The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners: How to navigate the dilemmas of social life
An essential guide to modern etiquette.

Life is full of awkward social situations; we forget someone's name while making introductions, we're stuck on the elevator with our boss, we run into our ex on a first date. While these dilemmas might feel trivial, they tap into some of the deepest themes of our social existence: how to pursue our own agenda while honoring the happiness and needs of others? How to go beyond the surface level when relating to another person?

Featuring twenty case studies from our modern world, this book puts good manners back at the center of our lives. Far from being old fashioned or stuffy, The School of Life argues, etiquette provides a framework through which to create a kinder and more considerate world.

  • THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ETIQUETTE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
  • NAVIGATING OUR MOST AWKWARD SOCIAL SITUATIONS this practical and relevant guide offers tips and scripts.
  • TWENTY CASE STUDIES AND ACTIONABLE ADVICE for dealing with common social dilemmas.
  • HOW TO WIN PEOPLE OVER, how to approach strangers at a party, and how to write an effective thank you note-the chapters in this book address common perplexing social situations head on.
  • BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGHOUT

1137460498
The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners: How to navigate the dilemmas of social life
An essential guide to modern etiquette.

Life is full of awkward social situations; we forget someone's name while making introductions, we're stuck on the elevator with our boss, we run into our ex on a first date. While these dilemmas might feel trivial, they tap into some of the deepest themes of our social existence: how to pursue our own agenda while honoring the happiness and needs of others? How to go beyond the surface level when relating to another person?

Featuring twenty case studies from our modern world, this book puts good manners back at the center of our lives. Far from being old fashioned or stuffy, The School of Life argues, etiquette provides a framework through which to create a kinder and more considerate world.

  • THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ETIQUETTE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
  • NAVIGATING OUR MOST AWKWARD SOCIAL SITUATIONS this practical and relevant guide offers tips and scripts.
  • TWENTY CASE STUDIES AND ACTIONABLE ADVICE for dealing with common social dilemmas.
  • HOW TO WIN PEOPLE OVER, how to approach strangers at a party, and how to write an effective thank you note-the chapters in this book address common perplexing social situations head on.
  • BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGHOUT

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The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners: How to navigate the dilemmas of social life

The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners: How to navigate the dilemmas of social life

The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners: How to navigate the dilemmas of social life
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The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners: How to navigate the dilemmas of social life

The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners: How to navigate the dilemmas of social life

Overview

An essential guide to modern etiquette.

Life is full of awkward social situations; we forget someone's name while making introductions, we're stuck on the elevator with our boss, we run into our ex on a first date. While these dilemmas might feel trivial, they tap into some of the deepest themes of our social existence: how to pursue our own agenda while honoring the happiness and needs of others? How to go beyond the surface level when relating to another person?

Featuring twenty case studies from our modern world, this book puts good manners back at the center of our lives. Far from being old fashioned or stuffy, The School of Life argues, etiquette provides a framework through which to create a kinder and more considerate world.

  • THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ETIQUETTE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
  • NAVIGATING OUR MOST AWKWARD SOCIAL SITUATIONS this practical and relevant guide offers tips and scripts.
  • TWENTY CASE STUDIES AND ACTIONABLE ADVICE for dealing with common social dilemmas.
  • HOW TO WIN PEOPLE OVER, how to approach strangers at a party, and how to write an effective thank you note-the chapters in this book address common perplexing social situations head on.
  • BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGHOUT

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781912891146
Publisher: The School of Life
Publication date: 10/20/2020
Pages: 112
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfillment.

The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.

The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 174,000 Instagram followers and 166,000 Twitter followers.

The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.

Read an Excerpt

4. How to approach strangers at a party

A party at the house of a friend, eleven o’clock, on a still-warm evening. A meter away from you, a group of people are chatting animatedly. Someone is telling an anecdote – it might be something about a train ride they took or the mishaps on someone’s bicycle – and their companions break in occasionally with rich laughter and stories of their own. The group as a whole seem confident and attractive and the main narrator especially so. But there may as well be a high solid brick wall or a lamprey-filled moat between you and they. There is resolutely no way you could ever move in to say hello. You smile your characteristic weak, loser’s smile, pretend to study the bookshelf – and leave the gathering ten minutes later.

Much of the advice provided by books and guides concerns what one might say in these circumstances. It could be better to start somewhere else: with what one should think. Chronic shyness is a guess about what other people are like. Though it doesn’t feel like it when it has flooded us, shyness reflects a rationally founded assessment as to the nature and intentions of other members of our species. It is not a chemical imbalance or an impulse, it’s a philosophy, albeit a deeply unhelpful one.

Its essential assumption is that other people are self-sufficient, that they do not lack for company, that they are not alone with anything, that they understand all they need to know – and that they do not share in any of our frailties, hesitations, secret longings or confusions. This echoes, in an adult form, the assumptions a child might make of their teacher, a competent stern grown-up who appears never to have been young, silly, tender or interested in a pillow fight.

This lack of faith in the humanity of others is a natural tendency of our minds. We go by external cues – and therefore come to assume that we are living among superior, metal-plated cyborgs rather than fragile, water-filled uncertain entities. We cannot believe that most of what we know of our own minds, especially the self-doubt, the anxiety and the sadness, exists in strangers too.

We’re slow to convert this crucial insight into a social strategy, into a confidence-inducing knowledge that others must also, as we do, harbor warmth, longing, curiosity and sorrow – the ingredients from which new friendships are built. A seemingly happily married person might have a lot of agony around the course of their relationship; a pugnacious sportsman might suffer from chronic anxiety and shame; a CEO might have vivid memories of their struggles and a lot of space in their imagination for people whose careers have yet to take off. A very intellectual person might – internally – be longing for a new friend who could patiently encourage them to dance (or forgive their inept gyrations). Our error is to suppose that the way a person seems is the whole of who they are: our anxiety closes off the core fact that we are all much more approachable than we appear.

The key to self-belief – and the mindset to talk to strangers successfully – doesn’t lie in strenuously insisting on our own merits; it’s source is a more accurate and less forbidding mode of imagining the inner lives, and especially the inner troubles, of others.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. How to tell when you are being a bore

2. How to write an effective thank you letter

3. How to choose a good present

4. How to approach strangers at a party

5. What to do at parties if you hate small talk

6. How to shake someone off at a party

7.How to win people over

8. Whether, and how much, to praise

9. How to successfully disappoint someone socially

10. How to be comfortable on your own in public

11. How to deal with upsets in service situations

12. How to become someone people will confide in

13. How to talk to a bereaved acquaintance

14. How to spill a drink down your front – and survive

15. How to deal with the subtext

16. How to stop worrying whether or not they like you

17. How to be a good guest

18. How to tell someone they have spinach between their teeth

19. How to make people feel good about themselves

20. How to face social catastrophe

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