Search results for ""author the school of life""

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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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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Children are used to hearing about how important it is to protect nature, but they may not fully understand how the natural world can positively impact their emotional wellbeing. With that in mind, this book shows children how nature can be fun, uplifting, consoling and even offer companionship. This is a book about how nature can touch us all and help us with our lives (especially when we might be feeling bored, sad or lonely). Children learn about the ways in which they can be comforted, inspired and uplifted by examples of nature such as: a flowing river a cow in a field clouds in the sky rabbits in their burrows stars at night a cuddle with a favourite puppy This is an inspirational book, not just educating children about the natural world, but teaching them to love and connect with it. Beautiful illustrations and a tone that is encouraging, warm and accessible makes it easy for children, and their favourite adults, to relate to.

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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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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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The dark truth is that it has become very hard to find anyone (and certainly anything) more interesting than one’s smartphone. This perplexing and troubling realisation has for most of us had huge consequences for our love stories, family lives, work, leisure time and health. This is why we have created Phone Detox, a palm-sized book filled with insights, ideas and meditations about the complex relationship we have with our phones. Phone Detox knows we love our phones and would never want us to give them up, but it is also gently aware that these delightful gadgets bear a hidden cost. This flip book is a tool that aims to bring a little sanity to our closest, most intense and possibly most danger-laden technological relationship. What people are saying about Phone Detox: “Must read. Very enlightening.” Robert “I got it as a birthday present for my husband; and it is currently doing rounds among our friends, as we all found its little snippets of psychologically philosophic wisdom inspiring and very useful.” Mila

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It can be hard to decide what we really want to achieve in our lives; our ambitions are often scattered, diverse and difficult to pin down. This is a tool for helping us focus on what we need to be fulfilled so that we can direct our energies and thoughts most effectively. It contains 160 cards detailing our most common ambitions and longings, along with instructions on how to reflect on our goals, arrange them in a logical order of priorities and, where necessary, weigh up trade-offs. Using the cards will help us to reveal our true purpose. The cards can be displayed, photographed or kept close to hand as a reminder of the path ahead. This is a simple-seeming but ingenious psychological tool for converting hunches and dreams into a realisable future.

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We are used to thinking of good conversation as the glue that holds friendships together, but we shouldn’t forget the immense value of playing games, with some of the same spirit of fun and adventure that we once deployed when we were children. Here is a pack of forty activities to draw us away from static conversation. Among other things, we will build a fort together, dance in surprising ways, deliver funeral orations, practise our acting skills, and play some entertaining (but kindly) pranks. The games are an invitation to cast aside reserve and get in touch with neglected imaginative aspects of ourselves. They are a reminder that friendship doesn’t only require talking; it thrives just as much on the lighthearted but significant business of playing together. Examples Inanimate Impressions Imitation, as Aristotle knew, is an activity humans find pleasurable and meaningful. This perhaps explains our delight in impressions. Ordinarily, we impersonate living creatures – friends, celebrities or animals. But this game takes a slightly different approach. Each guest should attempt to impersonate an inanimate object – a grandfather clock, or a dot-matrix printer, or a blender – using sounds and gestures. At the end, the group as a whole should elect a winner who has most uncannily captured the likeness of the object.

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Talking properly is the glue that keeps every relationship alive. By regularly checking in with one another, covering how we feel, what we’ve learnt, and how we see the world, we have a chance to build the satisfying, intimate and lively relationships we all deserve. However, in the busy conditions of modern life, it’s easy to fall behind on conversation. This box contains a set of the best talking points that any couple can use to broaden channels of communication and emotion. Accompanied by short explanatory essays that help to lend context and atmosphere, these talking points nudge us towards a mood of fruitful intimacy, understanding and affection. Designed to be used over dinner, for an evening or during a weekend away, this is the perfect tool with which to practise the art of closeness.

