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

An original and comprehensive look at what it is we seek when we set off on an adventure abroad - and at how we can travel better, so that our experiences overseas become truly transformative and memorable. Going travelling is one of the few things we undertake in a direct attempt to make ourselves happy - and frequently, in fascinating ways, we fail. We get bored, cross, anxious or lonely. It isn't surprising: our societies act as if going travelling were simple, just a case of handing over the right sum of money. But a satisfying journey isn't something we can simply buy: it's the result of an art that has to be learnt. This is the guide: not to any one destination but to travel in general. It talks to us, among other things, about how we should choose a place to go, what we might do when we get there, how we should make good moments stick in our minds and why hotel rooms can be such liberating places... In a succession of genial essays, we become students of an unexpected but vital topic: how to understand and more fully enjoy (what should be) some of the finest experiences of our lives. What people are saying about How to Travel: "How to Travel helped me narrow down where I want to travel to, why I want to travel there, and who I want to travel with. The blank pages included gave me room to respond to the questions posed in the essays, which made the reading experience that much more enjoyable. I highly recommend this book to anyone who dreams of experiencing a culture or world outside of their own but can't decide on a place." Larysa "A lovely collection of thought provoking short essays with note pages for jotting down things like 'useful foreign phrases' or to 'give drawing a go'. This book is very well presented with interesting quotes, images and photographs on different coloured pages on quality paper. It therefore has a nice feel and is really easy to read, no complex theories here. However, each piece on different aspects of travel is written well and makes you think which has real value...So enjoyable, and a perfect gift for someone preparing to travel." Sue "In classic School of Life form, the content is compellingly presented in an uncommon way, playful while authoritative." Rick "Has little pockets and fill in spaces that are so useful." Joana

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A soothing gallery of artworks and photography to guide us on a journeytowards calm.

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A blank notebook with a soft back with rounded corners, bellyband & elastic closure.

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We’re hugely dependent on language to express how we really feel, and yet words often feel curiously vague or frustratingly inaccurate. There are lots of moods, needs and feelings that our own language has not yet properly pinned down. The perfect word - even if it comes from abroad - helps us explain ourselves to other people, and its existence quietly reassures us (and everyone else) that a state of mind is not really rare, just rarely spoken of. This set of cards define some of our favourite words from the world’s languages and married them up with complementary images to create cards that bring some of our most important feelings into focus. We’ve created them to prompt greater reflection about the nature of language and the emotions. Example Cards: DUENDE (Spanish): A heightened sense of emotion created by a moving piece of art. FORELSKET (Norwegian): The euphoric feeling at the beginning of love. We can’t believe someone so perfect has wandered into our lives. They enhance and complete us. We might report: ‘I was overpowered by forelsket as our fingers interlaced…’

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Typically, we stumble on fascinating conversation topics a little bit by chance. Shyness can hold us back. Too often, we revert to polite, but not especially inspired, staples. Arranged to accompany each course, these twenty beautifully designed Conversation Menus lead us artfully to some of the most fascinating and revealing conversation topics. They invite us to open up about themes such as love, money, travel ambition, self-knowledge and the meaning of life. They contain questions and invitations to discussion that will raise smiles, build friendships and foster the best kind of intimacy, ensuring that our meals together can be everything we hoped. Questions Include: What do you blame your parents for? What do you wish your partner could forgive you for? Have you ever sabotaged your own success? Who did you have a rush on during your school years? Describe your first memorable encounter with another culture. What should children learn about the adult world? In what ways is your family especially odd? Who have you had to eject from your social life – and why? How would you like to be remembered? What shaped your attitudes to money?

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An inspiring curated selection of 40 photographs and artworks with accompanying essays examining the skill of confidence. The difference between success and failure often comes down to an ingredient that we are seldom directly taught about and may forget to focus on: confidence. Here is a supreme guide to a fatefully neglected quality – made up of a series of short essays that encourage us into a new and more fruitful state of mind. We hear why we should dare to try, why the past doesn’t have to dictate the future, why we can alter the way we speak to ourselves and why there are so many reasons to keep faith with our most ambitious aspirations. The images that accompany each essay are there to ensure that we aren’t merely intellectually stirred to change our lives but are also given the best kind of visual assistance. Within its modest size, this book succeeds at a mighty feat: unlocking our latent powers and edging us on with kindness and creativity to become the best version of ourselves.

