Search results for ""Author The School of Life""

Most questionnaires are just a bit of fun, but this one sets out to be both entertaining and useful. It offers us nothing less than a guide to the comforting and supportive relationships we long for. With online apps taking over the dating game, it has never been more crucial to know the rules. Through a series of pertinent questions, it reveals our distinctive style of loving, what our strengths and weaknesses are with partners, and how we might secure genuine fulfilment. As we work through the questionnaire and its accompanying essays, we discover the many reasons why relationships go wrong, and how they might do so less often in the future. The book considers the role of self-hatred, the influence of childhood, the importance of vulnerability, the appeal of unavailable people, and the best ways to overcome patterns of self-doubt and unhealthy attachment. Our minds are such confusing places, even the most thoughtful among us can fail to know central things about how we behave in relationships. This questionnaire will help us to understand ourselves more clearly and so set us free to discover the love we deserve.

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Emotions are like animals: No two are quite the same. Some are quiet; some are fierce; And all are hard to tame. An Emotional Menagerie is an emotional glossary for children. A book of 26 rhyming poems, arranged alphabetically, that bring our feelings to life – Anger, Boredom, Curiosity, Dreaminess, Embarrassment, Fear, Guilt, and more. The poems transform each emotion into a different animal to provide a clear and engaging illustration of its character: how it arises; how it makes us behave and how we can learn to manage its effects. Boasting a rich vocabulary, the poems also give children a wide variety of options for describing their feelings to others. Children experience all sorts of emotions: sometimes going through several very different ones before breakfast. Yet they can struggle to put these feelings into words. An inability to understand and communicate their moods can lead to bad behaviour, deep frustration and a whole host of difficulties further down the line. Like adults, they need help to recognise and verbalise their inner state. The greater their emotional vocabulary, the more likely they are to grow into happy, healthy and fulfilled adults. Filled with wise, therapeutic advice, brought to life through musical language and beautiful illustrations, An Emotional Menagerie is an imaginative and universally appealing way of increasing emotional literacy.

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A 15th anniversary collection of The School of Life’s most popular and essential essays on self-knowledge, relationships, work and culture. The School of Life is an organisation with a focused mission at its heart: to help foster calm, self-understanding and greater emotional maturity. In celebration of The School of Life’s 15th anniversary, we have gathered together ten of our landmark essays on key topics in a collectible edition. Among these, we find: Self-Knowledge, On Confidence, What is Psychotherapy?, How to Find Love, The Sorrows of Love, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, Why We Hate Cheap Things, How to Reform Capitalism, The Sorrows of Work and What is Culture For? In elegant and always clear prose, the essays take us on a tour around the central topics of emotional life, leaving us enlightened, calmer and readier to greet our inevitable challenges. With a new introduction from The School of Life, this book amounts to nothing less than a concise compendium of some of the wisest things we’ll ever need to know.

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Exploring ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less. The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful and focused on the essentials. But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions – and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming. This book is a guide to the simpler lives we crave and deserve. It considers how we might achieve simplicity across a range of areas: our relationships, social lives, work routines and our approaches to possessions and media. Along the way, we learn about Zen Buddhism, modernist architecture, monasteries, psychoanalysis, and why we probably don’t need more than three good friends or a few treasured belongings. It isn’t enough that our lives should look simple; they need to be simple from the inside. This book takes a psychological approach, guiding us towards less contorted hearts and minds. It suggests that once we truly know who we are and what we want, we will be able to live with far less than we currently believe we need. We have for too long been drowning in excess and clutter from a confusion about our aspirations; A Simpler Life helps us tune out the static and focus on what properly matters to us.

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We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages. But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one’s psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame? The School of Life is an organisation dedicated to teaching a range of emotional lessons that we need in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives – and that schools routinely forget to teach us. This book is a collection of our most essential lessons, delivered with directness and humanity, covering topics from love to career, childhood trauma to loneliness. To read the book is to be invited to lead kinder, richer and more authentic lives – and to complete an education we began but still badly need to finish. This is homework to help us make the most of the rest of our lives.

