Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast.

Today's podcast has been edited and adapted from Ourselves and Others by H. Clay Trumbull, published in 1889.

We do not fully understand ourselves.

We do not fully understand others.

We think that others do not understand themselves.

We are sure that others do not understand us. It seems to us that if we understood others better, we should find it easier to get along with them.

It seems to us that if others understood us better, it would be easier for them to get along with us.

Yet, as a matter of fact, most of our troubles with others grow out of our understanding others, and

of our being understood by them. Indeed, it is through an understanding of one another that

most of what we call our misunderstandings with one another come.

There are, it is true, many phases of our character which are a perplexity to ourselves,

and which we are right in supposing that others can never comprehend.

So there are many phases in the character of others, which must be a hopeless perplexity to them and to us.

Moreover, every character is many-sided, and one of our worst sides is likely to show itself at a time when it would seem as if the exhibit of one of our better

sides would have presented our entire personality in a very different aspect.

Even so, it is what we do clearly understand, of those whom we know most intimately,

that is the prevailing cause of our liking or of our

disliking them.

And it is what is clearly understood of ourselves by those who know us best, that mainly

influences their feelings with reference to us.

That which is least understood in the character of ourselves would, as a rule,

have least influence in the shaping of the estimation of us by those who know us well,

...