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Our societies frequently proclaim their enormous esteem for culture. Music, film, literature and the visual arts enjoy high prestige and are viewed by many as getting close to the meaning of life. But what is culture really for? This book proposes that works of culture were all made, in one way or another, with the idea of improving the way we live. The book connects a range of cultural masterpieces with our own pains and dilemmas around love, work and society, and invites us to see culture as a resource with which to address the complex agonies of being human. It provides us with enduring keys to unlocking culture as a way of transforming our lives.

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Many of us find ourselves in the odd situation of not believing in religion – but nevertheless being interested in it, moved by it and sympathetic to some of its aims. We may enjoy religious art and architecture, music and community, and even some of the rituals – while being unable to believe in angels, divine commandments or stories about the afterlife. This book is about those feelings and what we might do about them. The School of Life is a secular organisation fascinated by the gaps left in modern society by the gradual disappearance of religion. We’re interested in how hard it is to find a sense of community, how rituals are dying out and how much we sometimes crave the solemn quiet you find in religious buildings. This book lays out how we might absorb the best lessons of religion, update them for our times and incorporate them into our daily lives and societies – without taking on the supernatural or doctrinaire elements. This book tries to rescue some of what remains wise and useful from all that no longer seems (to many of us) to be quite true.

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An average couple will have between thirty and fifty significant arguments a year - and yet we’re seldom taught very much about why they happen and how they could grow a little less intense. This is a guide to arguments in love: it teaches us why they might occur, what their symptoms are, how we could learn some wiser ways of communicating and how we would ideally patch up after a fight. The book looks at twenty of the most common arguments - including ones about sex, money, in-laws, who is ‘cold’ and who is ‘over-emotional’ and the state of the bathroom and the finances. We recognise our own antics but also pick up consoling and wise ideas on how to skirt certain conflicts going forward. The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (‘I need you to love me, know me, agree with me’) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations and forceful ‘f *** yous’). A bad argument is a failed endeavour to communicate; this is a definitive guide to how we might argue better. ‘The priority is not so much to avoid points of contention as to learn to handle them in less counterproductively vindictive and more gently strategic ways. We need a lot help in order in order to acquire the complex art of converting our poisonous arguments into effective and compassionate dialogues.’

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We have so many vague feelings of hurt, envy, anxiety, and regret, but for the most part we never stop to make sense of them. It’s too un-comfortable and especially difficult because we are so often busy and frazzled, hyper-connected yet a bit lonely. To really understand what we feel and think, we must turn away from distractions, common sense, and other people’s opinions. We need to develop intimacy with ourselves. Our un-thought thoughts contain clues as to our needs and our longer-term direction. Writing them out is key. Through writing, we recognise patterns to observe and, perhaps, outgrow. We can strategise – a remarkably neglected task. We can ask ourselves why we make the choices we do. We can question faulty narratives and create new ones. We can consider ideas before we commit to them, and reinforce good ideas we already know. Writing is ultimately the task of discovering and developing what we think. There could hardly be a more important personal goal.

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We have so many vague feelings of hurt, envy, anxiety, and regret, but for the most part we never stop to make sense of them. It’s too un-comfortable and especially difficult because we are so often busy and frazzled, hyper-connected yet a bit lonely. To really understand what we feel and think, we must turn away from distractions, common sense, and other people’s opinions. We need to develop intimacy with ourselves. Our un-thought thoughts contain clues as to our needs and our longer-term direction. Writing them out is key. Through writing, we recognise patterns to observe and, perhaps, outgrow. We can strategise – a remarkably neglected task. We can ask ourselves why we make the choices we do. We can question faulty narratives and create new ones. We can consider ideas before we commit to them, and reinforce good ideas we already know. Writing is ultimately the task of discovering and developing what we think. There could hardly be a more important personal goal.

