Visar resultat för..."The School of Life Press"

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?

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.

We may spend years mastering the external world – acquiring degrees, advancing careers, building families – without ever turning inwards to make sense of the person orchestrating it all: ourselves.This book is a guide to the elusive, essential task of self-knowledge. With clarity, gentleness and depth, it explores why we are often mysteries to ourselves, how our childhoods quietly script our behaviours and why seemingly trivial experiences – an abrupt word, a strange dream, a lingering mood – can hold the keys to profound insight.Drawing on the wisdom of philosophy and psychotherapy, Know Yourself teaches us how to tune in to our inner signals, revisit the past without fear and better understand our desires, fears, patterns and longings. It is a call to begin the lifelong project of making sense of who we are – so that we might suffer less, connect more deeply with others and lead calmer, freer lives.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We spend our lives inside ourselves and yet understanding our inner world remains one of our most complex challenges. This enlightening and practical book offers a collection of transformative psychological tests designed to illuminate the hidden dimensions of our psyches.Through a curated selection of 50 psychological exercises, you’ll embark on an intimate journey of self-discovery. These tests invite you to look beneath the surface of your conscious thoughts, uncovering the subtle narratives that shape your emotions, relationships and sense of self.Each test is an invitation to explore your unspoken fears, your deepest desires and the unconscious patterns that drive your behaviours, providing unprecedented insight into your inner workings.

In an overcomplicated world, what many of us crave deep down is greater simplicity: less clutter, fewer commitments, less static and chaos. This ingenious set of cards asks us a range of deceptively simple questions – which we can answer by ourselves or with friends – that focus our minds on what really counts. They give us confidence to assess what we might give up on and where our true focus should lie. They ask us to look at our careers, our relationships, our family lives, and our ambitions more broadly. In a few easy steps, the cards help us prioritise and sift – and, with gentle humour, guide us to the simpler lives we long for and deserve. Examples Name ten ‘friends’ you keep seeing but that – in truth – you might be entirely content never to meet up with again.You’ve probably read hundreds of books to date. Which three have really mattered?Imagine that you were only allowed to make two more trips abroad in your life. Where still offers you something – and why?It’s the end of your life; what are two things you really want to tell the world in brief and simple terms?

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

All of us have – to a greater or lesser extent – suffered from traumas in our lives, often at a young age. The less we address these traumas, the more they have a habit of causing us difficulties in the form of broken relationships, nagging anxieties, depression, or physical symptoms like insomnia, digestive issues or backache.This book helps us understand what trauma is, how it can affect us for decades, and how we can liberate ourselves from its unfair and painful legacy. At once deeply practical and packed with ideas, the book functions like a humane and wise guide through a range of our most puzzling psychological difficulties. We are shown how to understand our pasts, assess our pains and finally say goodbye to troubles and repetitive patterns that have dogged us for too long.This – at last – is a route to liberation and the calm self-awareness and fulfilment we have been searching for.

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.

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

To wonder too openly or intensely about the meaning of life can seem a peculiar, ill-fated and faintly ridiculous pastime. It can seem like a topic on which ordinary mortals cannot make much progress. In truth, it is for all of us to wonder about, define and work towards a more meaningful existence.This book considers a range of options for where the meaning of life can be found, including love, family, friendship, work, self-knowledge and nature. We learn why certain things feel meaningful while others do not, and consider how we might introduce more meaning into our activities.What follows is a hugely thought-provoking and practical guide to one of the greatest questions we will ever face.

One of the most unexpectedly useful things we can do when we’re feeling glum or out of sorts is to look at pictures. The best works of art can lift our spirits, remind us of what we love and return perspective to our situation. A few moments in front of the right picture can rescue us.This is a collection of 100 of the world’s most consoling and uplifting images, accompanied by small essays that talk about the works in a way that offers us comfort and inspiration. The images in the book range wildly across time and space: from ancient to modern art, east to west, north to south, taking in photography, painting, abstract and figurative art. All the images have been carefully chosen to help us with a particular problem we might face: a broken heart, a difficulty at work, the meanness of others, the challenges of family and friendsWe’re invited to look at art with unusual depth and then find our way towards new hope and courage.This is a portable museum dedicated to beauty and consolation, a unique book about art which is also about psychology and healing: a true piece of art therapy.