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A guide to our anxious minds; offering a route to calm, self-compassion and mental well-being. Far more than we tend to realise, we’re all – in private – deeply anxious. There is so much that worries us across our days and nights: whether our hopes will come true, whether others will like us, whether the people we care about will be OK, whether we can escape humiliation and grief... Anxiety is deeply normal and, like so much else that troubles our minds, it can be understood and brought under our control. We all deserve to wake up every day without a sense of foreboding. This is a guide to anxiety: why we feel it, how we experience it when it strikes and what we can do when we come under its influence. Across a series of essays that look at the subject from a number of angles, the tone is helpful, compassionate and in the best sense practical. We have suffered for too long under the rule of anxiety. Here – at last – is a pathway to a calmer, more compassionate and more light-hearted future.

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Modern life is full of minor but acute dilemmas: we get stuck at a gathering with someone unusually boring and wonder how to move on without causing offence; in the course of introducing one friend to another, we realise that we have forgotten one of the party’s names; we run into an ex while on an early date with a new partner; we spill red wine across a host’s sofa... Such dilemmas might – at one level – seem desperately insignificant. But they actually belong to some of the largest and most serious themes in social existence: how can you pursue our own agenda for happiness while at the same time honouring the sensitivities and wishes of others; how can you convey goodwill with sincerity; how can you be kind without being supine or sentimental? These dilemmas were once covered by books on etiquette or manners. The modern age often doesn’t seem to value manners, equating them with an old fashioned stuffiness, instead we are advised to communicate our feelings and tell it the way it really is. But the result, in practice, is that we are often confused as to how to act around others and discharge our obligations to them. This book puts good manners back at the centre our lives. It features twenty case-studies on common social dilemmas and our possible responses to them, contributing to a new and original philosophy of graceful conduct. Manners are far from negligible fancies; they stand at the day-to-day end of a hugely grand and dignified mission which The School of Life is committed to: the creation of a kinder and more considerate world.

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Stress and mental ill health currently costs the UK economy upwards of £30 billion a year. Modern businesses continue to place huge emphasis on technical training, yet a lot of what determines the success or failure of organisations has nothing to do with the sort of hard skills taught at business school; instead, it comes down to the degree of emotional intelligence circulating in the workplace. This is a book that introduces us to twenty core emotional skills that can help businesses to flourish. They range from giving honest feedback, to accepting that it’s OK to fail, to addressing jealousies and insecurities within teams. We learn about how our childhoods continue to have an often unhelpful impact on how we deal with colleagues, and the best ways we might speak so that others will listen. The book is informed by the practical work that the Learning and Development division of The School of Life carries out, endeavouring to change the culture within organisations around the world through teaching teams the art of emotional intelligence. From the Learning and Development mission statement: ‘We believe that emotional maturity is the key to better employee performance and engagement.’ Testimony from L&D client the Guardian: ‘TSOL has brought a creative energy and an open, practical space to our wellbeing curriculum.’

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Many of us are attracted to the idea of marriage and yet feel a bit uncomfortable with some of the rituals that are traditionally associated with the big day. Perhaps the old ceremonies place too much emphasis on the supernatural or else seem out of step with some of the complex realities of contemporary relationships. In response to this dilemma, the School of Life has rethought exactly what the ideal wedding day would consist of and redesigned the entire process from scratch for the use of modern couples. The book begins by proposing new ways of getting prepared for a wedding at a psychological level, suggesting how couples should ready themselves for the often tricky journey ahead and how to think through some of the thorniest issues that beset love. The book then presents an entirely practical and thoughtfully redesigned wedding ceremony, from picking out a suitable venue to suggested vows and readings. Finally, the book offers some ideas for how to approach the start of married life. What follows is a bold rethinking of one of humankind's most important and popular rituals.