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We have so many vague feelings of hurt, envy, anxiety, and regret, but for the most part we never stop to make sense of them. It’s too un-comfortable and especially difficult because we are so often busy and frazzled, hyper-connected yet a bit lonely. To really understand what we feel and think, we must turn away from distractions, common sense, and other people’s opinions. We need to develop intimacy with ourselves. Our un-thought thoughts contain clues as to our needs and our longer-term direction. Writing them out is key. Through writing, we recognise patterns to observe and, perhaps, outgrow. We can strategise – a remarkably neglected task. We can ask ourselves why we make the choices we do. We can question faulty narratives and create new ones. We can consider ideas before we commit to them, and reinforce good ideas we already know. Writing is ultimately the task of discovering and developing what we think. There could hardly be a more important personal goal.

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Going travelling can be one of life’s greatest activities – but often, we fail to deepen the experience as much as we should and return home with some of the promise of our trip unrealised. Here is a pack of cards designed to help us get the very best out of travel – and to embed its greatest lessons in our minds. The cards contain questions that we can reflect on ourselves (in a journal or on a train ride) or ask others in a group – and that lead us to think deeply about how we might derive maximal satisfaction from a trip. This is an ingenious, low-tech, high-impact solution to one of the great conundrums of travel: how to ensure that the reality of going away will match our hopes.

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From adolescence onwards, one of the great struggles we face is how to reconcile our own desires with those we find socially acceptable. The best encounters with friends are those where we can talk honestly about what’s going on in our lives, sharing triumphs, joys, fears and longings - without the usual shyness or reserve. This game guarantees that the warmest, most fascinating conversations won’t have to be left to chance. With the help of a dice and some cards, the game asks participants to answer a series of questions around career, sex, money, relationships, family, gently inviting everyone to share important bits of themselves in an intimate and playful atmosphere. By thinking of confessions as a game – as a sociable and exploratory activity, as opposed to a risky affair – the cards prompt us to open ourselves up to interesting and exhilarating conversations, allow us to be a little more honest around the most intimate aspects of ourselves. Example Questions: What did you call your partner in your most heated argument? In your most depressed moods, what do you tell yourself about your career? What are you ashamed of people knowing about you and money? Describe in some detail the first time you had sex. What do you hate most about your children?

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An exploration of children's literature - from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan to Young Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe - and the lessons these stories teach about the world around them.

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It isn’t easy to get into a good conversation. Many of our best ones seem to have happened by chance. Far from it - we believe a great conversation always starts with someone asking a great question. In this set of beautiful cards, you’ll find laid out 100 of the very best questions around, carefully designed to get a group of people into exceptionally entertaining and meaningful conversations. Example Questions: What’s the best evening you ever had? Are you where you wanted to be at this stage in your life? What do you and your partner argue about most? What are the best things you owe your parents? Would you be happy to tell your friends how much you earn? Have you ever had a religious experience?

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It can be remarkably hard to tell other people how we really feel; it may even be tricky for us to get clear about our own moods. Mostly, if people ask how we are, we’ll just say, ‘Fine’ - knowing that we’ve provided only a sharp abbreviation of what is actually going on in our minds. This is a tool to help us overcome our vagueness: cards that offer definitions of twenty moods that we can all recognise but that can be hard to pin down and explain. Here are descriptions of - among many other things - the sense of feeling weepy, nostalgic, anxious, and dreamy. These cards help us reach a clearer understanding of our inner emotional weather. They can also be passed on to friends and colleagues (or simply displayed on our desk) so that the world can better know what’s going on inside us, without our needing to explain too much. Quotes From The Cards: ‘Everyone is more anxious than they are inclined to tell us. Even the tycoon and the couple in love are suffering. We’ve collectively failed to admit to ourselves how much it is customary to panic. But we can at least hold out our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbours, as if to say, in the kindest way possible: ‘I know...’ - On Feeling Anxious ‘We should enjoy our obsessive moods. To obsess well is to realise that the lovely person we sketch in our heads is our creation: a creation that says more about us than it does about them. We may not really be getting to know another person properly, but we are growing our insight into who we really are.’- On Feeling Obsessive