A guide to developing the art of finding serenity by understanding the sources of our anxiety and frustrations.Almost all of us wish we could be calmer; it is one of the distinctive longings of the modern age.Across history people have sought adventure and excitement, however a new priority for many of us is a desire to be more tranquil. This is a book designed to support us in our endeavours to remain calm against all the adversities life throws at us.A calm state of mind is not a divine gift, we can alter our responses to everyday things and educate ourselves in the art of remaining calm, not through slow breathing or special teas, but through thinking.This is a book that explores the causes of our greatest stresses and anxieties and gives us a succession of highly persuasive, beautiful and sometimes dryly comic arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and confusion.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.

Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront.What makes the issue so hard is that there are no fixed rules for judgement. How can we tell whether a relationship is ‘good enough’ or plain wrong? How do we draw the line between justified longing and naivety? Is sex vital or could it be foregone? Does someone ‘better’ actually exist? How much should the feelings of children be counted (and what might they be in the long term)? Could one’s partner change, perhaps with therapy, or should one assume that who they are now is who they will always be?This paperback edition walks the reader gently through their options and opens their mind to perspectives they might not have considered. It aims to take the reader towards a time, presently hard to imagine, when the choice will no longer feel so agonising. Using its lessons, we can understand ourselves deeply, consider our options, minimise our regrets and find the way ahead.What readers are saying about the hardback edition‘...a wonderfully quick and thought-provoking read.’‘An excellent book to help you make decisions in your personal life...’‘gives an insight into both sides of the relationship and the dynamics which may be at play’.

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 PersonWhen is One Ready to Get Married?How Love Stories Ruin Our Love Lives

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.

In the third of a series of pocket books, The School of Life has distilled its most essential ideas on serenity in order to produce a bitesize manual that is both useful and entertaining.Knowing how to fight off anxiety and remain calm belong to the greatest skills we can ever aspire to. Only with a serene state of mind are we in any position to enjoy all the other good things in life: friendship, love, family or work. Here is selection of The School of Life’s finest essays on the art of serenity. They teach us how to achieve the correct perspective on our problems, how to understand the worst of our fears and how to surround ourselves with the sort of people who can help us in our quest for a less anxious existence.We have – most of us – already spent far too long on needless worry; here at last is a crucial guide to the less turbulent future we deserve.

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.

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.

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.

Great stories are often universal: our very souls shine with new ideas when we read them.Books can be so powerful, helping us through tricky times, offering us wisdom we haven’t learnt yet, showing us that there are people like us, or showing us the opposite, that other people live very different lives. Books can be a friend when you need one the most and you can use them to help and inspire others, too.Big Ideas from Literature helps the child discover key ideas that lots of different books are trying to teach through the stories they tell – and helps the growing child develop empathy and resilience.This book teaches children (and adults!) about the history of literature, from the first ever story that was written down to the invention of books just for children. The best children’s books become our dearest friends and companions. Children discover characters from a diverse range of books – including J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Young Dark Emu: A Truer History by Bruce Pascoe – and learn how these stories can help them better understand the world around them.

This NEW Big Ideas Series book introduces art as something children can use, not just study. It shows how art connects to our feelings, helps us understand ourselves, and can bring comfort, excitement and joy. Readers will learn how to look at art without feeling bored, what kinds of art might help in different moods, and why everyone becomes an art expert long before they ever visit a museum.Clear, engaging and reassuring, this book encourages children to be curious, confident and independent in their responses to art — while quietly offering adults a fresh way to think about it too.Part of Best-selling Big Ideas series - introducing key cultural ideas in a clear, reassuring and accessible way for children aged 9–11.Shows why art matters, by connecting artworks to children’s emotions, moods and everyday experiences rather than facts or history.Encourages young readers to trust their own responses and tastes, helping them feel confident rather than intimidated by art.Presents art as emotionally useful, showing how different kinds of images can bring calm, joy, curiosity or comfort.Supports emotional literacy, wellbeing and independent thinking, aligning with PSHE and arts education goals.Ideal for shared reading, appealing to children while offering fresh insights for parents, carers and teachers.

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

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.

As grown-ups, one of our deepest urges is for life to be more adventurous: a little more excitement, novelty, interest and passion. Unfortunately, many adventures, especially the ‘big’ kinds, are too expensive, threaten to upturn everything and can upset those who rely on us. What we therefore badly need is access to smaller, more pocket-sized adventures.We call these ‘Everyday Adventures’ – from something tiny like eating an unfamiliar fruit from the market to rereading your favourite book to asking a parent what they were like as a teenager. This is a suggestion box to spark the imagination, revive the spirit and motivate us towards the slightly more adventurous lives we long for.Adventures include: Write down five questions you wish someone else would ask you; ask them of someone else.Set your alarm before sunrise and go for a walk