Emotional Skills For You, Your Team and Your Organisation
Emotional skills are crucial to unlocking our full potential, and because we bring our full psychology to work, this is a thorny challenge. The School of Life applies its deep and broad experience of individual and group psychology to the workplace, where we support individuals, teams and businesses to perform better, to be more successful and ultimately, more fulfilled. We run transformational workshops, talks and group or personal coaching. We have a rich and interactive toolkit: podcasts, games, books, microsessions, diagnostics and much more. Drawing on examples from art and psychotherapy, philosophy and literature, our programmes provide practical support for personal and professional introspection.
Purposeful careers, Meaningful performance
From individual coaching that fosters personal clarity, to workshops that strengthen teams through empathy and connection, to organisation-wide programmes that cultivate emotionally intelligent and adaptable leaders — we help people develop the insight, resilience and self-awareness required to navigate an ever-changing world with composure and purpose.
What We Offer
Our Full Emotional Skills Curriculum
Our expert-led Workshops (2 hrs, up to 30 people) create intimate, interactive spaces for dialogue, reflection and practical learning. Talks (1 hr, 50+ people) introduce emotional insights that spark team-wide conversations. Both can be run in-person or virtually, in the UK or worldwide, and are designed to inspire fresh thinking and real change.
Adaptability
Today, businesses – and their people – have to learn continually, responding to change and innovation by staying
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Adaptive Communication
One of the biggest causes of disharmony in life is when communication goes wrong. Feeling misunderstood – or
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Anxiety
Feeling anxious is entirely normal, unpleasant and detrimental to wellbeing. Our imaginations permanently remind us of everything that
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Assertiveness
One of the reasons why our lives are harder than they might be is that most of us
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Becoming Boss
Contrary to popular belief, none of us are actually ‘born leaders’. Instead, the entry into a management role
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Being Well
According to a recent study, 67% of professionals are experiencing moderate to high levels of stress at work,
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Charm
In order for even the best ideas to have the greatest impact they need to be communicated with
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Coaching
‘Leadership is not about you, it’s about them’, according to Jack Welch and in our modern working work
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Collaboration
Although collaboration – the extraordinary business of having to work with other people – is one of the
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Communication
The stronger a team’s communication skills are, the better the outcome: research by MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory found
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Confidence
The greatest projects and schemes die for no grander reasons than that we don’t dare. Indeed, research shows
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Crafting Careers
One of the most extraordinary and yet quietly routine assumptions of our professional lives is that we should
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Creativity
Einstein said that we’re all born geniuses – which suggests that a lot of education strips us of
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Curiosity
While we may imagine that curiosity is reserved for arts, culture, or our childhood, it is increasingly sought
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Decisiveness
Making good decisions is a fundamental aspect of being a trusted co-worker or an excellent leader. Yet, too
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Delegation
‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’ We’ve all heard this phrase at some point, whether
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Difficult Conversations
Throughout our life and work we will inevitably be faced with having many challenging conversations. Rather than viewing
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Diplomacy
A workshop which offers techniques for handling sensitive discussions and tough negotiations. Diplomacy is the art of navigating
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Effectiveness
The end result of an absence of efficiency isn’t just inefficiency, it’s regret. In order to work through
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Eloquence
Although many of us fear it more than death, knowing how to speak to others in front of
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Empathy
Feeling and demonstrating empathy is tied to better performance at work, and especially to better leadership. Empathy is
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Emotional Intelligence
Most businesses run into problems not because of a lack of technical know-how, but because of how we
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Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is a major fascination of our times. We often think of entrepreneurs as bold risk-takers with completely
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Goals
In our modern world, goal setting is everywhere: we set goals for our careers, our health, our finances
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Grit
Grit can be defined as ‘the passion and perseverance for long-term goals’. Demonstrating grit at work means to
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Growth Mindset
Beliefs drive our behaviour, perhaps few more than our mindset about our own abilities. Carol Dweck’s work on
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Impostor Syndrome
Around 70% of us will at some point in our lives experience an emotional state best characterised as
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Influence
Forensic science pioneer Edmond Locard formulated a theory which became the basis for forensic science as we know
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Initiative
While motivation might drive us, initiative is the ability and willingness to take action, and begin something independently
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Innovation
Innovation is the ability to create changes, offshoots and iterations that add value and solve problems. This requires
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Inspire
One of the most impactful things we can do as human beings at work is to inspire others.