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A book to inspire closeness and connection, helping people not only to find love but to make it last. Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships – yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might therefore be intuitive and easy. This book starts from a different premise: that love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. It calmly and charmingly takes us around the key issues of relationships, from arguments to sex, forgiveness to communication, making sure that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck. Part of a new essential paperback series from The School of Life, covering a range of emotional lessons needed in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

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A guide to emotional healing and living a more self-accepting life by learning to love oneself. Behind many of our problems lies an often ignored factor: we don’t like ourselves very much. We are sufferers of self-hatred. We tell ourselves the meanest things. It’s because of self-hatred that we tend to neglect our potential at work and get entangled in unfulfilling relationships, that we lack confidence in our social lives and suffer from anxiety and despair. This is a book that, with immense compassion and fellow feeling, investigates the phenomenon of self-hatred while giving pragmatic advice on how to overcome it. It asks where the feeling comes from, what it makes us do and how we might become kinder and more compassionate towards ourselves. We have probably spent far too much of our lives disliking ourselves and attacking everything we say, do or feel, while not even realising what we’re up to. It’s time to overcome our masochism and move towards a more self-forgiving and accepting stance. On Self-Hatred is a guide to the more compassionate and gentle relationship we should have had with ourselves from the start, and can all achieve now.

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Life constantly requires us to give other people some hugely awkward messages: that we don’t love them anymore; that we do love them (though we’re not meant to); that they smell a bit; that they’re fired; that we’re furious with them (though we adore them) or that their music is too loud... Often, out of embarrassment, we just stay quiet. Occasionally we explode. And typically, we stumble about, looking for the right words – dreading that we didn’t find them and thereby causing more hurt than we should. This is a book to help us locate the best possible words to get across a range of life’s most difficult messages. With twenty case studies drawn from relationships, friendships, work, our families and service situations, we are gently shown what we might – in an ideal world – find ourselves saying to make our intentions known while causing minimal harm. We are guided, among other topics, to how best to end a relationship, how to make it up with a child and how gently to let down a friend who wants more. We laugh, we recognise our troubles – and we’re introduced to a range of deeply empathetic ways to navigate some of our most acute social dilemmas.

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This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression or anger or bitterness, it’s a serene, accepting, gentle, wise and kindly response to the difficulties and occasional misery of being alive. It steers an ideal mid-way course between despair on the one hand and naïve optimism on the other. But melancholy is a well-kept secret. Those who feel the pull of melancholy moods tend to stay quiet about their tastes. We don’t often hear melancholy being celebrated or accorded the respect that it deserves. Melancholy languishes unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age. And yet the emotion heartily deserves exploration, it is one that leads to reflection and thoughtfulness. This book carefully collects and interprets a selection of the most universally recognisable melancholy states of mind, and thereby renders us less confused by our precious yet elusive feelings. We hear, among other things, about the melancholy of Sunday evenings and the melancholy of adolescence, the melancholy of high summer and the melancholy of crushes. This book offers a varied portrait of melancholy and it’s range of emotions, leading the reader to both insight and self compassion.

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Raising a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life’s great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck. There are many things to understand about how children’s minds operate and what they need from those who look after them so they can develop into the best version of themselves. The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of lessons, including ideas on how to say ‘no’ to a child one adores, how to look beneath the surface of ‘bad’ behaviour to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, how to encourage open self expression, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence. Importantly, this is a book that knows that perfection is not required – and could indeed be unhelpful, because a key job of any parent is to induct a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. Written in a tone that is encouraging, wry and soaked in years of experience, The Good Enough Parent is an intelligent guide to raising a child who will one day look back on their childhood with just the right mixture of gratitude, humour and love.

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Work can be a route to creativity, excitement and purpose. Nevertheless, many of us end up confused, discouraged and beaten by our working lives. The temptation is often just to blame ourselves, and to feel privately ashamed and guilty. However, as this book lucidly explains, there is a range of well-embedded and intriguing reasons why work proves demoralising, including the evolution of modern work, the role of technology and the mechanics of the economy. This surprisingly cheering book offers us an invigorating perspective over our working lives – and what we might do at times when our work challenges us almost unbearably. Chapters include: Specialisation Standardisation Commercialisation Competition Collaboration Equal Opportunity Meritocracy

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This is a book that should never fall into the hands of children – for it is filled with the darkest truths about life that might unbearably depress the young. However, for the older ones among us, this is a book full of solace, humour and relief. In a charming, naively illustrated tale, we follow the adventures of Bunny – a version of all of us – as he encounters a series of obstacles we are in some ways liable to recognise from our own lives. Watching poor Bunny, we end up delighted we’re not alone, and perhaps smiling darkly in sympathy with his sorrows. Children might even have the odd peek inside if they dare.