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It is a daily undertaking – a morning shot of coffee, an absentminded sandwich at your desk, a hastily assembled dinner with the remnants from the fridge... With its every day ubiquity we can make the mistake of assuming that food is of little importance, or simply fuel to see us through the day. But what is its real impact on our emotional lives, and how can we better nourish ourselves? What we eat and how we eat it has a significant impact on our psychological well-being. In recent times, our society has been eager to recruit food to the project of physical health, but we’ve not always paid so much attention to how cooking and eating can assist us with our emotional health. With over 150 recipes, Thinking & Eating shows how ingredients and dishes can be supporters of certain ideas, emotions and states of mind that best help us confront the challenges of existence. In each recipe we discover of the ways in which food can store, memorialise and transmit the most important ideas of our lives.

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Often, when we need to mark where we’ve got to in a book, we bend back the page or reach for an old receipt, but there’s a particular pleasure in having a robust and elegant bookmark to hand. Here are twenty bookmarks, unusually assembled into a small pull-out ‘book’ that simultaneously offers, across its surfaces, an essay on the business of reading: why we do it, what the best books do for us, and how literature might change our lives. This book of bookmarks prompts small, artful occasions when, at the start or end of a reading session, we can pause to consider the power of books and their vital place in our lives. Excerpts Include: “The moment we cry in a book is often not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected. We cry about our hopes” “One kind of good book leaves us asking: how did the author know that about me? By looking particularly deeply into their own secrets, authors simultaneously guess everyone else’s” “The best books put their finger on emotions that we recognise as deeply our own, but could never have formulated on our own.” “Books are like people; we meet many but fall in love very seldom. Perhaps only ten books will ever truly mark us. We shouldn’t feel ashamed of abandoning the ones that don’t work for us”

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Good work involves feeling engaged and motivated by what we’re doing – and battling inertia and weariness with courage and imagination. Fortunately, motivation is not a gift from the gods; it is a quality we can nurture in ourselves and encourage in others. ‘Motivation’ is a tool for increasing our effectiveness; 52 exercises designed to train our brains to find their bearings and generate their very best efforts. Our minds are not machines, and are prone to distractions, indecision and cognitive biases – but these can also be worked around and overcome. Each exercise prompts us to engage in activities and thought experiments that help us to surmount mental blocks and formulate strategies for solving problems and achieving our goals. At once a collection of psychological solutions and calls to action, this is an invaluable resource for unlocking our true potential.

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An insightful and illuminating guide on understanding the psychological legacy left to us by our parents.

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We accept without shame that most organs in our bodies might at some point develop problems – and could need a bit of help. We should not make an exception of our minds. Our lives are so complicated and so filled with burdens, we should be completely unsurprised if, at some point, we felt a need to pull up a white flag and ask for help with our minds. This is a guide to how to cope with a variety of forms of mental pain and unwellness, from the very mild to the more severe. It explains to us how and why we might become ill, how we can explain things to friends and family, how we should take care of ourselves – and how we might adjust our view of ourselves and our future so as to live wisely alongside our difficulties. Throughout the tone is humane, encouraging and rich with experience. A central idea is that there is no need for any of us to suffer alone with our condition and that the best way to mend is to reduce shame, accept our troubles as very normal – and seek out understanding and friendship. It’s by exploring and discussing what has happened to us that we can heal and reduce our sense of isolation. Written with kindness, knowledge and sympathy, and drawing upon the experience and knowledge of The School of Life therapists, this book is an essential tool to help us on the way to our recovery.

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The modern world is richer, safer and more connected than ever before but it is – arguably – also a far less loving world than we need or want: impatience, self-righteousness, moralism and viciousness are rife, while forgiveness, tolerance and sympathetic good humour can be in short supply. This is a book that rallies us to remember how much we all long for, and depend on love: how much we need people to forgive us for our errors, how much everyone deserves to be treated with consideration and imagination and how being truly civilised means extending patience and kindness to all those we have to deal with, even, and especially, those who don’t naturally appeal to us. With the right encouragement, all of us are capable of immense kindness. But without it, we can also quickly descend into something far darker. This book reminds us of our better natures and mobilises us to fight for the kinder, more loving world we essentially long for at heart. Throughout, it frames love not as a romantic, idealistic fantasy, but as a hugely serious and dignified force that can save us from meanness and strife, defend us against chaos – and usher in hope and courage.

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We are so used to living in a media-saturated world that we do not notice just how much damage is being done to us daily by the images we see and the articles and posts we read. If you are often anxious or find it hard to sleep, or you regularly want to give up on your fellow human beings, the reason may come down to the relentless influence of the modern media. How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds is a guide for navigating the media today. The book encourages the reader to consider the many peculiarities of the modern media: its excessive focus on scandal, its emphasis on novelty, its capacity to breed envy and self-hatred, its high-minded defence of itself, its ever shorter attention span and its obsession with fame. The book teaches us how to liberate ourselves from the media, in order to achieve calm and a more generous, original and imaginative state of mind. We are shown how to redress the balance and emerge with a stronger, more positive outlook on life.

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One of the things we all deeply crave, and all richly deserve, is a more exciting life. We know well enough that many things have to be routine, hard and a little bit boring. But we also rightly sense that, if only we can find a way, our lives could be rendered intermittently more joyful, intense, thrilling and beautiful. This is a guide to the more exciting life we know could be ours. It isn’t about the outward things we might do: travel, parachute out of airplanes or learn a foreign language. This is a book of psychology and about how we can nurture a sense of inner liberation, accept our desires and aspirations and then have the courage to set ourselves free. Perhaps for too long we have resigned ourselves to things that aren’t fair or necessary, we have felt too constricted (and perhaps unloved) to communicate well with others and the proper expansion of our characters has been sacrificed for the sake of compliance. Now is a chance to recover some of our spirit, and to become open to the full intensity, beauty and mystery of life and to the richness of our own possibilities. Here is a guide to that more exciting life we know should – and can – be ours.

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52 cards designed to help find new ways of thinking about journaling.

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The idea of family lies close to the meaning of life, but in practice, families do not always come together, or chat about what matters, or laugh as much or as often as they should. Everyone gets too busy, or it can feel hard to get into certain topics – and without anyone meaning to, occasions keep slipping by. The Family Game is the solution; this is a game expressly designed to help family gatherings live up to our highest hopes. It consists of a host of questions (chosen randomly with a dice) that kick-start the best sorts of conversations: ones in which we reconnect, say things we always meant to, laugh warmly together – and remember why family counts. The cards cover 5 categories: Gentle Teasing - What would the movie of your family be called? Gratitude - To whom have you been a bit too moody? Self - How would you like to evolve? Memories - What was your favourite time of day when you were little? Regrets - If you could be forgiven for something, what would it be?

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Our society typically devotes huge attention to the start of a marriage – and particularly to the actual wedding ceremony. But the real challenge lies beyond the wedding, with the long years ahead – and here we are too often left on our own. This box is The School of Life’s guide to the rest of a life together, containing twenty beautiful cards which lay out the central ideas on how to make a relationship work over the decades beyond the wedding day. It is filled with artful suggestions on coping with what even the most loving couple will face as they build a life together. This set of cards is both a celebration of marriage and a rich source of insights into the skills it demands. Quotes From The Cards: In Praise of Compromise: ‘Couples who compromise are not the enemies of love: they may be at the vanguard of understanding what lasting relationships truly demand and what they are for. They deserve admiration, not condemnation.’ On Sex and Marriage: ‘The waning of sex is – far more than we collectively admit – a sign that a marriage is stabilising, not failing. If we more publicly admitted this, we’d be less panicked, less ashamed and a little less resentful when the sex got less intense and less frequent.

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We often overestimate how fragile we are. In our nightmares, we assume that life would become impossible for us far earlier than it actually would. In reality, we could manage perfectly well with a lot less than we currently have. Not that we should want this to happen, of course: it’s simply that we could bear it. We forget our resilience in the face of risk and become unnecessarily timid. Our lives become dominated by a fear of losing things that we could in fact do without. This set of cards is designed to gently remind us that we are far stronger than we imagine. Examples 3 a.m. alone in bed is perhaps not the optimal moment at which to derive a true picture of reality. Wait – always – for the perspective of dawn. Things don’t need to be perfect; we are creatures eminently suited to ‘good enough’. It sounds heartless to say: ‘you’ll get over it’. But you will. The brain is designed to exaggerate troubles. We suffer more in our thoughts than in reality.

