Thought pieces

Thought Pieces gathers the latest thinking and ideas from The School of Life for Business. Here you’ll find insightful essays exploring the challenges facing professionals today and the emotional skills required to meet them.

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Five Ways to Reduce Anxiety

There are few things so universally experienced in life, and at the same time, so debilitating, than feelings of anxiety. Certain situations seem to provoke it very badly. Lying on…

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On Innovation and the Hero’s Engine

It seems reasonable to suggest that the principle of innovation drove Ancient Greek engineers to develop the first steam engine known to history. The fundamental ideas that would inspire the…

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Navigating Bureaucracy

Most of us grow up at the centre of a very responsive world. Parents re-organise their lives so as to accommodate the needs of their offspring. They spend a good…

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Why Play Is a Serious Business

Play, in most people’s minds, is the opposite of work. To hear the word is to remember childhood afternoons spent running around a garden, chasing insects and splashing puddles. Or…

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On Getting an Early Night

There’s a pattern that goes like this: it’s late, given when we’ve got to wake in the morning, but instead of going to bed, we stay up. The next day,…

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