Search results for ""Author The School of Life""
The School of Life Press What They Forgot to Teach You at School: Essential emotional lessons needed to thrive
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.
£15.00
The School of Life Press Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind
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.
£15.00
The School of Life Press The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners: how to navigate the dilemmas of social life
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.
£12.00
The School of Life Press The Emotionally Intelligent Office: 20 Key Emotional Skills for the Workplace
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.’
£12.00
The School of Life Press Happy, Healthy Minds: A Children's Guide to Emotional Wellbeing
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.
£16.20
The School of Life Press Phone Detox
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
£10.45
The School of Life Press What Do I Really Want to Achieve?: a tool to focus your life’s goals and priorities
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.
£18.00
The School of Life Press Games for Grown-ups: 40 activities to deepen and enliven friendships
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.
£18.00
The School of Life Press Emotional Conversations: discussions to keep love true
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.
£18.00
The School of Life Press The Compatibility Game: the secrets of a successful relationship
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
£18.00
The School of Life Press The School of Life: Quotes to Live By: a collection to revive and inspire
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.’
£15.00
The School of Life Press The School of Life: On Being Nice: a guide to friendship and connection
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.
£9.99
The School of Life Press Reasons to be Hopeful: what remains consoling, inspiring and beautiful
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.
£18.00
The School of Life Press The School of Life: On Failure: how to succeed at defeat
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.
£14.40
The School of Life Press What Can I Do When I Grow Up?: A young person's guide to careers, money – and the future
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.
£15.00
The School of Life Press Self-Knowledge
In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: ‘Know yourself’. Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions – particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly. We come away with a newly clarified sense of who we are, what we need to watch out for when making decisions, and what our priorities and potential might be. Contents: Self-Ignorance Philosophical Meditation Emotional Identity Honesty and Denial Self-Judgement Emotional Scepticism
£10.00
The School of Life Press The Meaning of Life: cards for profound and playful chat
We sometimes playfully wonder what the meaning of life might be - but it can be hard to kick start a conversation with ourselves (let alone with anyone else) around such a daunting subject. Here are 52 cards that directly and elegantly lead us to some of the largest questions about life and its meaning – cards that help us and our companions to think with exceptional depth about what truly matters, where we see ourselves heading and what gives life its purpose. This is a tool for direction, clarity – and some of the deepest yet most fun and entertaining conversations we’ll ever have.
£13.50
The School of Life Press Pillow Talk: cards for intimate conversations
Although the pleasures of sex are well known, what is less emphasised are the pleasures of talking about sex: what feels nice, what we like to daydream about, what we long for, where our fantasies have come from. There is scarcely anything more interesting. Yet too often, we find ourselves not having as many good conversations about sex as we might. Maybe we don’t know where to start, or we think we should know it all by now. Perhaps some aspects of sex feel tricky, or there is simply not enough time to get around to talking about it. This pack of cards is designed to spark the best kind of pillow talk: the sort where we explore sex with intimacy, playfulness and intellectual curiosity. Here are sixty questions to provoke some of the best conversations possible, guaranteed to leave us with a new sense of liberation and closeness
£18.00
The School of Life Press Emotional First Aid Kit: help for some of life’s most challenging psychological situations
No matter how much we celebrate individualism and praise the unique, we are, at heart, deeply collective creatures committed to the idea of ‘being normal’. And yet almost all of us feel, in private, that we’re really quite odd, by which we mean : not like anyone else we know. But our picture of what is normal is in fact - very often - way out of line with what is actually true and widespread. Many thoughts, fears and desires that we might assume to be uniquely and disconcertingly strange - and that make us feel painfully ashamed - are in fact completely average. These cards are a tool of self-assessment and reassurance. They ask us to compare ourselves with a range of statements, many of them dark, in order to find out just how weird (or not) we and our loved ones really are. They encourage us not to be ashamed of our uncomfortable thoughts and recognise the sheer normality of our madness, waywardness and alarm. Emergencies Include: ‘I can’t sleep’ ‘I’m in the wrong job’ ‘I might be turning into an addict’ ‘I’m so envious’
£18.00
The School of Life Press The Career Workbook: Fulfilment at Work
A thought-provoking and practical workbook with exercises to help you discover a career that is truly fulfilling. There are few questions harder or lonelier than, ‘What should I do with the rest of my working life?’ We are often simply meant to know the answer. But in private, some of us are acutely aware that we aren’t happy where we are and would love to find a way towards a job that is truly fulfilling. Tantalisingly, many of the answers we need to better direct our futures are inside us, but we need help getting them out, making sense of them and assembling them into a plan. This workbook contains a series of prompts, questions and essays designed to help us systematically understand more about our working identities and to guide us (with something like the skill of a great career therapist) towards an approach to work that will honour our talents and allow us to thrive.
£16.20
The School of Life Press The School of Life: A Job to Love: how to find a fulfilling career
A practical guide to finding fulfilling work by understanding yourself. The idea that work might be fulfilling rather than just necessary is a recent invention. These days, in prosperous areas of the world, we don’t only expect to get paid, we also expect to find meaning and satisfaction. A Job to Love is designed to help us better understand ourselves in order to find a job that is right for us. It explores the myths, traps and confusions that get in our way and shows us how to develop new, effective attitudes and habits.