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We are experts at focusing on what is missing from our lives. Our dissatisfaction often serves us well; it keeps us from complacency and boredom. But we are also dragged down by a pernicious inability to stop, take stock and recognise what isn’t imperfect and appalling. In our haste to secure the future, we omit to notice what is already very good. This pack of cards is designed to help us pause in our striving and, for a few moments, take on board some of what we have to be grateful for - a consoling, inspiring corrective to the lessons in cynicism and sourness that the world teaches every day. Example Cards: There were no outright catastrophes today. Others forget the stupid things we’ve done faster than we do. We can reinvent ourselves – a bit. Other people are usually shyer, sweeter and kinder than we’d anticipated We have managed to learn a few things down the years We don’t have to take ourselves seriously Many of the people we love are still alive. We could disappear for a bit. Many of the world’s most interesting people have written down their thoughts.

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Whatever our job title, our work will always benefit from new ideas and fresh ways of thinking. We’re used to regarding inspiration as something that arrives more or less at random; it is in fact a skill that we can learn to develop in ourselves and call on whenever we need it. Inspiration is a toolkit for generating new ideas: 52 exercises designed to foster an inventive frame of mind. With this to hand, we have no more need to wait for inspiration to strike; we can kindle it and deploy it as we require it. Each exercise prompts us to work on a particular creative muscle and helps us to establish the psychological conditions for original work. Drawing insights from the worlds of art, music, psychotherapy and innovation, this is an invaluable resource for creatives and professionals alike, helping our minds to become more reliable lightning rods for our numerous flashes of inspiration. Examples Sensory Deprivation Removing distractions and external stimuli can allow our mind to wander more freely. That’s why ideas tend to come to us in the shower, or just before we fall asleep. Sensory deprivation tanks are an extreme (and expensive) way of quieting the outside world. Create your own makeshift sensory deprivation tank. Find a spare office or free room and close the door. Turn out the lights, close the shutters or blinds, and switch off any electrical appliances. If it’s still noisy, use ear plugs or play white noise through some headphones. Stay in there for at least 10 minutes, or as long as you like. Use the time and space to think about your project – or try to think about nothing at all, and allow your mind to drift. Paint Like a Child Pablo Picasso spent his career developing his painting in an increasingly abstract direction. Near the end of his life, he remarked that although he was a technically accomplished painter at fifteen, ‘it look me a lifetime to paint like a child.’ Try to recall the person you were at five years old. How might you look at your work differently? What might strike you as humdrum, and what as exciting? What rules might you be prepared to break to honour the fiveyear-old you? company biography

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Meeting up with our friends is one of life’s great pleasures. We look forward to a chance to connect, share news and reaffirm our affection and sense of fun. But having a great time together, even with people we know well, is not necessarily as simple as it sounds. We don’t always manage to hit the right sort of topics of conversation and get to say the truly important things. This is a pack of cards with questions on them that guarantee that our encounters will be properly joyful and interesting. The questions take us through how conversation should ideally flow, from the more everyday topics to what is sincere, deep and tender. The cards take us on a perfect journey across a meal or a drink, from catching up to reconfirming why we matter to one another.

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40 images designed to lead you on a journey towards inward exploration of the self.

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Great dates are made up of great conversations: ones where we find out more about one another, discover what makes us both tick, share some of what we like and reveal how we see the world. This is a collection of cards that can be used out on a date to help provoke the best kinds of discussion. This pack includes 52 cards, each one posing an intriguing question or setting a challenge, designed to provoke, entertain and stimulate. As a bonus, the cards are graded according to how probing they are (Easy, Medium and Hard), so that you can playfully match the discussion with the flow of an evening. Example Questions: How might you entertain a five-year-old child that a friend left you with for an hour or two? Sketch the course of three previous relationships you’ve had. Without thinking too much, complete the sentence: ‘The problem with most of the people I’ve been on a date with is...’ Who would you like to go back and apologise to - and for what? Describe your first kiss? What are the main points you would like to be covered in a speech at your funeral?

