Inspirational Living: Life Lessons for Success & Happiness

Inspirational Living: Life Lessons for Success & Happiness

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Inspirational Living: Life Lessons for Success & Happiness episodes

  • Motivation for Making Your Life Great | Daily Heroism
    Listen to episode 402 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Motivation for Making Your Life Great. Edited and adapted from Love’s Way by Orison Swett Marden.
    Motivational Podcast Excerpt: J.R. Miller once said: ''Some day we shall learn that the little deeds of love made unconsciously as we pass on our way are greater in their helpfulness and shine more brightly in the life than the deeds of renown that we think now make a life great." Never was there a greater mistake than to think that heroism, courage, and daring, are confined to the field of battle. It doesn't matter what post we are assigned to in the battle of life, we have an opportunity to do heroic things every day.
    If we have the spirit of love, if we are filled with the love of truth and justice, if we are determined always to stand for the right no matter what the cost, we are always battling for the higher things of life.
    It is as heroic to take a firm stand for honesty, when it may cost you your job, or to rescue a person from a burning building or from drowning, as it is to go into military battle. It is heroic to stand for the right when others sneer and condemn you for doing so. Indeed, it often takes MORE courage to stand alone for the right, for justice, for principle (when those about you ridicule and caricature you for your stand), than it would be to walk up to a cannon's mouth in battle.
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    17 min
  • Inspiration for Self-Control & Building a Healthy Mindset
    Listen to episode 401 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Self-Control and Building a Healthy Mindset. Edited and adapted from Light on Life’s Difficulties by James Allen.
    Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Today, I’d like to offer some advice on the management of your mind. Before a person can see even the necessity for thorough and complete self-management, they have to throw off a great delusion that so many people have — the delusion of believing that their failures in life are entirely due to those around them, and not entirely to themselves.
    "I could make far greater progress if I were not hindered by others," or "It is impossible for me to make any headway, seeing that I live with such negative people," are commonly expressed complaints that spring from the error of imagining that others are responsible for one’s own folly.
    The violent or irritable person always blames those around them for their fits of anger. And by continually living in this delusion, they become more and more set in their irritable ways. For how can someone overcome — or even try to overcome — their weakness if they convince themselves that it springs entirely from the actions of others? 
    Go to SimpleHabit.com/living to download their free meditation app. Be among the first 50 listeners to sign up for their premium account to to unlock thousands of more meditations.
    17 min
  • The Art of Speaking Eloquently | How to Speak Well
    Listen to episode 400 of the Inspirational Living podcast: The Art of Speaking Eloquently | How to Speak Well. Edited and adapted from Personal Efficiency by James Samuel Knox.
    Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. To get the best readings of our podcast in heirloom quality hardcover or digital e-book, please visit InspirationalLifeLessons.com.
    Act now and you can buy the e-book Evergreen: 50 Inspirational Life Lessons and get the e-book Everest: 50 Motivational Life Lessons for free. Learn more at InspirationalLifeLessons.com.
    Today’s podcast has been edited and adapted from Personal Efficiency by James Samuel Knox, published in 1920.
    Very few people have ever been taught how to talk well, how to express themselves effectively. Yet every person would greatly profit by a good course of instruction in public speaking — for as Elbert Hubbard once said: “Truth badly spoken dies and dries and blows away, while a lie well launched sometimes lives for ages." How true that is! It certainly took the world a long time to believe in the truth of democracy and human rights, and to recognize the falsehoods of tyranny and autocracy.
    According to William Jennings Bryan, the greatest compliment any speaker can pay to the subject they are discussing is to tell the truth about it and tell it effectively. In other words, to know the truth is a great asset in itself, but to be able to tell it with skill and power is to greatly add to one's influence in a community.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew a thing or two about public speaking, said that the work of eloquence is to change the opinions of a lifetime in twenty minutes. A thorough knowledge of one's subject is the beginning of such eloquence — for the great public speaker is the one who inwardly digests facts and whose speech, therefore, becomes a living product. Or as Socrates said: "Every person can speak eloquently on that which they clearly understand," while Benjamin Disraeli added: "Eloquence is logic on fire." Another way to express the same idea would be to say that eloquence is facts on fire, because logic is based upon facts.
