The Secrets of Successful Relationships
The Secrets Series, Book 1
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Narrated by:
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Rachel Lanning
About this listen
The key ingredients to contented love—quintessential advice on relationships from The School of Life, with an approachable tone
It can sometimes seem a mystery why some couples stay together and thrive – while many more split up or drag on scratchily. While we might think happy love is left to chance, there are some identifiable secrets that underpin good relationships that we can learn and put into practice.
The first title of a new series,The Secrets of Successful Relationships draws upon the expertise of The School of Life therapists to teach us the key ingredients of contented love. Chapters such as “Learning to Love Oneself”, “Knowing What to Overlook”, “Good Listening” and “The Importance of Bad Dates” prompt us to think about how we can achieve success in love. In a tone that’s warm, encouraging and funny, we learn: how to communicate effectively, how to manage differences, what to do when sexual problems arise, how to air grievances, the best way to share a home and—when things grow truly problematic—how to judge whether or not we should stay or leave.
This handbook shows us how to take the necessary, careful, intelligent steps towards the contented love we deserve.
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Insightfulness
- By Anonymous User on 06-10-23
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Self-Knowledge
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Fiona Buckland
- Length: 1 hr and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: "Know yourself". Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions - particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly.
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terrible voice
- By Tina Crosby on 08-27-20
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Varieties of Melancholy
- A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression, rage, or bitterness. It’s a serene, wise, and kindly response to the difficulties of being alive. It helps us navigate a wise and rational middle ground between extreme despair and naïve optimism. But melancholy is a well-kept secret. It isn't celebrated or recommended. It remains relatively unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age.
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Hurt locker
- By beecroft on 02-21-24
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How to Survive the Modern World
- Making Sense of, and Finding Calm in, Unsteady Times
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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How to Survive the Modern World is the ultimate guide to navigating our unusual times. It identifies a range of themes that present acute challenges to our mental wellbeing. The book tackles our relationship to the news media, our ideas of love and sex, our assumptions about money and our careers, our attitudes to animals and the natural world, our admiration for science and technology, our belief in individualism and secularism–and our suspicion of quiet and solitude.
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A Simpler Life
- A Guide to Greater Serenity, Ease and Clarity
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 3 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied, and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful, and focused on the essentials. But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions – and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming.
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Bite-size practical tips for a better life
- By Tonya Kubo on 02-12-22
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Stay or Leave
- How to Remain In, or End, Your Relationship
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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A book to offer clarity and guidance when facing the difficult decision of whether your relationship has a future. Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront.
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Fantastic book, hate the narrator
- By Birta Flokadottir on 08-25-24
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Anxiety
- Meditations on the Anxious Mind
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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This is a guide to anxiety: why we feel it, how we experience it when it strikes, and what we can do when we come under its influence. Across a series of essays that look at the subject from a number of angles, the tone is helpful, compassionate, and in the best sense, practical.
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Insightfulness
- By Anonymous User on 06-10-23
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Self-Knowledge
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Fiona Buckland
- Length: 1 hr and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: "Know yourself". Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions - particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly.
-
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terrible voice
- By Tina Crosby on 08-27-20
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Varieties of Melancholy
- A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression, rage, or bitterness. It’s a serene, wise, and kindly response to the difficulties of being alive. It helps us navigate a wise and rational middle ground between extreme despair and naïve optimism. But melancholy is a well-kept secret. It isn't celebrated or recommended. It remains relatively unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age.
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Hurt locker
- By beecroft on 02-21-24
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How to Overcome Your Childhood
- How to Raise Contented, Interesting, and Resilient Children
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Sonya Cullingford
- Length: 2 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we may, as adults, be struggling, is that we were denied the opportunity to fully be ourselves in our earliest years. This book is a guide to better understanding our younger selves in order to shape who we wish to be in the future.
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An essential read.
- By Anonymous User on 12-03-23
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The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 2 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Modern life is full of minor but acute dilemmas: we get stuck at a gathering with someone unusually boring and wonder how to move on without causing offence; in the course of introducing one friend to another, we realise that we have forgotten one of the party’s names; we run into an ex while on an early date with a new partner; we spill red wine across a host’s sofa...
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On Self-Hatred
- Learning to Like Oneself
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Behind many of our problems lies an often ignored factor: we don’t like ourselves very much. We are sufferers of self-hatred. We tell ourselves the meanest things. It’s because of self-hatred that we tend to neglect our potential at work and get entangled in unfulfilling relationships, that we lack confidence in our social lives and suffer from anxiety, despair and imposter syndrome.
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Useful ideas to reflect on
- By Kevin on 08-14-24
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A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Charlie Anson
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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A Therapeutic Journey follows the arc from mental crisis and collapse, to convalescence and recovery. Written with kindness, knowledge and sympathy, it is both a practical guide and a source of consolation and companionship in what might be some of our loneliest, most anguished moments.
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Deep, intelligent, compassionate
- By Terri Myers on 12-23-23
By: Alain de Botton
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The School of Life: On Failure
- How to Succeed at Defeat
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing–in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives.
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The second part of the book was really good perceived failure.
- By Anonymous User on 12-29-23
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What They Forgot to Teach You at School
- Essential Emotional Lessons Needed to Thrive
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Sonya Cullingford
- Length: 3 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learned intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages. But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one’s psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame?
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Wonderful
- By Anonymous User on 07-18-21
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Small Pleasures
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Rachel Lanning
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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We exhaust ourselves and the planet in the search for very large pleasures, while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which—if we only pay more attention—can bring us solace and joy on a daily basis. This is a guidebook to life's small pleasures: everything from the distinct delight of holding a child's hand to the joy of watching the evening sky. It's an intriguing, evocative collection that will heighten our senses and return us to the world with newfound excitement and enthusiasm.
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An underrated treasure
- By Anonymous User on 08-12-23
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The School of Life
- An Emotional Education
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Alain de Botton, Charlie Anson
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is arguably the single most important skill for surviving the twenty-first century. But what does it really mean? One decade ago, Alain de Botton founded The School of Life, an institute dedicated to understanding and improving our emotional intelligence. Now he presents the gathered wisdom of those ten years in a wide-ranging and innovative compendium of emotional intelligence that forms an introduction to The School of Life.
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The school of life needs to be in schools.
- By Angela pope on 02-03-23
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On Confidence
- By: The School of Life, Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Alain de Botton
- Length: 1 hr and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence - one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives.
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Poignant and timeless
- By Graceny Jimenez on 08-15-20
By: The School of Life, and others
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Future Noir
- The Making of Blade Runner
- By: Paul M. Sammon
- Narrated by: Todd McLaren
- Length: 25 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In this intensive, intimate, and anything-but-glamorous behind-the-scenes account, film insider and cinephile Paul M. Sammon explores how Ridley Scott used his creative genius to transform the work of science fiction's most uncompromising author into a critical sensation, a commercial success, and a cult classic that would reinvent the genre.
By: Paul M. Sammon
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How to Know a Person
- The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
- By: David Brooks
- Narrated by: David Brooks
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.” And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them?
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A book he was ready to write
- By Adam Shields on 11-17-23
By: David Brooks
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Meditations for Mortals
- Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
- By: Oliver Burkeman
- Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman
- Length: 4 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.” It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.
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Surprisingly profound
- By JG on 10-24-24
By: Oliver Burkeman