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The effectiveness of any organisation or business comes down to how skilled everyone is at collaborating: how well we’re able to explain ourselves, listen to others and approach challenges in a spirit of good will and pragmatism. Luckily, we don’t have to be born with collaborative skills; they can be taught, mastered and regularly rehearsed. With the right tools to hand, we can harmonise diverse backgrounds and thinking styles and end up working fruitfully with people of very different personalities. Collaboration is a tool for helping people work together better: 52 exercises designed to build empathy, insight and trust between colleagues. Intended to transform the atmosphere in teams, it prompts people to participate in a range of tasks and thinking exercises that strengthen their ability to cooperate and lend them insight into how others’ minds work. In a playful and often entertaining way, this toolkit aims to achieve something critical: the creation of a team that can work seamlessly and imaginatively together. Examples Strength Appraisal Everyone should write down what they see as the key strength of every other member of the team (for example, that they’re empathetic, organised or tenacious). Then, going around the room, every team member should have their perceived strengths read out to them. Look out for any common themes that emerge and think about how the wider team’s perceptions might differ from your own. Unscrewing Screw-Ups Take it in turns to share the biggest mistake you’ve made at work – for example, deleting the file for an important presentation, placing an expensive order for the wrong type of printer ink, or forgetting the name of a major client during a meeting. Let the team suggest what lessons might be learned from the screw-up, and how the experience might have been beneficial in the long run.

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Explores and appreciates the small pleasures found in everyday life. So often we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures, while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which if only we paid more attention could bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. This is a book to guide us to the best of life’s small pleasures: the distinctive delight of holding a child’s hand, having a warm bath or the joy of the evening sky. It is an intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures to heighten the senses and return us to the world with new-found excitement and enthusiasm. Small pleasures are points of access to the great themes of our lives. Every chapter puts one such moment of enjoyment under a magnifying glass to find out what’s really going on and why it touches, moves and makes us smile.

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A guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing. The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine and transport. But it can also feel as though modern times have plunged us ever deeper into greed, despair and agitation. Seldom has the world felt more privileged and resource-rich yet also worried, blinkered, furious, panicked and self-absorbed. How to Survive the Modern World is the ultimate guide to navigating our unusual times. It identifies a range of themes that present acute challenges to our mental wellbeing. The book tackles our relationship to the news media, our ideas of love and sex, our assumptions about money and our careers, our attitudes to animals and the natural world, our admiration for science and technology, our belief in individualism and secularism – and our suspicion of quiet and solitude. In all cases, the book helps us to understand how we got to where we are, digging deeply and fascinatingly into the history of ideas, while pointing us towards a saner individual and collective future. The emphasis isn’t just on understanding modern times but also on knowing how we can best relate to the difficulties these present. The book helps us to form a calmer, more authentic, more resilient and sometimes more light-hearted relationship to the follies and obsessions of our age. If modern times are (in part) something of a disease, this is both the diagnostic and the soothing, hope-filled cure.

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The modern world can present the body as a machine that just needs to be regularly exercised. However, it is a remarkably sensitive organ in which a lot of our pain and hope is stored and that we need to interpret and handle with subtlety. This impact of our body upon our mind is something which needs to be explored as it is easy to pay attention to one more than the other and to to ignore the crucial balance between the two. This is a book filled with reflections and exercises designed to help us live more harmoniously and maturely within both mind and body. It gives guidance on how to calm our minds with bodily exercises that work on the real sources of our anxieties. It suggests how to be less rigid in, and timid about, our bodies and how to relax into them in a way we might not have done for far too long. It offers ideas on how to accept the way we look, and how to treat the body in order for it to assist the mind in yielding its very best ideas. The impacts of activities such as singing, dancing and art are explored along with the liberation of spirit that these might offer. This is a book, both theoretical and practical, that will improve our relationship between our physical and mental selves and allow us a route to a life of greater self-assurance, wisdom and freedom to be ourselves.

