Courtney Rich of Utah, was running in the Salt Lake City marathon. But as she headed into Mile 24, she began to feel the one thing that she didn’t want to do: collapse. It began creeping up on her and then suddenly overtook her.

“I wanted them to see Mom finish strongly. Those are things I tell my kids as often as I can when things are hard or they’re playing in their own sports. ‘Just do your best and that best is going to be a little different every day,’” she said. But at that moment, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to finish the race. “When I can feel my legs slowing down and I know I’m going to disappoint my kids,” Rich said. “By Mile 24… I looked at my watch and that’s when I called my husband and was in tears,” she said. “I was just having a little pity party for myself for a minute.”

“Next thing I knew, my daughter ran out,” Rich recounted. “I kind of saw her out of the corner of my left eye and I realized it was Avery. I just put a huge smile on my face. I stuck out my hand, she grabbed it and all of a sudden, my legs that were hurting and the heaviness of my body just felt lighter and we just ran to the finish line hand in hand.”

The proud mom said Avery told her that she did what she knew her mom needed at that moment. “That is absolutely Avery’s character. She sees people. She has sympathy. She notices people and is aware of just feelings and needs,” Rich said.

“Don’t ever brush aside the inspiration to do a small act of kindness for someone because you just never know what impact that will have on people,” Rich added.

Life can be so wonderful,full of adventure and joy. It can also be full of challenges, setbacks and heartbreaks. Whatever our circumstances, we generally still have dreams, hopes and desires—that little something more we want for ourselves and our loved ones. Yet knowing we can have more can also create a problem, because when we go to change the way we do things, up come the old patterns and pitfalls that stopped us from seeking what we wanted in the first place.

This tension between what we feel we can have and what we’re seemingly able to have is the niggling suffering, the anxiety we feel. This is where we usually think it’s easier to just give up. But we’re never meant to let go of the part of us that knows we can have more. The intelligence behind that knowing is us—the real us. It’s the part that believes in life and its possibilities. If you drop that,you begin to feel a little “dead”inside because you’re dropping “you”.

So, if we have this capability but somehow life seems to keep us stuck, how do we break these patterns?

Decide on a new course and make one decision at a time. This is good advice for a new adventure or just getting through today’s challenges.

While, deep down, we know we can do it, our mind—or the minds of those close to us—usually says we can’t. That isn’t a reason to stop, it’s just the mind, that little man or woman on your shoulder, trying to talk you out of something again. It has done it many times before. It’s all about starting simple and doing it now.

Decide and act before overthinking. When you do this you may feel a little, or large, release from the jail of your mind and you’ll be on your way.