Practices

Try turning 'I will not mess this up today' into 'today I am going to do this well'. You do not have to believe it yet. Said the other way round, it keeps the disaster in front of you all morning.

Notice how many of your goals are stated as things that must not happen. Do not be late, do not lose your temper, do not forget the form. Each one…

Put something small at stake and you turn up more. Groups that charge a token amount get better attendance than free ones, and the same trick works on yourself.

It does not have to be money. Book the class you would have to cancel a day ahead, tell a friend you will meet them there, pay the small deposit. The…

What you expect from a treatment shapes what you get from it. That is worth a conversation before you start, not months later when it has not worked.

If you are beginning something new and half of you thinks it is nonsense, say so. A doubt that stays unspoken tends to come out as a missed…

Nobody tolerates something unpleasant for no reason. Before starting anything difficult, get clear about what you want on the other side of it, in your own words.

Something like: I want to sit an exam without being sick, so I am willing to practise feeling uncomfortable. The sentence has to be yours. A goal…

Do not walk into a hard event and improvise. Ten minutes beforehand, work out what is likely to happen, what you will do about it, and how you get out if you need to.

If someone is coming with you, make it a shared plan. What the signal is when one of you needs air, who says what to whom, when you leave. The point…

When you cannot skip it, shorten it. Come for the meal and skip the drinks afterwards. Two hours of you at your best is worth more to everyone than five hours ending badly.

Decide the leaving time before you arrive and say it out loud on the way in, so that it is a plan rather than a walkout. Booking something afterwards…

Explain the calming corner on a quiet Tuesday, not in the middle of a meltdown. New instructions do not go in once a child is already rising.

Walk them through it when nothing is happening. This is where it is, this is what you can do there, this is how you come back. Let the whole class…

Whatever the correction is, teach it before you need it. A routine the child already knows can be started with two words instead of a negotiation in front of everybody.

Show them the table, the worksheets, what happens when they finish, and let them try it once while nothing is wrong. After that the instruction is…