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Choosing a partner is one of the most consequential and tricky decisions we will ever make. The cost of repeated failure is immense. And yet we are often so alone with the search. Partners used to be found for us by parents and society. Now we are expected to follow our feelings - and so locate people by ourselves, according to intuition. This should be an improvement, but our emotions often pull us towards hugely problematic characters and dynamics. How to Find Love explains why we have the ‘types’ we do - and how our early experiences give us scripts of how and whom we can love. The book provides a crucial set of ideas to help us make safer, more imaginative and more effective choices in love.

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The Great Thinkers is a collection of some of the most important ideas of Eastern and Western culture - drawn from the works of those philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, artists and novelists whom we believe have the most to offer to us today. We've worked hard to make the thinkers in this book clear, relevant and charming, mining the history of knowledge to bring you the ideas we think have the greatest importance to our times. This 480-page book contains the canon of The School of Life, the gallery of individuals across the millennia who help to frame our intellectual project - and we have succeeded if, in the days and years ahead, you find yourself turning to our thinkers to illuminate the multiple dilemmas, joys and griefs of daily life.

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A collection of humanity’s most inspiring ideas throughout time, bringing perspective to the challenges and wonders of being alive. This is an unusual sort of history book: a history of ideas – and not just any old ideas, ideas from across time and space that are best suited to healing, enchanting and reviving us. Along the way, we travel around the world, from the very beginnings of our species right up to the modern age. We hear about the Ancient Greeks and Romans, we learn about Buddhism and Islam, we acquire ideas from Hinduism and the European Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Modernity. Deliberately eclectic, the book gives us a panoramic, 3,000-year view over the finest insights of a diversity of civilisations. Every idea hangs off an image – it could be a place, a document, a building or a work of art – that has something very specific to teach us. There are ideas here that will stick in our minds because they can help to answer the biggest puzzles we may have: about the direction of our lives, the issues of relationships, the meaning of existence. The book amounts to a feast for the intellect and the imagination – to make us into the best sorts of historians, those who know how to use the past to shed light on their own lives.

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The world is full of places that inspire and bring us joy: they might be exceptionally beautiful, resonant with history, untouched by civilisation or rich in memory. This is an atlas that gathers together some of the most enchanting and reinvigorating places around the world in order to heal and captivate, including beautiful destinations in Greece, Italy, Japan, America, Chile and Australia, to name but a few. We’re taken to the tops of mountains, solitary cliffs, elegant cities and also some less expected locations: airports, hydroelectric stations and meteorite craters. Great travellers have always known that travelling can broaden the mind; here we see how it can also heal it. A Therapeutic Atlas reminds us that the world is far broader and more inspiring than we tend to appreciate day to day. Tempting images are combined with short essays that discuss the power of particular places to help us with the difficulties of being human. We locate places that are therapeutic because they coax us out of familiar patterns of thought and liberate our minds. This is a book that can be read when travelling, as a real-life atlas, but as importantly, when travel is difficult, it reminds us that there is no place like home and the sanctuary of our own bed.

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Most of us long to be a little calmer: too many of our days are lost to agitation and worry, stress and discord. Yet we know that we are at our best when we can manage not to panic and take challenges in our stride. Fortunately, a calm state of mind is not a divine gift. Even those of us starting from a more agitated position can systematically understand and lay claim to it. Too many books on this subject simply explain what it would be like to be calm. This is a workbook that takes us through the practical steps required to actually become calm. It is filled with exercises and prompts that deliver the self-understanding and self-compassion on which true serenity depends. Furthermore, the book invites us to build calming routines into our daily lives so that what we learn can stick with us and change us for the long term. Based on years of The School of Life’s work in the area of anxiety and calm, this is a landmark workbook guaranteed to bring about the calmer state of mind we long for and deserve.