£9.99
The School of Life Press Big Ideas from History: a history of the world for You
An engaging, alternative history of the world for children, which helps to make sense of today. The present can loom very large in a child’s mind: all the crises and challenges of the modern world can feel overwhelming and at times dispiriting. This book is a big history of the world, from the beginnings of the universe to now, which places the reader at its centre. It encourages them to think about how and why they experience the world as they do and offers a helpful perspective by placing their thoughts and feelings in the context of our history and evolution. Big Ideas From History is an immense story of what has happened through time that speaks personally and constructively to a growing mind. What might the dinosaurs or the ancient Egyptians, the Aztec warriors or the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century tell us that could be interesting and useful to hear now? The insights we need are scattered in time and place, waiting to be discovered. The book also looks to the future and asks the reader to imagine a world they would like to live in. What might they learn from self-knowledge? How can they grow, develop and create their own place in history? It is a thoughtful and inspiring introduction to the world around us, which encourages the child to engage with themselves and others through history.
£19.80
The School of Life Press The Book of Me: a children’s journal of self-discovery
Children love to explore, born with a boundless desire to understand the world around them. While most of the outside world has already been mapped, there’s a whole other world that has yet to be discovered, one that’s accessible only to them: their own minds. The Book of Me is a guided journal of self-discovery. It takes readers on a journey inside themselves, helping them explore their mind, their moods, their imagination, their conscience, and how they determine the course of their lives. Alongside wise and engaging explanations of ideas, each chapter contains a wealth of interactive exercises that together help to create a rich and unique self-portrait. Through writing, drawing, cutting out and colouring in, children can begin to untangle the mysteries of existence and work out who they really are (and who they might become…). Combining psychology, philosophy and sheer fun, The Book of Me is an introduction to the vital art of self-knowledge, showing how it can help us grow into calmer, wiser and more rounded human beings.
£16.20
The School of Life Press Drawing as Therapy: Know Yourself Through Art
One of the difficulties about how our minds work is that we often cannot quite clearly see or know what is inside us. Art therapists have a longstanding tradition of prescribing image-making to prompt expression of feelings, often by asking people to draw, paint, or sculpt “how you feel.” It is one of the fundamental approaches in the field that distinguishes art therapy from verbal techniques that ask people to simply talk about their emotions. Author Erica Jong once wrote that imagery is a form of emotional shorthand. This could be interpreted to mean that while we may use paragraphs of prose to describe an emotional experience, images allow us to communicate simply and directly. At its core, art therapy embraces the paradigm that creating images cuts to the chase when it comes to expressing feelings. The point is not to draw well. But to draw with authenticity. This is specifically a book for people who can’t draw.
£16.20
The School of Life Press Who Am I?: Psychological exercises to develop self-understanding
One of the trickiest tasks we ever face is that of working out who we really are. If we’re asked directly to describe ourselves, our minds tend to go blank. We can’t just sum ourselves up. We need prompts and suggestions and more detailed enquiries that help tease out and organise our picture of ourselves. This book is designed to help us create a psychological portrait of ourselves with the use of some far more unusual, oblique, entertaining and playful prompts. The questions are designed to help us cumulatively appreciate how rich our identities are and how complicated, beautiful and sometimes painful our experiences have been. If self-knowledge is central to a wise and fulfilled life, it is because it teaches us which of our many—often contradictory—feelings and plans we might trust, in order that we can be a little more sceptical around our first impulses and less puzzled by the ebb and flow of our moods. We can understand where some of our feelings have come from and what might be driving our convictions and our longings.
£16.20
The School of Life Press Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
It’s one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same. We marry the wrong person. Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We know that perfection is not on the cards. The fault isn’t entirely our own. In the Classical age one might have considered criteria such as how much land a prospective marriage partner has. In the Romantic age, which still dominates our culture, we place great confidence in intuition – a sense that there is such a thing as ‘the one’, that you understand one another perfectly and that you both never want to sleep with anyone else again. The time has come to bury the Romantic intuition-based view of marriage and learn to practice and rehearse marriage as one would ice-skating or violin playing, activities no more deserving of systematic periods of instruction. A Collection of Three Essays: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person When is One Ready to Get Married? How Love Stories Ruin Our Love Lives
£10.00
The School of Life Press A Voice of One's Own: a story about confidence and self-belief
A beautifully photographic therapeutic novel which teaches us about our own emotions through a young woman’s journey of self-discovery. This is a novel with a striking mission at its heart: not just to tell us a story but to show us – through the example of one life – how we might change our own. The novel introduces us to Anna, a kind, inspiring, thoughtful but modest and self-questioning person, in whom we might catch echoes of ourselves. Life has been hard of late for Anna: her job is putting her under extreme pressure, her relationship is lacking the support she craves, her parents have saddled her with a complicated emotional history. And yet she is determined to progress and liberate herself from her inhibitions. In a style that’s brief and poignant, accompanied by lyrical and thought-provoking images, we follow Anna as she slowly unpicks the roots of her self-suspicion and discovers something we all deserve but have so often been denied: a voice of our own.
£15.00
£16.41
Penguin Books Ltd The School of Life: An Emotional Education
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Give the gift of inspiration: an essential guide to living wisely and well, no matter what challenges the world throws at you - from Alain de Botton, the bestselling author of The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel and The Course of LoveThis is a book about everything you were never taught at school. It's about how to understand your emotions, find and sustain love, succeed in your career, fail well and overcome shame and guilt. It's also about letting go of the myth of a perfect life in order to achieve genuine emotional maturity. Written in a hugely accessible, warm and humane style, The School of Life is the ultimate guide to the emotionally fulfilled lives we all long for - and deserve. This book brings together ten years of essential and transformative research on emotional intelligence, with practical topics including: - how to understand yourself- how to master the dilemmas of relationships- how to become more effective at work - how to endure failure- how to grow more serene and resilient Praise for Alain de Botton:'What he has managed to do is remarkable: to help us think better so that we may live better lives' Irish Times'A serious and optimistic set of practical ideas that could improve and alter the way we live' Jeanette Winterson, The Times'Alain de Botton likes to take big, complex subjects and write about them with thoughtful and deceptive innocence' Observer
£10.99