A practical guide to knowing yourself. Socrates summed up all philosophical commandments with one directive: "Know yourself." Self-knowledge informs not only our identity, but how we make decisions in life, work, and love. Society has no shortage of people and organizations offering to guide us to distant places, but very few will help us with the far more important task of traveling around the byways of our own minds. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with the tools we need in order to fully understand our characters. We come away with a newly clarified sense of who we are, what we need to watch out for when making decisions, and how to fulfill our true potential. EXPLORES THE LIFE-CHANGING POWER OF UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES - A PRACTICAL TOOLKIT for self-discovery. - INCLUDES THOUGHT-PROVOKING EXERCISES for self-analysis. - THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S MOST POPULAR SUBJECT the associated YouTube video "Who Am I?" has 1.5 million views. 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 6 million YouTube subscribers, 351,000 Facebook followers, 218,000 Instagram followers and 163,000 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. Emotional Inheritance What creates Emotional Identity? Why do we have the Emotional Identity we do and not a different one? A big modern response looks to genetics for answers: it tells us that we have a specific genetic inheritance and (via many complex processes) that this inheritance shapes our adult personality. We're not saying that genetics are irrelevant, but we want to focus attention on another kind of inheritance: Emotional Inheritance. One of the characteristic possessions of all European nobles for many centuries was an elaborate depiction of their family tree, showing their lineage down the generations. The idea was that the person sitting at the bottom of the tree would see themselves as the product of - and the heir to - all who had come before them. The tree came a quick visual guide to who they were and what others should know about them. If two aristocrats were contemplating marriage, the first thing they would do was to carefully examine each other's trees. It can seem like a quaint preoccupation, wholly tied to another age and solely of interest to members of a few grand and ancient families. But the idea of such a tree sits upon a universal and still highly relevant concern: irrespective of the financial and status details of our families, we all have another significant legacy to grapple with, in that each of us is the recipient of an emotional inheritance, largely unknown to us, yet enormously influential in determining our day-to-day behaviour, and normally in rather negative or complex directions. We need to understand the details of our Emotional Inheritance a little before we are able to ruin our own and others' lives by acting upon its often antiquated and troublesome dynamics.
