them, walk with them, sit near them and say one true thing, and the closeness tends to follow.

The chemistry gets talked about a great deal and it is the least useful part. What you can act on is the diary: a standing meal with someone, a hand…

Twenty minutesGrowing empathyMedical and treatmentQur’an 30:21One line of research

Four ordinary things take the edge off a hot temper: being touched by someone you trust, eating with people, moving your body hard enough to breathe, and sitting still for a few minutes a day.

None of them are about anger directly, which is the point. Exercise lowers what you are already carrying before the argument starts. A shared meal…

Twenty minutesGrowing empathyMedical and treatmentQur’an 76:8One line of research

If eating together helps, it is the together that is helping. Being full is not a route to feeling close, and treating it as one goes wrong quickly for some people.

Sit down with somebody once a week and eat whatever you were going to eat anyway. That is the whole practice. If you notice yourself reaching for…

Twenty minutesGrowing empathyMedical and treatmentQur’an 90:14One line of research

A ladder worth climbing has six things: real steps, built with you rather than for you, in your own words, a first rung that is genuinely easy, your hand on the pace throughout, and practice often enough to add up.

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…

Twenty minutesFacing it a step at a timeCBTQur’an 84:19One line of research

Years of avoiding people leave real gaps, not only fear. How to start small talk, how to join a group already talking, how to get out of a conversation. Those can be taught, and being taught them is not an insult.

Sending someone into a peer group without the ordinary moves risks a genuinely bad afternoon, which then teaches exactly the wrong lesson. Practise…

Twenty minutesFacing it a step at a timeCBTQur’an 20:28One line of research