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The Compatibility Game is designed to help two people in a relationship (romantic or otherwise) assess their level of compatibility. It helps to a) identify areas of alignment and divergence in their values, ambitions, goals or beliefs and b) discuss the significance of these. Crucially, the game does not suggest that incompatibilities cannot be overcome: the basis of successful relationships is not compatibility but compromise. The box contains two sets of 80 cards (2 x 75 ‘statement’ cards plus 5 ‘blank’ cards) - each person has their own set Each card contains a statement of opinion or belief: ‘I’m a spiritual person’; ‘Extreme left wing views annoy me’; ‘I’m a morning person’, and so on. The cards are arranged into five themes — Values, Psychology, Habits, Leisure and Politics The ‘game’ involves two players choosing the cards that most closely accord with their own POV and comparing their choices with the other player to assess their levels of compatibility

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A collection of enlightening quotes, delivering some of the most important lessons The School of Life has to offer. This is a selection of the very best and most psychologically acute quotations from The School of Life, covering such large and diverse topics as relationships, regret, anxiety, work, friends, family, travel and, not least, the meaning of life. Some of these quotations elicit an immediate nod of recognition, others leave us thoughtful and a few are just plain funny. The book is organised by The School of Life’s key themes – Relationships, Self-Knowledge, Sociability, Work, Calm and Leisure – that together amount to a tour around the most profound sorrows and joys of the human mind and heart. Offering comfort and consolation in a compact format, The School of Life Book of Quotations is ideally suited to our impatient, anxious and searching times. Quotations: ‘The best cure for unrequited love: get to know them better.’ ‘Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.’ ‘The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.’ ‘Insomnia is the mind’s revenge for all the thoughts we forgot to have in the day.’

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A guide to rediscovering niceness as one of the highest of all human achievements. Many books seek to make us richer or thinner. This book wants to help us to be nicer: less irritable, more patient, readier to listen, warmer and less prickly. Niceness may not have the immediate allure of money or fame, but it is a hugely important quality nevertheless, and one that we neglect at our peril. On Being Nice gently leads us around the key themes of the often-forgotten quality of being nice. It discusses how to be charitable, how to forgive, how to be natural and how to reassure, as well as the importance of navigating interpersonal relationships with compassion and kindness. Ultimately, the book encourages us to understand that niceness is compatible with strength and is not an indicator of naivety.

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An honest and accessible guide to finding light in the darkest of times. In a world that isn’t short of darkness, there could be few more urgent priorities than to spend time rehearsing for ourselves why life – despite all its challenges – still has so much to offer us; why there are still so many reasons to be hopeful. The book is an eclectic collection of anecdotes and arguments, vibrantly illustrated with artworks and photography, that remind us why we should remain hopeful when all else fails. Across a series of short essays, we learn why we still have the right to feel purposeful and buoyant despite everything that is challenging: because there is still so much more to discover, because we can delight in summer days and the light of dawn, and because we don’t require perfection for things to feel good enough. In a tone that avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality and cynicism, the book urges us to reconnect with our more resilient selves, bidding us to recover faith in what is still possible. At points funny and always encouraging and kind, here is an ideal friend to guide us back to courage and delight.

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A reassuring guide on how to overcome failure, teaching us that we can learn to fail well This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing – in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives. Our societies talk a lot about how to succeed: we’d end up so much wiser and calmer if we learnt how to cope better with the more likely scenario of failure. This is a book packed with dignified, sensible, kindly suggestions about how to approach failure: how to deal with friends, how to cope with enemies, how to endure regret, how to pick oneself up, how to accept oneself despite one’s flaws, and how to endure and thrive in new, less than ideal circumstances. It’s a perfect volume for anyone who has ever had a relationship breakdown, suffered a career reversal, made enemies, bungled a project or wasted their time – in other words, for all of us. When we fail, it can sometimes seem as if we are alone in this however, in truth, there is nothing more human than to fail – and nothing wiser and more necessary than to learn to fail well.

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It’s impossible for a child to spend too long around adults without one of them coming up and asking, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ They mean for this to be a relatively simple question; the idea is that you’ll quite easily be able to say something like, ‘A teacher’ or ‘A doctor’ and then the adult will move on – and bother someone else. But the truth can be a lot more complicated, and if you’ve ever felt confused or annoyed by the question, you have every right: knowing what you might want to do with your working life is one of the biggest, oddest and hardest questions of all. It might take many decades to find a good answer to it – and it’s one that most adults are still grappling with... This is a unique book about careers and the world of work written expressly for children. It takes us on a journey around some of the most essential questions within the topic: how can one discover one’s passions, what should a ‘good’ job involve, what is a good amount of money to try to make, how does the economy function – and acknowledges that the job you might do one day probably doesn’t even exist now. The result is a book that should spark some exceptionally fruitful conversations and help children look to their future work life with positivity and anticipation.

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