Career Workbook
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 kn...
School of Life: Relationships
A book to inspire closeness and connection, helping people not only to find love but to make it last. Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships - yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to sup...
The School Of Life - Stay Or Leave
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.
School of Life: A Job to Love
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 als...
Small Pleasures
So often, we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures - while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which - if only we paid more attention - could daily bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. But ...
Reasons to be Hopeful
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 h...
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. Th...
Therapeutic Atlas
The world is full of places that inspire and bring us joy: they might be exceptionally beautiful, resonant with history, untouched by civilisation or rich in memory. This is an atlas that gathers together some of the most enchanting and reinvigora...
On Self-hatred
A guide to emotional healing and living a more self-accepting life by learning to love oneself. 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 mea...
School of Life: Calm
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 ad...
Art Against Despair
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 fr...
How Emotionally Mature Are You?
Most of us long to be more emotionally mature and better able to face life's challenges with poise, confidence, kindness and good-natured intelligence. We want to be proper grown-ups. With gentleness and insight, How Emotionally Mature Are You? he...
Confidence Workbook
The difference between a successful and a disappointing life often comes down to a critical ingredient that we overlook at our peril: confidence. What makes one life cheerful, purposeful and energetic and another less so typically has nothing to d...
Self-Improvement Journal
This journal invites us to regularly check in on ourselves - what we want, where we want to change, and where we need to go - in order to maximise our chances of leading a fulfilled and contented life. The journal helps us to carve out time to foc...
How Ready Are You For Love?
Most questionnaires are just a bit of fun, but this one sets out to be both entertaining and useful. It offers us nothing less than a guide to the comforting and supportive relationships we long for. With online apps taking over the dating game, it has never been more crucial to know the rules. Through a series of pertinent questions, it reveals our distinctive style of loving, what our strengths and weaknesses are with partners, and how we might secure genuine fulfilment. As we work through the questionnaire and its accompanying essays, we discover the many reasons why relationships go wrong, and how they might do so less often in the future. The book considers the role of self-hatred, the influence of childhood, the importance of vulnerability, the appeal of unavailable people, and the best ways to overcome patterns of self-doubt and unhealthy attachment. Our minds are such confusing places, even the most thoughtful among us can fail to know central things about how we behave in relationships. This questionnaire will help us to understand ourselves more clearly and so set us free to discover the love we deserve.
Essential Ideas 1: Love
In the first of a series of pocket books, The School of Life has distilled its most essential ideas on love in order to produce a bitesize manual that is both useful and entertaining. We learn - among other things - how to pick partners more relia...
The Secrets Of Successful Relationships
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 in 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. Chapters such as "Learning to Love Oneself", "Knowing What to Overlook", "Good Listening" and "The Importance of Bad Dates" prompt us to think about how we can achieve success in love. In a tone that's warm, encouraging and often funny, we learn how to communicate effectively, how to manage differences, what to do when sexual problems arise, how to air grievances, the best way to share a home and - when things grow truly problematic - how to judge whether or not we should stay or leave. This handbook shows us how to take the necessary, careful, intelligent steps towards the contented love we deserve.
The Secrets Of Successful Friendships
Few things promise as much potential happiness as friendship, yet the challenge of finding and maintaining meaningful connections remains one of life's great struggles. Drawing on psychology, philosophy and cultural history, The Secrets of Successful Friendships offers a thoughtful exploration of why friendship is both more complex and more rewarding than we typically imagine. It examines why we get lonely, what holds us back from deeper connections, and how we might develop the emotional intelligence needed for lasting bonds. With characteristic wisdom and warmth, the book explores different varieties of friendship, from casual acquaintances to profound lifelong connections, while offering practical insights into overcoming common obstacles like shyness, envy and fear of vulnerability. By explaining friendship's true purpose, the book gives us a chance to build new relationships of genuine depth and meaning.
