Self-Help

A toolkit of 100 questions to spark exciting and meaningful conversations. 

It isn’t easy to get into a good conversation. Many of our best ones seem to happen by chance. Far from it! A great conversation starts with someone asking a great question. Inside this portable, design-forward box, on beautiful cards, you’ll find 100 of the very best questions around—carefully designed to get a group of people into exceptionally entertaining and meaningful conversations.

A guide for helping us focus on what we need to be fulfilled so that we can direct our energies and thoughts most effectively

Finding a partner.
Paying off the mortgage.
Reconnecting with my parents.
Less screen time.

It can be hard to decide what we really want to achieve in our lives; our ambitions are often scattered, diverse and difficult to pin down. This is a tool for helping us focus on what we need to be fulfilled so that we can direct our energies and thoughts most effectively. It can be hard to decide what we really want to achieve in our lives; our ambitions are often scattered, diverse and difficult to pin down. 

This attractive box contains 160 cards detailing our most common ambitions and longings, along with instructions on how to reflect on our goals, arrange them in a logical order of priorities and, where necessary, weigh up trade-offs. Using the cards will help us to reveal our true goals, even our purpose in life. The cards can be displayed, photographed or kept close to hand as a reminder of the path ahead. 

A simple-seeming but ingenious psychological tool for converting hunches and dreams into a realizable future.

20 Menus with 12 questions per menu, across varying themes - to foster friendship and bring meals to life. 

So many of us spend a lot of time getting the food right when we invite others over for a meal, but in the end what makes a really great dinner party is the conversation.

Typically, we stumble on fascinating conversation topics by chance. Shyness can hold us back. Too often, we revert to polite, but not especially inspired, staples or anecdotes. Arranged to accompany each course, these twenty beautifully designed Conversation Menus lead us artfully to some of the most fascinating and revealing conversation topics. They invite us to open up about themes such as love, money, travel ambition, self-knowledge and the meaning of life. They contain questions and invitations to discussion that will raise smiles, build friendships and foster the best kind of intimacy, ensuring that our meals together can be everything we hoped.

Exercises to build better team dynamics 

In order to work well together, people need more than just technical skills; they need to get to know and understand each other. We know this intuitively: it’s why fortunes are spent on team-building exercises. But because expensive off-site work retreats aren’t always possible, The School of Life has designed a game that requires nothing more than a room and a little free time. 

Teamwork contains 100 questions that playfully and sensitively introduce us to our colleagues by setting up the best kinds of conversation about everything from our childhoods to our values. Played as a group, these cards promote conversations that humanize colleagues in each other’s eyes and help to create an atmosphere of forgiving and kind collegiality around the office. A proven, easy way to turn individuals into a team. 

Topics covered include: Flaws, Fears & Regrets, Character Work, Likes & Interests, The Past

60 prompt cards with ideas and questions designed to help you find confidence 

We often assume that we must accept the levels of confidence we currently possess. But confidence is not a given: it is a quality we can learn about and develop in ourselves. 

These Confidence Prompt Cards keep a variety of consoling and invigorating arguments at the front of our minds, ready for the greater and smaller challenges of our lives. They remind us, for the sake of confidence, to speak to ourselves in a kind way, and to remember that the greatest thing we should fear isn't messing up, but not trying it out in the first place.

A Living Eulogy. A portrait of your ideal evening. A prompt to breathe—40 activities to help us get in touch with our inner playful and introspective selves

We are used to thinking of good conversation as the glue that holds friendships together, but we shouldn’t forget the immense value of playing games, with some of the same spirit of fun and adventure that we once deployed when we were children. Here is a pack of forty activities to draw us away from static conversation. Among other things, we will build a fort together, dance in surprising ways, deliver funeral orations, practice our acting skills, and play some entertaining (but kindly) pranks. The games are an invitation to cast aside reserve and get in touch with neglected imaginative aspects of ourselves. They are a reminder that friendship doesn’t only require talking; it thrives just as much on the light-hearted but significant business of playing together.

52 cards for greater serenity, ease and clarity

In an overcomplicated world, what many of us crave deep down is greater simplicity: less clutter, fewer commitments, less static and chaos. This ingenious set of cards asks us a range of deceptively simple questions – which we can answer by ourselves or with friends – that focus our minds on what really counts. They give us confidence to assess what we might give up on and where our true focus should lie. They ask us to look at our careers, our relationships, our family lives, and our ambitions more broadly. In a few easy steps, these cards help us prioritize and sift – and, with gentle humor, guide us to the simpler lives we long for and deserve.