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Kindness
When we are little, one of the first lessons we ever receive is in the importance of being
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Leadership
Throughout the ages, much has been written about the traits of great leaders. It’s easy to feel intimidated.
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Managing Change
Today, widespread and frequent change often feels inescapable – particularly in business. And yet in reality our ability
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Managing Up
The Harvard Business Review defines managing up as ‘being the most effective employee you can be, creating value
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Motivation
It’s not hard to make the link between motivation and a more productive workplace. Motivation inspires energy, commitment,
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Negotiation
A single question can evoke a multitude of different responses depending on who is answering. Agreeing on which
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Objectivity
Emotions can sometimes blur our vision. To make good decisions and work well with others, we need to
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Peak Performance
Peak performance is defined as an individual performing at optimal levels physically, mentally, or both. Employees who thrive
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Personal Brand
Everyone has a reputation; a personal brand is our visible and distinctive commitment to the value we bring
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Playfulness
Too often we think of play as something reserved for children, or worse, for the lazy, idle, and
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Presenting
Presenting is a skill laden with more barriers and judgments than most. We are much more likely to
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Problem-Solving
When a problem arises, our first instinct is often to rush head-first into fixing it. As humans, we
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Productivity
One of the most powerful skills we can develop to enhance our performance and wellbeing is improved self-management
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Psychological Safety
To get the best out of our people we not only have to equip them with the knowledge
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Purpose
Day-to-day work can all too easily make us feel bored or burnt-out. For many of us, this is
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Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence, yet studies show that while most of us think we understand
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Self-Management
One of the most powerful skills we can develop to enhance our performance and wellbeing is improved self-management.
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Storytelling
Life is built upon an intertwining collection of different stories. In fact, each of us house our very
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Strategic Thinking
There is a fundamental distinction to be made between two kinds of thinking: figuring out what we would
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Supportiveness
Supporting others and listening carefully (but not uncritically) to their signs of distress allows us to give them
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Trust
Trust is a basic human need and one that’s essential to our early development: in its essence, trust
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Unconscious Bias
All of us navigate our professional and personal lives with an Emotional Inheritance. That is, a way of
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Vulnerability
It’s no surprise that each of us wish to appear professional and competent in our working lives. In
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Becoming a Leader
As with management, leadership is something that often ‘happens’ to us without a great deal of fanfare or
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Leadership Style
Deep down, we often believe that being a leader should mean becoming someone else. Yet the key to
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Leading Purposefully
Leaders need to inspire their teams. To do so, they must be clear on their own purpose, and
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Innovation Mindset
Objectively, every leader understands the importance of innovation. Yet a range of emotional and functional barriers exist which
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Leading Change
Humans are hardwired to seek certainty. As leaders, we bear a unique responsibility to not only paint a
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Leading Inclusively
Leaders must set the tone they wish their teams and organisations to follow. Understanding the behaviours and signals
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Leadership Prioritisation
Effective decision making and strategic prioritisation are the cornerstones of successful leadership. Inability to distinguish the imperative from
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Leadership Wellbeing
Leaders face some of the toughest challenges when it comes to promoting and maintaining their own wellbeing; they
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Leadership Coaching
In these one-hour one-to-one coaching sessions, leaders will: Reflect on their relationship to the specific emotional skill,
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Join Our Leaders’ Circle
Join the Leaders’ Circle at The School of Life at Work and connect with senior L&D, HR and leadership professionals committed to putting human skills at the heart of workplace innovation. As a member, you’ll enjoy in-person and virtual events, exclusive access to cutting-edge insights and materials, and a vibrant peer network focused on shaping the future of learning.
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Workshop Participant
“
A really insightful workshop which provided ample opportunities for deep self reflection and conversation that allowed us to learn about one another and increase our ability to empathise.”
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