Good Life Engine.
Membership in the anxiety club
This is a Paragraph. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start editing the content and make sure to add any relevant details or information that you want to share with your visiThe book originated from the Good Life Engine course at Aalto University. GOOD LIFE ENGINE ™ is a trademark of Aalto University. Aalto University granted me this trademark for book publishing.
Book Description
The Good Life Engine is one of the flagship courses of the Aalto Ventures Program (Aalto University, Finland). The course was designed by Johannes Kaira and me. It was held for the first time in 2019. The Good Life Engine was created in response to the needs of Aalto University students regarding well-being and self-mastery. Since the first pilot in 2019, the course remained very popular among students. It has a limited number of seats that are usually reserved within 1-3 days after the registration is opened. The diversity of students is considerable. They represent all six Aalto University schools, all ages from bachelor's to Ph.D. level, and various nationalities. Last year even Aalto staff started to attend the course.
This book represents only part of the course. It will be first among the whole Good Life Engine book series with such topics as time management, creating your identity, goals setting, resilience, creativity, maintaining motivation, etc. I chose as the beginning the topic of anxiety because I see how many people are struggling with it.
For whom is this book?
The audience for this book is very broad as the issue of anxiety is omnipresent. However, the main target group is people aged from 20 to 55 years old, experiencing transition phases (change of family situation, work transition, work search) or people approaching burnout because of multiple life challenges.
You can consider this book not a recipe, but rather a map that will help the reader to navigate through life with more clarity and comfort and see opportunities for self-development. It will be especially beneficial for people of different ages feeling lost and/or people who want to learn to understand themselves and others better. This book will help the reader to accumulate a certain buffer of psychological capital, like insurance against small setbacks so that these will not make one give up or turn away from one’s personal goals and direction. In addition, people teaching self-development topics at universities or in corporate training programs will find the content of the book helpful in crafting their teaching and training sessions.
This book is different from the majority of self-help books, which offer a prescription for a better life based on one or two main concepts. It presents instead a holistic collection of different concepts, approaches, and methods for self-study to practice in one’s specific life context. In addition, this manual contains exercises that my colleagues and I created for the Good Life Engine course and other Aalto Ventures Program courses. One will not be able to see these exercises anywhere apart from this book or by becoming a student at Aalto University. Over the years, I have seen these tools work effectively on our very diverse crowd of students. Many exercises will have frameworks and templates together with step-by-step explanations on how to fill them.
Why did I write this book?
I am the one who created the Good Life Engine course together with my colleague Johannes Kaira. I keep teaching it, seeing its crucial importance in the unpredictable times that we all are living in – first the pandemic, followed by the war in Europe. During my years of teaching students from very diverse backgrounds, I have accumulated a lot of tacit and practical knowledge that can provide support and answers to people with similar needs as the students have when joining the course. I know that every person and his or her story is unique, and what works for one person might not work for another. That is why I am offering a library of tools, instead of one general concept. Many of these tools were a great help for me to tackle my anxiety when I was rebuilding my life in Finland as an immigrant and a single parent of two children. The book is full of my own life stories that will be relevant to many working women.
To conclude
Imagine taking your car to a repair shop because the engine started to make weird noises and stopped functioning properly (because you are living with constant anxiety). The repair shop is full of shiny metal parts: cylinders, filters, pumps, gaskets, etc. If you are like me and don’t understand much about cars, you need assistance. You can get it from a skillful mechanic. You will get an understanding of your engine’s parts and how they work together, and then you will feel more comfortable driving your car, saving you time, effort, and money. In a similar way, this book, like the mechanic, will fix your engine and help you maintain your well-being, and increase your sense of satisfaction from life.