Getting Over Your Parents
Our parents are a huge deal: no matter our relationship to them, who we are today (what love stories we get into, our attitudes to work, our self-esteem) is crucially determined by our relationships with our origin families. Following on from the bestselling How To Overcome Your Childhood, Getting Over Your Parents is a practical guide on how to navigate the complex legacies left to us by our parents. By exploring different types of parents, such as "The Preoccupied Parent", "The Overprotective Parent"' and "The Controlling Parent", it gives us a vocabulary with which to understand some of the stranger and more difficult things that parents sometimes do to their children, as well as advice on how to move forward from our puzzles or confusions. The emphasis is never on blame, always on understanding. Offering constructive solutions for dealing with the symptoms of a difficult childhood, this book helps us to explore the past so that we can avoid the mistakes our parents made, and secure for ourselves the more creative, calm and loving future we deserve.
Voice of One's Own
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 ...
From Trauma to Healing
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 anxiet...
Big Ideas from Literature
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 ...
Essential Ideas 2: Self-Awareness
In the second of a series of pocket books, The School of Life has distilled its most essential ideas on self-awareness in order to produce a bitesize manual that is both useful and entertaining. Understanding ourselves is the key to unlocking our ...
Couple's Workbook
Therapeutic exercises to help couples nurture patience, forgiveness and humour. Here is a workbook containing the very best exercises that any couple can undertake to help their relationship function optimally; exercises to foster understanding, p...
Who Am I?
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 enquirie...
Life Lessons from Bergson
Life Lessons from Bergson
Life Lessons from Hobbes
The School of Life offers radical ways to help us raid the treasure trove of human knowledge' Independent on Sunday Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher. Born in Wiltshire in 1588, his masterpiece, Leviathan, established the foundation for Western political thought and inspired both hate and awe. He revealed the darker side of human nature and the value of authority. But he also showed us how to flourish, how to be fearless and free, so that our lives need not be 'nasty, brutish and short'. Here you will find insights from his greatest work. The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary, everyday dilemmas. These books emphasize ways in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. 'thoroughly welcoming and approachable ... [an] invigorating essay on Hobbes ... If the six books in the Life Lessons series can teach even a few readers to pay passionate heed to the
Life Lessons from Freud
Life Lessons from Freud
What Are You Feeling?
An illustrated guide to emotions that helps children identify and articulate how they are really feeling. What Are You Feeling? is the first in a series of books that aims to develop emotional literacy for children aged 5-8 years. It is a book abo...
On Loneliness
On Loneliness
Calm in 40 Images
Calm in 40 Images
How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds
We are so used to living in a media-saturated world that we do not notice just how much damage is being done to us daily by the images we see and the articles and posts we read. If you are often anxious or find it hard to sleep, or you regularly w...
School of Life: On Failure
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 fai...
School of Life: Quotes to Live By
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 div...
The School Of Life Guide To Modern Manners
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? It is often confusing to know how to act around others and navigate social situations. This book features twenty case-studies on common social dilemmas and our possible responses to them, contributing to a new and original philosophy of graceful conduct.
Big Ideas from Science
Science is all around us, helping to explain the ideas that matter in our life. By asking questions about how things work, we can gain a deeper understanding of the world and our place in it. Big Ideas from Science introduces children to some of the most influential scientists throughout history, and the amazing scientific breakthroughs that have changed the way we live – from the discovery of bronze to the invention of the microscope. With engaging facts and playful illustrations, children are encouraged to follow their innate curiosity, to look at the world in different ways and to try and make sense of it. The book shows us how science not only helps us invent incredible new technology, understand the structure of atoms or reach the moon, but can also help us with some of the most important questions in our lives: how can I become a wiser person, a better friend and a kinder, more compassionate human?
More Loving World
The modern world is richer, safer and more connected than ever before but it is - arguably - also a far less loving world than we need or want: impatience, self-righteousness, moralism and viciousness are rife, while forgiveness, tolerance and sym...
The Meaning Of Life
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.
School of Life: On Mental Illness
We accept without shame that most organs in our bodies might at some point develop problems - and could need a bit of help. We should not make an exception of our minds. Our lives are so complicated and so filled with burdens, we should be complet...