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Therapeutic exercises to help couples nurture patience, forgiveness and humour. Here is a workbook containing the very best exercises that any couple can undertake to help their relationship function optimally; exercises to foster understanding, patience, forgiveness, humour and resilience in the face of the many hurdles that invariably arise when you try to live with someone else for the long term. Couples are guided to have particular conversations, analyse their feelings, explain parts of themselves to one another and undertake rituals that clear the air and help recover hope and passion. The goal is always to unblock channels of feeling and improve communication. Not least, doing exercises together is – at points – simply a lot of fun.

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A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking. We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a very brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also tantalisingly unpredictable, spending worryingly large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimise these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfil our potential – and achieve the contentment we deserve. We learn – among other things – how to grasp fragile and flighty thoughts before they disappear through anxiety and fear, at what times of day to try to work and for how long, how to make use of our boredom and instincts – and how to overcome timid and predictable approaches to the largest problems.

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The difference between success and failure often hangs on a fascinatingly small and elusive concept that our standard education system never touches: confidence. This is a guidebook to what confidence consists of, why we lack it - and how we can acquire more of it in our lives. On Confidence walks us gently and wryly around the key issues that stop us from making more of our potential. We hear about the impostor syndrome, the wisdom of imagining the great in their bathrooms and what Nietzsche and Montaigne (among others) have to tell us about resilience and courage. We often stay stuck with the level of confidence we have because we implicitly regard being confident as a matter of slightly freakish and unrepeatable good luck. In fact, as this essay charmingly shows, the opposite is true. Confidence is a skill based on a set of ideas about our place in the world - and its secrets can quietly and deftly be learnt. What people are saying about On Confidence: “Awesome graphic design and the paper quality is amazing.” Joana “Great content, engagingly written.” Janine “Great life advice without being overly pedantic. Cleverly written, digestible format.” Carolyn

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An essential guide to help children become more aware of their emotional needs. This book examines a range of everyday topics that might give children’s minds difficulties, for example: when parents don’t seem to understand us; when we fall out with friends; when school feels boring or difficult; when we’re too busy and get overwhelmed; when our phones create trouble; when we feel sad, bored, anxious or fed up with things. As an atlas to a child’s mind, we explore a range of common scenarios encountered by young children and talk about some of the very best ideas to help deal with them. By offering a sympathetic and supportive framework, we encourage children to open up, explore their own feelings and face the dilemmas of growing up armed with emotional intelligence.

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When we end up in a really good conversation with a friend, we sometimes pay them a slightly unusual but sincere compliment: we say that chatting to them feels like talking to a good therapist. What we tend to mean is that they’re giving us space to talk, they’re not interrupting us or pushing their own advice aggressively forward: they’re properly listening. This game cannot turn us into real therapists (that would take years of training). But like many good games (ones about flying or being a detective for example), it gives us a chance to try out, entertainingly but safely, one of the most interesting sides of a great profession. The Therapy Game offers us a rare opportunity to listen and speak to one another at truly fulfilling length and depth.

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Children are born philosophers – but in order to fully bring out the best of their thinking, it helps to equip them with the largest and most thought-expanding questions. This is a pack of the very sharpest, based on the biggest conundrums of philosophy, and is guaranteed to generate lively, warm and fascinating conversations among families and friends. No prior knowledge is required; all that counts is a spirit of curiosity. The pack includes questions like: Is it ever right to lie? When might freedom not be a good thing? What’s the difference between living and being alive? How does money make you happy – and when doesn’t it? With these questions to hand, conversation will forever be profound and entertaining, and minds young and old will have a crash course in the joys and adventures of philosophy.