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Psychotherapy is one of the most valuable inventions of the last hundred years, with an exceptional power to raise our levels of emotional well-being, improve our relationships, redeem the atmosphere in our families and assist us in mining our professional potential. But it is also profoundly misunderstood and the subject of a host of unhelpful fantasies, hopes and suspicions. Its logic is rarely explained and its voice seldom heard with sufficient directness. This is a book that attempts to explain psychotherapy: what the needs are in all of us to which it caters; the methods by which it addresses these needs - and what the outcome of a therapeutic intervention could ideally be. The book reflects a fundamental belief of the School of Life that psychotherapy is the single greatest step any of us can take towards self-understanding and fulfilment. A course of therapy stands to render us ever so slightly less angry, self-defeating, unconfident, lost and sad. This is a guide to the purpose and meaning of psychotherapy. What people are saying about What is Psychotherapy?: “Love the book, high quality product. I am very pleased with my purchase. It is a small book but big enough to answer the question from the headline.” Srecka “Great read and being a hardback gives the book a special feel, a kind if little treasure.” Brian “A lovely little book to help make psychotherapy more accessible.” “Great book for that first understanding of psychotherapy, easy and quick to read.” “This book is invaluable and makes so much sense. I will be ordering more copies to give to friends.” “Inspiring and impressive. Bringing easy terms and daily encounters into deeper understanding.”

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Children are, in many ways, born philosophers. Without prompting, they ask some of the largest questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of it all. Yet too often this inborn curiosity is not developed and, with age, the questions fall away. This is a book designed to harness children's spontaneous philosophical instinct and to develop it through introductions to some of the most vibrant and essential philosophical ideas of history. The book takes us to meet leading figures of philosophy from around the world and from all eras - and shows us how their ideas continue to matter. The book functions as an ideal introduction to philosophy, as well as a charming way to open up conversations between adults and children about the biggest questions we all face. What people are saying about Big Ideas for Curious Minds: “This is an absolute must have for ALL children. It is absolutely fantastic and helps children understand a number of their daily struggles. In fact I take that previous comment back, this is an absolute must for EVERYONE. I have had read it from cover to cover, and as a 40 year old woman I have honestly learnt something new.” Freddies Mummy UK “This is a beautifully produced book published by the School of Life (founded by well known philosopher Alain de Botton). It is a very accessible starting point for exploring philosophy and how philosophical ideas can be applied to everyday life, in fact it is very explicit about this.” Ewingel “I can't stop reading and talking about this book with others. It is easy to follow and great for an introduction to philosophy for kids. Well written, great illustrations, ideas and clever how it relates the philosophers' ideas to the lives and issues that children have. 5 stars!” Thomas Leesa “The book itself is genius with an introduction to leading figures of philosophy from around the world from all eras. Alongside that there are chapters teaching our children crucial lessons about life, about love, and about loss. Topics such as ‘Why you feel lonely’, ‘Politeness matters’, ‘People are unhappy not mean’, and ‘The mind-body problem’ offer invaluable insights into philosophy in a way that our children can really get on board with. When the book arrived and I had a quick glance through it, my immediate reaction was that it was far too old for my children. And yet when I took the time to start reading, and to admire the beautiful illustrations, I found myself still sat there, an hour later, realising that this was exactly the kind of book I want each of my children to read as they grow.” Five Little Doves “The focus of these chapters are incredibly meaningful, some of my favourites include ‘People are unhappy, not mean’, ‘Learn to say what’s on your mind’, ‘Good things are (unexpectedly) hard’ and ‘Politeness matters’. The book has been written by the fantastic School of Life and it is suggested for curious minds aged 9+. I think most adults would also find these ideas incredibly helpful to reflect on; who doesn’t need reminding that when someone is angry, maybe it’s not you who is responsible?” Louise Treherne, Role Models “Although Big Ideas for Curious Minds is aimed at children I have got a lot from it too – and I wish I had read it myself as a child… This book has taught me, and LP, new ways of thinking and new ways of being.” What the Redhead Said

