What happens when the plan is too big, the practice doesn’t make you feel better, or life changes the body you made that plan for? This week’s picks are about those very ordinary moments. Christine Carter makes a case for habits small enough to survive a difficult Tuesday. Elaine Smookler writes about going onstage frightened despite years of mindfulness practice. And Li-elle Rapaport explores how to find meaning when your body no longer lets you live exactly as you once did. All three give us something useful to try or think about.
How to Build a Habit by Starting Ridiculously Small
Greater Good Magazine · Christine Carter · September 23, 2026
Christine Carter has run a marathon. She has also spent years making elaborate plans to run regularly and then watching them collapse. In this piece, she describes a new plan that sounds almost comically modest: get dressed, take the dogs outside, and walk to the mailbox. Running farther is welcome, but it isn’t the requirement.
The story works because many people recognize the cycle. We make a plan for our most motivated day, then ask our tired, busy self to carry it out. Carter draws on habit research to explain why repeating a small action in a familiar setting can do more than occasional bursts of effort. She also points out that a tiny action can have value in its own right. A short walk still gets you outside.
For coaches and teachers, this is a useful test of the commitments we help people make. “Meditate every morning” can sound manageable in a session and become one more thing to fail at by Wednesday. A version that takes less than a minute might actually happen. From there, the person has something real to build on.
Try this: Take one practice you keep postponing. Write down its smallest complete version, then decide when and where you will do it tomorrow.
Read the original: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_build_a_habit_by_starting_ridiculously_small
Failing on All Fronts
Mindful · Elaine Smookler · September 21, 2026
Elaine Smookler, a psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher, finally gets a chance to try stand-up comedy. Instead of arriving calm and composed, she is terrified. Her years of practice have made her aware of the fear, but they have not removed it. It is a funny and unusually honest starting point for an article about what mindfulness can offer when life refuses to cooperate.
Smookler describes turning toward the sensations of sitting and breathing, noticing the anxious thoughts that arrive, and going onstage anyway. Her account will sound familiar to anyone who has wondered why they still feel nervous after all that personal work. It also offers teachers a reminder about the expectations they set. If a student believes practice should make fear disappear, noticing fear may feel like failure. In Smookler’s story, that awareness helps her stay present long enough to do the thing she cares about.
We picked this one for the lived example. It gives a workshop leader or coach a far more human way to talk about practice than a promise of permanent calm.
Try this: Before your next difficult conversation, notice what fear is doing in your body. Then choose the next action that matters, even if the fear comes along.
Read the original: https://www.mindful.org/failing-on-all-fronts-why-practice-mindfulness/
How to Deal With the Grief of an Aging Body
Greater Good Magazine · Li-elle Rapaport · September 18, 2026
Personal growth is often described as adding something: a new habit, a stronger mindset, a better routine. Li-elle Rapaport writes about a harder kind of change, when aging, pain, or illness takes away something that used to feel central to who you are. The loss may be the activity itself, but it can also be the future you expected to have.
Rapaport draws on psychology to describe grief that has no neat endpoint. Her example of someone who loves hiking but can no longer do it in the same way makes the point concrete: the love of nature may still have a place in life, even if the old route does not. That possibility does not require pretending the loss is small.
This is valuable reading for professionals who work with people in transition. A client’s trouble “sticking to the plan” may sometimes be grief for a body or life that made the old plan possible. Listening for that loss can open a more helpful conversation about what the person still values and how they might live it now. The article was republished by Greater Good from The Conversation.
Try this: If a change has closed off a familiar activity, ask what that activity gave you. Is there another way to make room for some of that experience?
Read the original: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_deal_with_the_grief_of_an_aging_body
