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

We too often assume that we must accept the levels of confidence we currently possess. But confidence is not a given: it is a quality we can learn about and develop in ourselves. These Confidence Prompt Cards keep a variety of consoling and invigorating arguments at the front of our minds, ready for the greater and smaller challenges of our lives. They remind us, for the sake of confidence, not to think too well of others; to speak to ourselves in kinder tones; and to remember that the greatest thing we should fear isn’t messing up, but dying without having given it a go. Example Cards: ‘Everyone is afraid - even those who frighten us.’ ‘Confidence is what translates theory into practice. It should never be thought of as the enemy of good things; it is their crucial and legitimate catalyst. We need to develop confidence in confidence.’ ‘We have not seen enough of the rough drafts of those we admire Confidence means forgiving ourselves for the horrors of our first attempts.’

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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.

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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

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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’

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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

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