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In life, we are regularly faced with dilemmas: complex everyday problems for which there are no obvious answers. When a friend confesses to having an affair, do we keep their secret’? When a colleague has terrible breath, do we let them know’? When a stranger is crying on the bus, do we offer comfort or keep our distance’? In such moments, we long for some good advice to help us find a way forward. The Dilemmas Game invites you to flex your moral muscles and compare your problem-solving skills with those of your friends and family. Players must propose different solutions to 52 common dilemmas, using analogies or drawing on real-life experiences to explain their answers. It’s a fun and enlightening way of practising for the inevitable quandaries of life.

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A meal with friends is only ever as good as the questions we ask one another. Too often, we fall back on polite but not so inspired staples: ‘Have you got anything special planned for the weekend?’ ‘What do you do?’, and so on. But there are better kinds of questions - questions that work like magic keys that open up our hearts, draw out our memories and prompt our latent reserves of generosity, fun and interest. This pack collects 80 of these sorts of questions to ensure a meal together can be at once meaningful, entertaining and touching. Laid out on placecards, the questions gently and charmingly pull our fellow diners towards the sort of topics that matter most to our deeper selves - and help us get the most out of one another... Questions Include: What do other people not understand about you? What do you worry about in the middle of the night? Which three adjectives capture important things about you? When you feel upset, how - ideally - would you like to be comforted?

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In order to work well together, people need more than just technical skills; they need to get to know and understand each other. We suspect this intuitively; which is why fortunes are spent on team-building exercises. But because costly excursions aren’t always possible, we’ve designed a game that requires nothing more than a room and a little free time. Teamwork contains 100 questions that playfully and sensitively introduce us to our colleagues by setting up the best kinds of conversation about everything from our childhoods to our values. Played as a group, we’ll end up in profound, eye-opening and meaningful chats that humanise colleagues in each other’s eyes and help to create an atmosphere of forgiving and kind collegiality around the office: this is the best and easiest way to turn individuals into a team. Topics covered include: Flaws, Fears & Regrets Character Work Likes & Interests The Past

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It’s hard to understand who we really are: what we want, how we feel and why we react as we do. This lack of self-knowledge can be trouble, for it makes us get into the wrong relationships, pick unsatisfactory jobs or spend money unwisely. No wonder Socrates summed up all the counsel of philosophy in just two words: ‘Know Yourself’. These cards are designed to assist us in a journey of self-knowledge; they present us with a range of ideas and questions that can help us to understand ourselves better. Each card carries an exercise on one side and a piece of analysis on the reverse to help you gain insight and clarity on that ever elusive subject: yourself. Example Questions: Who are you? What happened to you in childhood? What is the meaning of life?

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There are about 130 million books in the world – and they are being added to at a rate of 4 million a year or so. Which ones, therefore, should we really read? What are the books that count? Which ones are going to make a real difference to us in the limited time we have? This is The School of Life's answer: a definitive list of the 100 books that we feel should truly matter to anyone who cares about their development and growth, a 100 books that are guaranteed to inspire, console and uplift us. We find books from all over the world, some very well known, others fascinatingly unfamiliar, united by a common ability to help us grow into the best versions of ourselves and to combat anxiety, despair and loneliness. This book answers one of the great questions we all face: how to assemble the perfect set of books with which we can acquire self-understanding, calm and emotional maturity; how to build ourselves a true library for happiness.

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This is a pack of cards to foster connection and closeness, which can (strangely but truly) be generated almost on command by the right sort of conversations. Here are 100 questions that help couples to rekindle affection. They lead naturally to chats about what we are ready to forgive, what we deeply appreciate, what remains exciting and what is especially worth cherishing. This is a deceptively simple game with life-changing consequences. Questions cover topics such as: What I really admire about you is… When appreciative friends discuss us, what do you think they might celebrate in us? How would you like to come back together again at the end of every day? If you never improved one bit, I’d still... The trick to understanding why I can sometimes be difficult is to remember that... Contains adult content.

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A book to offer clarity and guidance when facing the difficult decision of whether your relationship has a future.

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A glass 15 minute timer.

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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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