Alain De Botton

The School of Life

Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is the ultimate soft skill of the twenty-first century. Drawing on his work in the hugely successful School of Life organisation, Alain de Botton presents a compendium of emotional intelligence. Using his trademark mixture of analysis, anecdote, insight and practical wisdom, he considers how we interact with each and with ourselves, and how we can do so better. From the reigning master of popular philosophy, this is an essential look at the skill set that defines our modern lives.

The School of Life: an Emotional Education

Simple tools from 60 great thinkers throughout history to improve your life today.

Great Thinkers

A thought-provoking essay that teaches us that confidence is not a gift from the gods, but a skill that can be learned.

On Confidence

A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking.

How to Think More Effectively

A collection of the essential emotional lessons we need in order to thrive.

What They Forgot to Teach You at School

This book explores 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. 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. 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.

A guide to greater serenity, ease, and clarity

A Simpler Life

An examination of the importance of self-knowledge, providing practical exercises to aid self-discovery.

Self-Knowledge

A fresh approach to matters of the heart, teaching us that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck.

Relationships

Roman Krznaric

This is a book about how to take working life in new directions – how to negotiate the labyrinth of choices, how to think about personal ambitions and motivations, and ultimately how to take concrete steps to finding a fulfilling career. It is a self-help book with a difference. Standard career guides are filled with pop psychology and bullet-point advice for writing CVs and making action plans, but How to Find Fulfilling Work casts its net wider. While not ignoring the insights of psychology or the need for practical planning, it reveals wisdom about work found in sociology, history, literature, film and philosophy. It may be a false illusion that there is some perfect dream job out there for us, an ideal calling or vocation. But this book is premised on the idea that it is possible to find work that is life-enhancing. This is a book that inspires as much as it instructs and will aid self-reflection about the wider quest of how to live a good life.

How to Find Fulfilling Work

A guide to breaking free from the enduring, and sometimes damaging, behavioral patterns learned in childhood. When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we may, as adults, be struggling, is that we were denied the opportunity to fully be ourselves in our earliest years. Perhaps we were over-disciplined and cowed, not allowed to be willful or difficult--and so learned to tell white lies and people-please. Or perhaps our caregivers were preoccupied or fragile and so we had to assume the role of parent, burying our true needs and desires deep underground. When we thoroughly examine our upbringings, the larger implications for our adult selves are clear to see. Once we understand the roots from which our flaws stem, we can set about correcting the harmful behaviors we mistakenly believe to be innate. This book is a guide to better understanding our younger selves in order to shape who we wish to be in the future. It explores to what extent we can pin our actions in the present to our experiences in the past, and how we might then break free from the learned patterns of our childhoods.

How to Overcome Your Childhood

Philippa Perry

A handbook to console, nourish and gently lead us on the path to emotional balance. There is no simple set of instructions that can guarantee sanity, but if you want to overcome emotional difficulties and become happier, psychotherapist Philippa Perry argues that there are four cornerstones to sanity you can influence to bring about change. By developing your self-observation skills, examining how you relate to others, breaking out of your comfort zone and exploring new ways of defining yourself, she suggests ways of getting over your problems and feeling more "normal". This book explores techniques to help you find emotional equilibrium, such as practising mindfulness, being emotionally honest in your relationships with others, challenging your brain in new and exciting ways, and finding cause for optimism. Through case studies, practical exercises and stories of individual experience, this insightful and inspirational book reaches out to anyone in need of a little emotional support from time to time.

How to Stay Sane

A guide to developing the art of finding serenity, not through meditation, but through understanding the sources of our anxiety and frustrations.

Calm

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 we need some encouragement to focus our gaze. This is a book to guide us to the best of life's small pleasures: everything from the distinctive delight of holding a child's hand to the enjoyment of disagreeing with someone to the joy of the evening sky; an intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures that will heighten our senses and return us to the world with new-found excitement and enthusiasm.

Small Pleasures

An exploration of what lies behind our problematic behavioural patterns in the workplace and how we can overcome them.

The Emotionally Intelligent Office

Introduces twenty-five of history's leading figures in philosophy, including Buddha, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and how their philosophical ideas continue to matter in today's world.

An Introduction to Philosophy

Big Ideas for Curious Minds

Most books that want to change us seek to make us richer or thinner. This book wants to help us to be nicer: that is, less irritable, more patient, readier to listen, warmer, less prickly... Niceness may not have the immediate allure of money or fame, but it is a hugely important quality nevertheless and one that we neglect at our peril. This is a guidebook to the uncharted landscape of niceness, gently leading us around the key themes of this forgotten quality. We learn how to be charitable, how to forgive, how to be natural and how to reassure. We learn that niceness is compatible with strength and is no indicator of naivety. Niceness deserves to be rediscovered as one of the highest of all human achievements.

On Being Nice

A practical guide to traveling in the best way possible, featuring 20 essays for inspiration and advice in a broad range of scenarios.

How to Travel

A Job to Love

A guide to making wiser, more informed choices in love, drawing on in-depth analysis to explain our instinct for romantic self-sabotage.

How to Find Love

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.

The School of Life

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