The School of Life

A practical guide to finding fulfilling work by better understanding yourself.

Alongside a satisfying relationship, a career we love is one of the foremost requirements for a fulfilled life. Unfortunately, it is devilishly hard to understand oneself well enough to know quite where one's energies should be directed. A Job To Love is designed to help us out of some of these impasses. It is a guide to how we can better understand ourselves and locate a job that is right for us.

With compassion and a deeply practical spirit, this book guides us to discover our true talents and to make sense of our confused desires and aspirations before it is too late.

The idea that work might be fulfilling rather than just painfully necessary is a strikingly recent invention. Nowadays, in prosperous areas of the world, we don't only expect to obtain money through labour, we also, to a greater or lesser extent, expect to find meaning and satisfaction. It's a big ask and explains why career crises are so common. Unfortunately, it is devilishly hard to understand oneself well enough to know quite where one's energies should be directed. A Job To Love is designed to help us better understand ourselves in order to locate a job that is right for us. It explores the many myths, traps and confusions that get in our way, and shows how to develop new, effective attitudes and habits. With compassion and a deeply practical spirit, this book guides us to discover our true talents and to make sense of our confused desires and aspirations before it is too late.

Chapters include:

• How we came to desire a job we could love
• The 'vocation myth'
• The output/input confusion
• The dangers of success
• Confidence and inner voices
• The 'perfectionism trap'
• The imposter syndrome
• Good enough work

Read an extract from the book.

Hardback book

A Children's Guide to Emotional Well-being

From the 'School of Life' comes this comprehensive guide to being human for young people who are ready to turn to a book for some answers.  Ideal for 9 years and older.

Our minds are beautifully complicated and brilliant machines.  For much of our lives, these machines run efficiently with minimal maintenance.  However, just like our other organs, they do require some proper attention every now and then and recognising this at an early age can help as children progress into adulthood.

This is a guide designed to help children become more aware of their emotional needs and examines a range of topics that might give their minds difficulties, for example:

• When parents don’t seem to understand us
• When we are finding it hard to make friends
• When we feel angry, anxious or lack confidence
• When school feels boring or difficult

We explore a range of common scenarios encountered by children and talk about some of the very best ideas to help deal with them. By offering a sympathetic and supportive framework, Happy, Healthy Minds encourages children to open up, explore their feelings and face the dilemmas of growing up armed with emotional intelligence.

Hardcover, with illustrations by Lizzie Stewart.  168 pages.   246 mm x 180 mm.

Published by The School of Life.

Extracts from the Book:

On Bullies

“People behave badly — they get angry or they do and say mean things — when they are afraid of something. Usually you can’t see what they are afraid of and they don’t tell you. They feel they can’t explain their fear, and they are worried that if they tried to explain no one would understand. So they cover up their fears. They try to look as if they aren’t afraid at all. Maybe this happens to you sometimes.”

On Frustration

“Both anger and sadness start off with frustration, with a wish that has not been fulfilled. But the frustration will make us sad when it is expected. It might make us furious when it is a surprise. What makes us angry are frustrations, large or small, that we have not budgeted for; that we didn’t expect to happen.”

On Confidence

“If we know we might look stupid, because everyone does at one time or another, it gives us permission to try things where we risk looking stupid — which includes all the most interesting situations in life. If you are too concerned about looking sensible, you’ll never audition for the school play, paint a crazy picture, or try speaking a foreign language.”

Choosing a partner is one of the most consequential and tricky decisions we will ever make, and the cost of repeated failure is immense. This book explains why we have the ‘types’ we do, and how our early experiences give us scripts of how and whom we love. It sheds light on harmful repetitive patterns and the extent to which we are not always simply choosing people who can make us happy. We learn the most common techniques we use to sabotage our chances of fulfilment and why, despite their costs, we unwittingly engage in them. This book provides a crucial set of ideas to help us make safer, more imaginative and more effective choices in love.

Chapters Include

• Introduction: From Reason to Instinct
• Why We Fall in Love with Particular People
• Our Problems With the People We Are Attracted To
• Improving Our Problematic Instincts
• Obstacles to Finding Love
• Conclusion: Realism

Read an extract of the book

The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of life lessons, including how to say 'No', how to look beneath the surface of "bad" behavior to find the root of what is going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, and how to handle the moodiness of adolescence. 

Rather than striving for perfection, the book argues, the job of any parent is in fact to guide a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. 

Encouraging, wry, and steeped 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, humor, and love.

• COMPASSIONATE ADVICE: for raising content toddlers into resourceful teens.
• FOR BUSY PARENTS: includes digestible, accessible lessons in parenting.
• ACTIONABLE TIPS: for balancing parental instinct with the acquisition of new skills.
• EMOTIONAL CURRICULUM: with lessons in curiosity, listening, manners, and adolescence.

Hardcover.

Published by The School of Life.