The School of Life

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. It's a big ask and explains why so many people have an identity crisis in their work lives. The School of Life: 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. With compassion and practicality, this book guides us to discover our true talents and to make sense of our confusion, desires, and aspirations - before it is too late. FIND A CAREER YOU LOVE: a guide to finding fulfilling work through self-exploration. PRACTICAL EXAMPLES AND EXERCISES: to inspire fresh thinking about our jobs and ourselves. BEAUTIFULLY PRODUCED: with classic black and white illustrations. PART OF THE NEW PAPERBACK SERIES 'LESSONS FOR LIFE'

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

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.

Whether we’re big or small, it can be hard to get away from our screens. Most children spend between five and seven hours a day looking at some form of screen – and most grown-ups spend twice as much time. Screens promise endless entertainment, but the more time we spend with them, the more we lose sight of all that is strange, fascinating and delightful in the world around us. Even when we’re stuck indoors, there are infinite possibilities for banishing boredom and having fun so long as we use our imagination. All we need are a few helpful suggestions.... No-tech Fun contains 80 of the weirdest and most wonderful activities children can do at home , all without using a screen. Rather than scrolling or tapping, you’ll be invited to draw, make, write, invent, dress up, hide, seek and discover. You can paint like Picasso or meditate like Buddha; become an indoor entomologist or a home Olympian; make up a new language or a mythical creature; and even find the fun in some household chores. Inventive and irreverent, this book is the perfect companion for humdrum days and wet weekends. It is a compendium of the world’s strangest, silliest and most stimulating activities.

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.

Everyone tells kids that art matters – but the truth is that very often it’s hard to know why it really does. Museum visits can feel like a chore as does having to learn the names of the big artists we’re all meant to love (but perhaps don’t quite in the way we’re supposed to). This is a huge pity because – grasped the right way – art has a deep capacity to improve our lives and offer us a sense of joy and mental well-being. Here is a guide to art for children with a difference: in a tone that’s kindly, informative, unstuffy and at times rightly irreverent, this book explains how art can fit into our lives. We learn where the impulse to make art comes from, what art to look at in certain moods, how to go around a museum without getting bored and why – without even realising it – we all become experts in art by decorating our first bedrooms. This is an innovative guide to the importance of art, produced in a way that will enchant children and, along the way, teach their favourite adults one or two vital things as well.

Children are rarely introduced properly to architecture, but there are in fact few subjects more important – because the quality of the architecture that surrounds us has such an impact on our mood and sense of well-being. The bitter truth is that in modern times, we’ve built a world that’s far too often ugly or uncharming – and we’ve done so because only a very few people ever feel they have the right to comment on what gets built around them. This is a chance for the next generation to develop the tools to talk about architecture with confidence, knowledge and passion. It tells us about what a satisfying building is, what makes a street enticing (or not), why some cities are charming and others repel us – and how we might build going forward in a way that will reliably delight and uplift us. This engaging and beautifully illustrated guide is designed to help children (and their favourite adults) to understand how buildings work and how we might create the better looking world we all crave and 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.

It is a daily undertaking – a morning shot of coffee, an absentminded sandwich at your desk, a hastily assembled dinner with the remnants from the fridge... With its every day ubiquity we can make the mistake of assuming that food is of little importance, or simply fuel to see us through the day. But what is its real impact on our emotional lives, and how can we better nourish ourselves? What we eat and how we eat it has a significant impact on our psychological well-being. In recent times, our society has been eager to recruit food to the project of physical health, but we’ve not always paid so much attention to how cooking and eating can assist us with our emotional health. With over 150 recipes, Thinking & Eating shows how ingredients and dishes can be supporters of certain ideas, emotions and states of mind that best help us confront the challenges of existence. In each recipe we discover of the ways in which food can store, memorialise and transmit the most important ideas of our lives.

Almost no one gets through life without, at some point, having their heart broken. Advice at such a dark moment tends to focus on letting time do the healing. But there is also a vital role for understanding and perspective. We sometimes make our situation far worse than it needs to be through certain ideas we develop about why we’ve been left. We start to tell ourselves that we are not good enough, that we fail at everything, that this one rejection means we will always be maltreated… Our thoughts make our sorrow a great deal more intense than it could be. This is a book to help us over heartbreak by offering us some context, some history, some psychology and a little philosophy. We learn about how our responses to abandonment are formed, what the best way to think about an ex might be and how to envisage future relationships when we are in despair. We come away gently cheered that we are not alone, consoled that our suffering will have an end - and intrigued by the endless and subtle sorrows and joys of relationships.

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

Dating might seem a trivial and relatively inconsequential part of love, but it is in fact key to getting into the kind of relationship that can last and help us flourish. The process we call dating sits on top of some of the largest themes of love: how to know whether or not someone is right for us; how soon to settle and how long to search; how to be at once honest and seductive; how to politely extricate oneself without causing offence. This little book is an indispensable guide to the dating process. It teaches us about the history of dating (and why the way we are dating now is so novel and so perplexing), the reason why our dating days can be so anxious, how we should discuss our past on a date, what questions we might ask a new partner, how to optimise our attempts at dating - and how to digest and overcome so-called ‘bad’ dates. The book is at once heartfelt and perceptive and never minimises the agony, joys and confusions of our dating days and nights. It provides us with the ideal wise roadmap to the varied, sometimes delightful, sometime daunting realities of dating.

Not being able to sleep is deeply frightening. We panic about our ability to cope with the demands of the next day; we panic that we are panicking; the possibility of sleep recedes ever further as the clock counts down to another exhausted, irritable dawn. Our societies have learnt to treat insomnia with the best applied discipline we know: medicine – in particular, with pills powerful enough to wrestle consciousness into submission. But there are other things to do besides, or alongside, medicalising insomnia. We can reflect on our sleeplessness, define it to ourselves and others, try to understand where it springs from in human nature and speculate on what it might - in its own confused way - be trying to tell us. This book is an eloquent guide to, and companion through, the long sleepless hours of the night. We come away from its soothing pages informed, consoled and armed with insights that will make us feel a lot less alone – as we wait for sleep, eventually, to come.

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 presents a range of areas in which we might seek the meaning of life, including love, family, friendship, work, self-knowledge and nature. We learn why certain things feel meaningful while others don’t, and consider how we might introduce more meaning into our activities. Topics covered in this book: LoveVague self-understandingFamilyProvincialismWork SelflessnessFriendshipImmortalityCultureThe art of storytellingPoliticsNaturePhilosophy

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.’

Being a parent can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is also - intermittently - the cause of some of our deepest sorrows. It is likely that we will spend at least some of the time in despair and confusion, wondering whether it really had to be so hard. Philosophy has, over the last 2,000 years, been a discipline committed to calm, kindness, perspective and a reduction of paranoia. It is one of the most useful sources of solace and humanity. This invaluable book is made up of 26 small essays that aim provide understanding of and consolation for the trials and pleasures of parenting. They will provoke insight, recognition and a far more forgiving, generous assessment of one's challenges. The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting promises us a gentle way of staying calm around one of the most arduous yet deeply fulfilling jobs in the world. What people are saying about The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting: “Very helpful and wise insights that bring a little peace of mind.” “Great book and it's a must give gift for new parents.” Jeff “This is a very moving and reassuring. Beautiful quality book too.” Sam “Thanks School of Life, it's been an eye opening and reassuring read.” Beth “The presentation as a board book for children is great fun. It made advice seem light handed and possible.” Josephine

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