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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1570 practices

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Nobody sees the times you did not say the cutting thing, including you a week later. Put them somewhere you can look at: one sticky note on the wall for each.

Memory is unfair about this. The single evening you lost your temper stays vivid while thirty quiet successes disappear, and then it feels as though…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 53:40One line of research

If you held back at four o'clock and then snapped at seven, the holding back still happened. A later slip does not reach backwards and cancel it.

All or nothing scoring is the quickest route from one lapse to giving the whole thing up: I lost it, so none of it was working, so why bother. Count…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 18:24One line of research

If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.

A lot of people turn the practice down before trying it, because the label sounds like it belongs to somebody else's religion or somebody else's sort…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 29:69One line of research

If a practice looks pointless, you will have dropped it by Thursday. Before you take on anything new, get clear on what it is meant to be building in you.

Ask for the mechanism in one plain sentence: this repeated thing grows that capacity. Write it somewhere you will actually see it. When the practice…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 53:39One line of research

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

Breaking the worry loop

Remembering to do it

What you are actually defending

Facing it a step at a time

Making it stick

When you use something to cope

Tolerate distress

Choosing your response

Growing empathy

When everything feels flat

When anger turns to harm

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Self-compassion

Shame

Anger, alcohol and the body

Emotions as signals

Use your strengths

Getting assessed and diagnosed

Practising under provocation

Being seen and judged

Obsessions and compulsions

Letting it out safely

Touch and bodywork

Feeling from the inside

Rest and pacing

Question the thought

Help someone grieving

Living with uncertainty

Your brain is expensive to run and it spends where it is used. What you stop practising gets quietly defunded.

This is the honest reason to keep a skill going after it has started working. The month you feel calm is exactly the month the practice looks…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 35:29One line of research

Rehearsing a calmer response is not thinking about change, it is the change. Each repetition makes that route slightly quicker to reach for.

Which is why tiny reps are worth doing at all. A single rehearsal on an ordinary Tuesday does not feel like anything, and that is fine, because the…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 99:7One line of research

The old angry route does not get deleted. What you are building is a rival route beside it, and at the start the new one is small.

Expect the old path to show up when you are tired, ill or caught off guard, because it is still there and it is well worn. That is not proof the work…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 11:115One line of research

There is an old story about two wolves fighting inside a person, and the winner turns out to be whichever one gets fed. It is only a story, but the arithmetic in it is right.

Feeding here means whatever you actually rehearse: the conversation you replay at two in the morning, the reply you draft and delete, the grudge you…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 2:148One line of research

Resolving harder is not a plan. What protects you in a hot moment is a skill you have already practised and a situation you have set up in your favour.

Willpower is at its thinnest exactly when you need it most: late, tired, hungry, already provoked. So do the work earlier, where it is cheap. Decide…

Five minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 3:200One line of research

This goes the way learning a bicycle went. You could not, then you could but only with all of your attention, then one day you rode without thinking about it. The middle bit is the ugly bit.

In that middle phase the skill works but it costs you everything to use, and it looks clumsy from the outside. That is where most people decide it is…

Five minutesMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 84:19One line of research

When you offer a practice to someone, use their words for it rather than yours. Keep the fuller version ready for the day they ask where it comes from.

A plain, unmystical version suits most people and costs them nothing to accept. Anyone who gets curious can have all of it, and they will take more…

Five minutesMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 5:48One line of research

Knowing something calmly and feeling it are two separate achievements, and the second takes longer. If you can say the reasonable thing but it does not touch how you feel, you are partway, not failing.

The gap does not close by arguing with yourself harder. It closes by living it: doing the practice in real situations, in your body, while the…

Twenty minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 87:8One line of research

When something is genuinely alive for the person in front of you, work with that. Whatever you had planned to cover keeps until a quieter week.

Teaching over the top of live feeling does not land, and it tells the other person that your agenda outranks their week. When there is heat, follow…

Twenty minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 18:23One line of research

It does get better, but not by waiting for time to pass. The improvement comes from the walking, and the walking is small and unremarkable.

Every rep you did today changes almost nothing you can feel, which is the honest and irritating truth of it. Progress here shows up over months and…

LongerMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 92:7One line of research

You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.

A child who drifts off topic, answers a slightly different question, or needs things said twice may not be avoiding you or daydreaming. The words may…

A minuteReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 20:28One line of research

Behaviour is usually the visible end of a skill that has not been built. What you are watching in a classroom is the shape of the difficulty rather than the shape of the child.

It is a single sentence you can say in a meeting, and it tends to move the conversation away from what to do about the behaviour towards what the…

A minuteReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 17:84One line of research

Most children do not pick up reading by sitting near books. Around a fifth need very structured, repetitive teaching before it clicks, and about half of the rest still need a good deal of deliberate instruction, so structured teaching is the ordinary case rather than a special measure.

It helps to stop asking who qualifies for help and start asking how much teaching each child needs. A child left to fail badly enough to earn support…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 96:5One line of research

When reading results lift across a whole state after every teacher is retrained, the lesson is uncomfortable and hopeful at once. A good part of what looks like children failing is teaching that has not caught up yet.

One state moved from flat to clearly improved reading in years when many others slipped, and what changed was not the children but how teachers were…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 22:78One line of research

Speech arrives on its own if a child is spoken to. Reading, writing and arithmetic do not, and it is no failing that they have to be taught piece by piece.

Children absorb talk from the people around them without lessons. Print is a much later invention and the brain has no ready made place for it, so it…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 96:4One line of research

When a child keeps failing at a task, try reducing what it demands of attention and memory before you increase the practice. Shorter steps, one instruction at a time, the working written down where they can see it.

Attention, holding things in mind and switching between steps all set a ceiling on how much of a lesson gets through. You cannot easily raise that…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:286One line of research