    13 min
  • Positive Thinking for Success | Overcoming Negativity
    Listen to episode 399 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Positive Thinking for Success | Overcoming Negativity. Edited and adapted from Dynamic Thought by Henry Thomas Hamblin.
    Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. Today’s podcast is about the importance of building a positive mindset. If you’d like additional tools and inspiration for becoming an optimist, be sure to check out the Simple Habit app.
    In addition to guided meditations that will boost your positivity, Simple Habit also has motivational talks, such as the 31 Day Fresh Start series by Cory Muscara. Cory has strategically put together 31 important messages (each one building upon the other) to help you get a fresh start in life — including topics such as working with regrets, gratitude, forgiveness, cognitive reframing, and more.
    Discover the 100s of free meditations and talks available on the Simple Habit app by downloading it today. And, for a limited time, our listeners can unlock thousands of more meditations for a special price. Get 30% off their premium subscription by being among the first 50 listeners to sign up at SimpleHabit.com/living.
    Today’s reading was edited and adapted from Dynamic Thought by Henry Thomas Hamblin, published in 1917.
    People are divided into two types, positive and negative. Let me try and describe each to you.
    Positive people are magnetic, attractive, courageous, happy, cheerful, healthy, energetic — are full of vitality, power, and the ability to succeed. They never doubt their ability to win; they never worry when things go wrong; they don’t complain when things aren’t smooth.
    If a positive person meets with a temporary set-back, they become the more determined to succeed. They do not lay upon other people the blame of their own mistakes, but instead learn a lesson from their temporary failure which shall be a guide and beacon in all their future undertakings....
    17 min
  • Ambition, Success & The Inner Voice of Wisdom
    Listen to episode 398 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Ambition, Success, and the Inner Voice of Wisdom. Edited and adapted from Dynamic Thought by Henry Thomas Hamblin.
    Motivational Podcast Excerpt: WHAT is success? To one person it means one thing and to another it may mean something quite different. Some people desire happiness and love above all things, and could they but gain these would count themselves successful in the highest degree, even though their circumstances remained humble and comparatively poor.
    Some desire fame and distinction in science. Their ambition is to invent, to discover or investigate, to do something that has never been done before. The only reward that they seek is the joy of accomplishment.
    Some desire to be great in music, painting, in sculpture, while others seek to be leaders in their chosen profession of business, medicine, law, or politics. Still others have ambitions to serve their day and generation, to give and be spent in the service of humanity.
    Whatever your ambition may be, follow it. Whatever you have a taste for (whatever it is you have a burning desire to accomplish), follow it and strive after it. It is useless to try and be successful if you are a round peg in a square hole. Before you can make your life a full and abundant success, you must find your "niche" and fill it.
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    17 min
  • Motivation for Living Each Day to the Fullest
    Listen to episode 397 of the Inspirational Living podcast: The Joy of Living Each Day to the Fullest. Edited and adapted from A Way of Life by Sir William Osler.
    Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: I have told you that my success philosophy for life is to live for the day only, to disregard thoughts of the future and the past. But now let us speak of the day itself! What first? Be your own day-captain! and sigh not with Job for any mysterious intermediary. Prepare to lay your own firm hand upon the helm. Get into touch with the finite things of the day, and grasp in full enjoyment that sense of mastery in a machine working smoothly.
    Join the whole creation of animate things in a deep, heartfelt joy that you are alive, that you see the sun, that you are on this glorious earth which nature has made so beautiful, and which is yours to conquer and to enjoy. Realize, in the words of Browning, that "There’s a world of opportunity for joy spread round about us, meant for us, inviting us."
    What are your morning sensations — for remember that they control the day. Some of us are congenitally unhappy during the early hours; but the person who feels on awakening that life is a burden or a bore has been neglecting their machine, driving it too hard, stoking the engines too much, or not cleaning out the ashes and clinkers. Or they've been indulging too much in the ways of Bacchus.
    Go to SimpleHabit.com/living to download their free meditation app. Be among the first 50 listeners to sign up for their premium account to to unlock thousands of more meditations.
    15 min
  • A Way of Life | A Success Philosophy for Daily Living
    Listen to episode 396 of the Inspirational Living podcast: A Way of Life | A Success Philosophy for Daily Living. Edited and adapted from A Way of Life by Dr. William Osler, a founding professor of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
    Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Every person has a philosophy of life in thought, in word, or in deed — one that has been worked out in themselves unconsciously. Among the very best, they may not know of its existence. With the very worst, they may pride themselves as some kind of paragon. As this philosophy grows with our growth through adulthood, it cannot be taught to the young in formal lectures.
    Why then should I trouble you? Because I have a message that may be helpful. It is not philosophical, nor is it strictly moral or religious, and yet in a way it is all three. It is the oldest and the freshest, the simplest and the most useful.
    My message is but a word, a Way, an expression of the experience of a plain man whose life has never been worried by any philosophy higher than that of a farmer or shepherd. I simply wish to point out a path in which the wayfaring soul, though a fool, cannot err. Not a system to be worked out painfully, only to be discarded; not a formal scheme; simply a habit as easy or as hard to adopt as any other habit, good or bad. 
    Visit Our Sponsor Blinkist at Blinkist.com/living to start a free 7 day trial.
    17 min
  • How to Get What You Want | Making Dreams Come True
    Listen to episode 395 of the Inspirational Living podcast: How to Get What You Want | Making Dreams Come True. Edited and adapted from How to Get What You Want by Orison Swett Marden.
    Go to SimpleHabit.com/living to download their free app and to unlock thousands of more meditations with their special offer just for our listeners.
    Motivational Podcast Excerpt: You are victory organized. You were born to conquer, to play a magnificent part in life’s great game. But you can never do anything great or grand until you have such a conviction of yourself and your ability.
    How often do we hear it said of some person, “Everything they undertake succeeds,” or “Everything they touch turns to gold?” Why? Because that person is constantly picturing to themselves the success of their undertakings, and they are backing up their vision by their efforts.
    By clinging to their vision (by vigorous resolution and persistent, determined endeavor) they are continually making themselves a powerful magnet to draw to them their dream. Consciously or unconsciously, they are using the divine intelligence or force by which every human being may mold themselves and their environment according to the pattern in their mind.
    17 min
  • Wake Up! How to Get the Morning & Day Started Right
    Listen to episode 394 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Wake Me Up! How to Get the Day Started Right. Edited and adapted from Nerve Control and How to Gain It by H. Addington Bruce.
    Visit Our Sponsor: Shop Carbona.com with the coupon code LIVING for 20% off.
    Motivational Podcast Excerpt: I imagine that there are some of you who would say that things haven’t been going well with you lately — that you are nervous, easily tired, easily irritated. You may have been to the doctor, but they found nothing organically wrong with you. The doctor didn’t even find it necessary to modify your diet.
    You yourself feel that the trouble is more mental than physical. You are worried by business conditions; the high cost of living weighs on your mind; you dread the bill collectors; etc.
    You appreciate that worry will not mend matters for you. But what are you to do? If you could only afford to get away from everything for a while, you feel that you would be all right again. But you cannot leave your work.
    There IS however one thing that you CAN do, at your own home, in the morning, that can change your mindset and avert the worry. It is a very simple thing...
    16 min
  • Beauty, Truth & The Upanishads | Rabindranath Tagore

    Listen to episode 393 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Beauty, Truth & The Upanishads. Edited and adapted from The Realisation of Life by Rabindranath Tagore.

    Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Every day our science is penetrating into the region formerly marked on the map as unexplored or unexplorable. Our sense of beauty is similarly engaged in ever pushing on from its conquests. Truth is everywhere, therefore everything is the object of our knowledge. Beauty is omnipresent, therefore everything is capable of giving us joy.

    In the early days of human history, we took everything as a phenomenon of life. The science of life then began by creating a sharp distinction between life and non-life. But as science is proceeding further and further, the line of demarcation between the animate and inanimate is growing more and more vague. In the beginning of our understanding, the sharp lines of contrast were helpful to us, but as our comprehension becomes clearer they gradually fade away.

    The Upanishads have said that all things are created and sustained by an infinite joy. To realize this principle of creation, we have to start with a division — the division into the beautiful and the non-beautiful. The apprehension of beauty has to come to us with a vigorous blow to awaken our consciousness from its primitive lethargy, and it attains its goal by the urgency of the contrast.



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    15 min

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