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Not many teenagers want to talk to their parents that much. Their reasons are numerous and often sensible; yet for parents, the silence can feel painful and mysterious. What happened to their once chatty little ones? What might teenagers truly want to tell their parents, if only there was the right opportunity? And what might parents want to tell their children in turn, if it didn’t generate an immediate wince or boredom? This is a pack of cards that can break a log-jam of frustration and silence between generations with humour and curiosity. Containing 52 questions that are playful and interesting, yet carefully designed to pierce through armour, they offer parents and their teenage children a rare chance to go beyond the usual unsatisfying exchanges and rediscover one another, in an atmosphere of tolerance and fun, as the complicated, intense yet loveable and deserving beings they really are.

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In theory, we are all interested in being kind. In practice, a lot gets in the way: tiredness, anger, bitterness. But a lack of kindness lies at the heart of so much of what goes wrong at work, in friendships, and in love. These Kindness Prompt Cards are designed to bring out our better natures. They present us with a series of thoughts that nurture our sympathy, our powers of compassion, and our appetite for forgiveness. They return us to who we always want to be and deep down already are: kind people. Examples The kind person gives generously from a sense that they too will stand in need of kindness. Not right now, not over this, but in some other area. They know that self-righteousness is merely the result of a faulty memory: an inability to hold in mind, at moments when they are truly good and totally in the right, how often they have been deeply and definitively in the wrong. One fundamental path to remaining kind around people is the power to hold on, even in very challenging situations, to a distinction between what someone does, and what they meant to do. The modern world is very uncomfortable around the idea of a good person not succeeding. We would rather say that they weren’t good than embrace a far more disturbing and less well-publicised thought: that the world is very unfair. Kind people always keep the notion of injustice in mind.

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An outline for a new kind of wedding ceremony free from theology, with new rituals designed to prepare us for modern marriage. Many of us are attracted to the idea of marriage and yet feel a bit uncomfortable with some of the rituals that are traditionally associated with the big day. Perhaps the old ceremonies place too much emphasis on religion or else seem out of step with some of the complex realities of contemporary relationships. In response to this dilemma, The School of Life has rethought what the ideal wedding day would consist of and redesigned the process for modern couples. The book proposes new ways of getting prepared for a wedding at a psychological level, suggesting how couples should ready themselves for the often tricky journey ahead. It presents an entirely practical and thoughtfully redesigned wedding ceremony, from picking out a suitable venue to suggested vows and readings. Finally, it offers some ideas for how to approach the start of married life.

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We are constantly at risk of losing perspective around the challenges we face. We mistake what is manageable for a catastrophe; we despair of ourselves too soon; we alienate others by over-reacting; we don’t notice and appreciate what there is still to be grateful for; we forget we’re going to die and that a lot of today’s headache will soon be forgotten. These cards provide eloquent invitations to recover a wiser, calmer, redemptive perspective on our lives. Each card identifies a fresh perspective we might take on problems – perspectives coloured by time, space, history, culture and travel among others – nudging us gently and compassionately towards a more liveable relationship with our difficulties.

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An essential guide to navigating the complexities of professional relationships. Our colleagues can be the sources of our greatest joys and triumphs: they compensate for our weaknesses, enlarge our strengths and aggregate our energies. However, working successfully around others is neither intuitive nor simple: it requires us to communicate effectively, to understand our own minds and blind spots, to master our emotions and to see the world through others’ perspectives. This book compresses our learning into a series of lessons on workplace psychology. The result is nothing less than an essential guide to more profitable, harmonious and happier organisations.

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Our societies are remarkably confident on the matter: affairs are terrible things and only fools, monsters and knaves would ever be involved in them. Those who are their victims deserve unending sympathy and access to a good lawyer. This stance may be clear, but it is not especially helpful or productive - given that, in reality, 1 in 4 of us are going to end up involved in an affair during our lifetime. This is a book written to increase our understanding of what is really at stake in affairs: it looks at why affairs happen and ventures beyond black and white caricatures. It delves into the question of what unfaithful sex means and why, despite the risks, it happens so often. Most importantly, the book seeks to help us through affairs, offering couples a better understanding of each other’s motivations and moods - and, where desirable, a way to save a relationship. We have for too long either openly condemned or secretly lusted after affairs: this, finally, is a chance to understand them.

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