The School of Life

Did you know that The School of Life also works with businesses? Businesses are not abstract entities; they are, in the end, simply groups of humans, working together towards a common goal. To create a successful team, we need to address the psychological and emotional dynamics at play – namely, the ways in which employees think, behave and feel about themselves – and others. That’s where The School of Life comes in. We bring our expertise in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy and philosophy to address the challenges of working life. We begin with a focus on the individual; helping each and every employee to understand themselves (and, by extension, those around them) a little better. We do this in the following ways: - Our Workshops offer highly interactive explorations into the emotional skills employees and business require, with collaborative exercises, tips tools and plenty of time for reflection. Running for 2 hours for 20 employees; available in person or virtually. - Our Talks explore the role that emotions play in office life. A thought-provoking opportunity to increase company-wide levels of emotional intelligence and to prompt discussion and insight. Running for 1 hour for 50+ employees; available in person or virtually. - Our Coaching sessions allow participants to deep dive into a specific emotional skill, providing individuals with the opportunity to explore their personal strengths and weaknesses in relation to that skill. Conducted 1:1 and lasting an hour, participants will leave the session with a clear action plan for their own development in this skill area. Available in person or virtually. - The School of Life App Our app contains thousands of bite-sized essays, films and audio lectures that teach the elements of emotional maturity and self-development, available 24/7. - Workbooks, books and products Our books and products help to embed the skills explored in our workshops and talks, facilitating personal reflection and insight. Our ultimate goal is to create emotionally intelligent offices; workplaces in which mental wellbeing is one of the highest priorities, and where every team member has a sense of their aptitudes, their ambitions, and how they can pursue their objectives in a manner conducive to their personal and professional growth. ☞ Find out more https://lnkd.in/eZp8Rcrn or contact business@theschooloflife.com. #emotionsatwork #leadership #employeeengagement #learninganddevelopment

It sounds paradoxical and absurd to think that some of us might need to find something to worry about in order to recover our equilibrium. Worry is, after all, something we should rightly hate to have to suffer and should engage with only when absolutely necessary.⁠ ⁠ Yet, some of us do start to feel distinctly nervous when things around us settle down and pervasive stillness descends.⁠ We start to feel anxiety about the future precisely when – and in a sense because – there is nothing especially awful on the horizon. Our behaviour might be easy to mock and dismiss but the fact that we need to find something to worry about isn’t mere indulgence. It’s evidence of a particular kind of problem that deserves special compassion and patient understanding. The compulsive need to worry is evidence that – somewhere in a past we haven’t fully unpacked and understood – we underwent something properly worrying and sad. ⁠ To learn more click the link. https://lnkd.in/eXSF-rpj

We typically aim for a particular career because we have been deeply impressed by the exploits of the most accomplished practitioners in the field. We formulate our ambitions by admiring the beautiful structures of the architect tasked with designing the city’s new airport, or by following the intrepid trades of the wealthiest Wall Street fund manager, by reading the analyses of the acclaimed literary novelist or sampling the piquant meals in the restaurant of a prize-winning chef. We form our career plans on the basis of perfection. Then, inspired by the masters, we take our own first steps and trouble begins. We become stuck in an uncomfortable paradox: our ambitions have been ignited by greatness, but everything we know of ourselves points to congenital ineptitude. We have fallen into what we can term the Perfectionist Trap, defined as a powerful attraction to perfection shorn of any mature or sufficient understanding of what is required to attain it. To learn more click the link. https://lnkd.in/eKVeDepC

Our condition is a nuisance but not a curse; it is a sign of inner trouble, but not of evil; it can spoil our lives but it need not ruin them. To learn more about these ideas, click the link. https://lnkd.in/eE5vp7gJ

When we fail in our lives, our moods risk heading towards two extremes: self-pity, where it’s everyone else’s fault, and self-flagellation, where we blame only ourselves and replay evidence of our stupidity. Self-flagellation is the greater risk. To survive in high-pressure conditions, we grow adept at self-criticism, swiftly picking up on our errors and taking stock of our shortcomings. But excessive self-criticism leads to depression and underperformance. It’s important to carve out time to sample an emotional state many of us are suspicious of: self-compassion. We’re suspicious because we fear over-indulging our characters and ruining our potential. But depression and self-disgust are serious enemies too, so we need to re-learn the value of self-compassion and appreciate its role in a good, ambitious, and fruitful life. To learn more click the link: https://lnkd.in/eWibTWTT

As we know only too well, becoming an adult has very little to do with turning 18 or 22, driving a car or being entitled to drink, getting a mortgage or having a child. An adulthood worthy of the name is an internal process which may post-date the acquisition of a formal adult identity by many years. We might be 92 and still, very slowly, leaving adolescence behind. If we lived to be 450, many of us would still be struggling to acquire the fundamental constituents of a grown-up mind. There is one definition of adulthood that it is worth focusing on in particular: adulthood as defined by the discipline of psychotherapy which, more than any other, is devoted to working out a path from psychological infancy to maturity. To learn 9 more signs you're mature in the eyes of psychotherapy click the link here: https://lnkd.in/ekmjqKPn

Our brains are brilliant instruments, able to reason, synthesise, remember and imagine at an extraordinary pitch and rate. We trust them immediately and innately – and have reasons to be deeply proud of them too. However, these brains – let’s call them walnuts in honour of their appearance – are also very subtly and dangerously flawed machines. flawed in ways that typically don’t announce themselves to us and therefore give us few clues as to how on guard we should be about our mental processes. Most of the walnut’s flaws can be attributed to the way the instrument evolved over millions of years. It emerged to deal with threats, some of which are no longer with us, and at the same time, it had no chance to develop adequate responses to a myriad of challenges generated by our own complex societies. We should feel pity for its situation and compassion for ourselves. To gain a deeper understanding of your faulty walnut, click the link. https://lnkd.in/eg7JMV_n

The goal of self-knowledge isn’t just to become one’s true, uninhibited self in all settings. It’s to know when – and with whom – it is safe to reveal our perhaps less palatable sides. For more on self-knowledge, follow the link. https://lnkd.in/eB4-yXkC

Going travelling can be one of life’s greatest activities - but often, we fail to deepen the experience as much as we should and return home with some of the promises of our trip unrealised. Save these questions to get the best out of travel. These questions are taken from our Travel Therapy cards. Click the link to find out more. https://lnkd.in/eYyQaWgm

A quiet life sounds like an option that only the defeated would ever be inclined to praise. Our age is overwhelmingly alive to the benefits of active, dynamic, ‘noisy’ ways of living. If someone offered us a bigger salary for a job elsewhere, we’d move. If someone showed us a route to fame, we’d take it. If someone invited us to a party, we’d go. These seem like pure, unambiguous gains. Lauding a quiet life has some of the eccentricity of praising rain. And yet, when we examine matters closely, busy lives turn out to have certain strikingly high costs that we are collectively committed to ignoring. To learn more click the link. https://lnkd.in/eavPemri