60 prompt cards designed to help lead you through the important task of knowing yourself a little better 

It's hard to understand who we really are: what we want, how we feel and why we react as we do. This lack of self-knowledge can cause trouble. It makes us get into the wrong relationships, pick jobs we don’t love or spend money unwisely. No wonder Socrates summed up all the counsel of philosophy in just two words: “Know Yourself.” 

These cards are designed to assist us in a journey of self-knowledge. They present us with a range of ideas and questions that can help us to understand ourselves better. Each card carries an exercise on one side and a piece of analysis on the reverse to help you gain insight and clarity on that ever elusive subject: yourself.

52 cards to deepen and transform the experience of travel

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 unrealized. 

Here is a pack of cards designed to help us get the very best out of travel – and to embed its greatest lessons in our minds. These cards contain questions that we can reflect on privately (in a journal or on a train ride) or ask others in a group. This is an ingenious, low-tech, high-impact solution to one of the great conundrums of travel: how to ensure that the reality of going away will match our hopes. And it makes a great bon voyage gift!

52 exercises to foster diplomacy, empathy and effective communication within teams

Let’s get this party started!

Is this truism true?

And relax!

Collaboration is a tool for helping people work together better: 52 exercises designed to build empathy, insight and trust between colleagues. Intended to transform the atmosphere in teams, it prompts people to participate in a range of tasks and thinking exercises that strengthen their ability to cooperate and lend them insight into how others’ minds work. In a playful and often entertaining way, this toolkit aims to achieve something critical: the creation of a team that can work seamlessly and imaginatively together.

A set of 60 cards to remind us of the many reasons we have to be thankful

We are experts at focusing on what is missing from our lives. Our dissatisfaction often serves us well; it keeps us from complacency and boredom. But we are also dragged down by an inability to stop, take stock and recognize the abundance around us. In our haste to secure the future, we omit to notice the good. This pack of cards is designed to help us pause in our striving and, for a few moments, remember some of what we have to be grateful for — a consoling, soothing balm to carry around or keep close at hand.

A set of 20 cards featuring fresh perspectives through which to look at life

We are constantly at risk of losing perspective around the challenges we face. We mistake what is manageable, or we despair too soon. We alienate others by over-reacting, or we don’t notice and appreciate what there is still to be grateful for.

These cards provide eloquent invitations to recover a wiser, calmer, redemptive perspective on our lives. Each card identifies a fresh perspective we might take on problems – perspectives colored by time, space, history, culture and travel among others – nudging us gently and compassionately towards a more liveable relationship with our difficulties.

40 Place Cards with 80 Questions for Sparking Meaningful and Revealing Conversations Around the Table 

“If you had to write a book, what would it be about?”

A meal with friends is only ever as good as the questions we ask one another. 

Too often, we fall back on polite but not so inspired staples: “What are you doing this weekend?” or “What do you do for work?”, and so on. But there are better kinds of questions – questions that work like magic to open up our hearts, draw out our memories and promote generosity, fun and interesting conversation.

This pack collects 80 of these sorts of questions to ensure a meal together can be at once meaningful, entertaining and touching. For casual dinners with friends, or potentially rife holiday meals with relatives.

Laid out on place cards, the questions gently and charmingly pull our fellow diners towards the sort of topics that matter most to our deeper selves – and help us get the most out of one another.

52 exercises to stimulate creativity, playfulness and innovative thinking

Whatever our job title, our work will always benefit from new ideas and fresh ways of thinking. We’re used to regarding inspiration as something that arrives more or less at random; it is in fact a skill that we can learn to develop in ourselves and call on whenever we need it.

Inspiration gives us a toolkit for generating new ideas. Here are 52 exercises designed to foster an inventive frame of mind. We don’t need to wait for inspiration to strike! With this set, we can kindle inspiration when we need it. Each exercise prompts us to work on a particular creative muscle and helps us to establish the psychological conditions for original work. Drawing insights from the worlds of art, music, psychotherapy and innovation, this is an invaluable (and playful) resource for creatives and professionals alike, helping our minds to become more reliable, lightning rods to stoke flashes of inspiration.

60 prompt cards designed to help you find compassion and empathy

We are all interested in being kind—at least, in theory. In practice, a lot gets in the way: tiredness, anger, bitterness. But a lack of kindness lies at the heart of so much of what goes wrong at work, in friendships, and in love. These Kindness Prompt Cards present us with a series of thoughts that nurture our sympathy, our powers of compassion, and our appetite for forgiveness. They return us to who we always want to be and deep down already are: kind people.