Sahar Khalid

“These good narrators accept that lives can be meaningful even when they involve a lot of failure and humiliation. Mistakes are not dead ends; they are sources of information that can be exploited and put to work as guides to more effective subsequent action.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“These are all issues in search of clarity. The good listener knows that, via conversation with another person, we’d ideally move from a confused, agitated state of mind to a calmer and more focused one. Together, through talking, we would work out what is really at stake. But, in reality, this tends not to happen because few of us are sufficiently aware of how to achieve this clarity from our conversation. There aren’t enough good listeners. People tend to assert rather than analyse. They restate in many different ways the fact that they are worried, excited, sad or hopeful, and their interlocutor listens but does not help them to discover more. Good listeners fight against this with a range of conversational gambits. They hover as the other speaks; they offer encouraging remarks; they make gentle positive gestures: a sigh of sympathy, a nod of encouragement, a strategic ‘hmm’ of interest. All the time, they are egging the other to go deeper into issues. They love saying: ‘Tell me more about…’; ‘I was fascinated when you said…’; ‘Why did that happen, do you think?’ or ‘How did you feel about that?”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.”
― The School of Life, Relationships

“Everyone on Earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming