Showing results by author "The School of Life" in All Categories

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.

Love has a history and we ride - sometimes rather helplessly - on its currents. Since around 1750, we have been living in a highly distinctive era in the history of love that we can call Romanticism. And it has been a disaster for love. Relationships challenges the assumptions of the Romantic view of love. It shows how to develop new attitudes that can lead to a psychologically mature vision of love.

Bringing up 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. The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of life lessons, including how to say ‘no’ to a child you adore, how to look beneath the surface of ‘bad’ behavior to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence.

A book to offer clarity and guidance when facing the difficult decision of whether your relationship has a future. Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront.

We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve.

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 learned 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?

We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence - one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives.

Behind many of our problems lies an often ignored factor: we don’t like ourselves very much. We are sufferers of self-hatred. We tell ourselves the meanest things. It’s because of self-hatred that we tend to neglect our potential at work and get entangled in unfulfilling relationships, that we lack confidence in our social lives and suffer from anxiety, despair and imposter syndrome.

From Trauma to Healing is a practical guide to breaking free of these traumas and finding hope for the future. In four chapters, Causes of Trauma, Symptoms of Trauma, Relocating Trauma, and Processing Trauma, we learn what trauma is, how it can affect us for decades, and how we can liberate ourselves from it in a healthy way.

It can sometimes seem a mystery why some couples stay together and thrive—while many more split up or drag on scratchily. While we might think happy love is left to chance, there are some identifiable secrets that underpin good relationships that we can learn and put into practice. The first title of a new series, The Secrets of Successful Relationships draws upon the expertise of The School of Life therapists to teach us the key ingredients of contented love.

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.

A compassionate guide to normalizing mental illness and achieving emotional wellbeing. This is a guide to coping with a wide variety of mental unwellness, from the very mild to the severe. It explains how and why we become mentally ill, how we can explain our experiences to friends and family, and how we can reframe our view of ourselves and our future in order to thrive.

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.

The second book in The School of Life's 'Secrets' series, offering lessons on the emotional skills necessary to build and maintain friendships.

Few life skills are as neglected, yet as important, as the ability to remain calm. Our very worst decisions and interactions are almost invariably the result of a loss of calm - and a descent into anxiety and agitation. Surprisingly, but very fortunately, our power to remain calm can be rehearsed and improved. We don’t have to stay where we are now: our responses to everyday challenges can dramatically alter. This is a book that patiently unpacks the causes of our greatest stresses and gives us a succession of arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and fury.

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. It's a big ask and explains why so many people have an identity crisis in their work lives. 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.

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...

This book presents a range of areas in which we can seek the meaning of life, including love, family, friendship, work, self-knowledge and nature. We discover why some things feel meaningful and others don't, and learn how to introduce more meaning into our daily lives.

We exhaust ourselves and the planet in the search for very large pleasures, while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which—if we only pay more attention—can bring us solace and joy on a daily basis. This is a guidebook to life's small pleasures: everything from the distinct delight of holding a child's hand to the joy of watching the evening sky. It's an intriguing, evocative collection that will heighten our senses and return us to the world with newfound excitement and enthusiasm.

This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression, rage, or bitterness. It’s a serene, wise, and kindly response to the difficulties of being alive. It helps us navigate a wise and rational middle ground between extreme despair and naïve optimism. But melancholy is a well-kept secret. It isn't celebrated or recommended. It remains relatively unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age.