The School of Life Dictionary - Hardcover

The School Of Life

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0995753598 ISBN 13: 9780995753594

Publisher: The School of Life, 2018

Synopsis

A dictionary is a guide to a language. This dictionary is for the distinctive language that The School of Life ‘speaks’: that of emotions. It is an alphabetical selection of some 200 words and phrases that shed light on our feelings about ourselves, other people, and the workings of the modern world. Too often, we struggle to find the right words to explain what we mean; The School of Life’s dictionary is a tool to help us convey our true intentions with economy and precision. The School of Life – an organisation dedicated to making sense of our emotional lives – offers us a complete vocabulary with which to understand some of our key emotional states and ideas and to express them succinctly and successfully to the world.

• Definitions include:
• Cheerful Despair
• Cure for Unrequited Love
• Existential Angst
• FOMO
• Impostor Syndrome
• The Quiet Life
• Utopia

Sample entry:
Insomnia
Insomnia is seldom a disease: it’s an inarticulate, maddening but ultimately almost logical plea released by our core self, asking us to confront certain issues we’ve put off for too long. Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think. It is revenge of all the many thoughts we didn’t take seriously enough in the day.
See also: Philosophical Meditation, Unprocessed Emotion

About this title

About the Author

The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. It is a resource for helping us understand ourselves, for improving our relationships, our careers, and our social lives―as well as for helping us find calm and get more out of our leisure hours. They do this through films, workshops, books, and gifts―and through a warm and supportive community. You can find The School of Life online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the globe.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Impostor Syndrome

In many challenges, both personal and professional, we are held back by the crippling thought that people like us could not possibly triumph given what we know of ourselves: how reliably stupid, anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others, because we don't seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lauded around us.

The root cause of Impostor Syndrome is a hugely unhelpful picture of what other people are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we fail to imagine how deeply flawed everyone else is beneath a more or less polished surface.

The Impostor Syndrome has its roots in a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us - a far narrower and more edited source of information.

The solution to Impostor Syndrome lies in making a crucial leap of faith: that, despite a lack of reliable evidence, everyone else must be anxious, uncertain and wayward as we are. The leap means that whenever we encounter a stranger, we are not really encountering a stranger, we are encountering someone who is - despite the surface evidence to the contrary - very much like us. Therefore, nothing fundamental stands between us and the possibility of responsibility, success and fulfilment.

See also: Psychological Asymmetry

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Edition details

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0995753598
• ISBN 13: 9780995753594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 280