Arianna Huffington is described as one of the most influential women in the world, and now she has a new philosophy that she describes in her book, Thrive.

As the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, Ms Huffington has the ears and eyes of millions of people, but she was in Bermuda last weekend talking to much more intimate audiences about her book and its message.

Ms Huffington’s big event was at Colonial Medical Insurance’s “An Audience with Arianna”, at the Fairmont Southampton on Saturday morning, where she spoke to a near-capacity audience.

Amid moments of humour, she spelled out her theories for living a healthier and more fulfilling life.

“It is wonderful to wake up in this Island, coming from New York,” she said. “I want to remind you that you live in paradise. Waking up and hearing the frogs and not the sirens is a big improvement on life in New York.”

She asked her audience: “How do we define success?”

Ms Huffington explained she was brought up in Athens by her “amazing” mother, who would remind her of the Greek philosophers’ question: “What is the good life?”

The 64-year-old media mogul compared that question to another one, “What is a successful life?”, and reminded the audience that the metrics of that answer were dollars and power.

“That is like sitting on a two-legged stool — soon you fall off,” she said.

The third leg of the “successful life” stool has four pillars.

The first pillar is wellbeing, she said, and reminded the audience that stress was at the heart of modern sickness.

Modern people live in an environment of “time famine”, she said. “We live breathlessly, out of time, rushing from one thing to another.”

Ms Huffington’s second pillar is wonder.

“On this Island there is much to wonder at, so much to appreciate,” she said.

“Gratitude is a key of both wellbeing and wonder.”

She encouraged the audience to their lives by the motto: “Live as though everything is rigged in your favour”, and said that in her life, looking back, everything she had experienced had been a blessing in the end.

Ms Huffington spent her early adulthood living in London, England.

“I fell in love with a man twice my age and half my size — but love is blind,” she said to laughter. “I was with him for seven years. By then I wanted children. He knew he didn’t want to have children.

“I made the decision to leave London. I moved to New York. The reason I moved to New York was I knew I was a weak person and I didn’t want to go back, so I put an ocean between us.

“Moving to New York was responsible for my whole life and career — including my two daughters.”

To more laughter, she added: “My entire life and career was down to a man who wouldn’t marry me.

“Women are so afraid of taking risks, because they are afraid it won’t work out.”

Doing the exercise of prioritising one’s goals was another of Ms Huffington’s pearls of wisdom that could prove to be revelatory.

As part of an Oprah.com e-course that begins in May, people are asked to write down all their goals, and then prioritise them.

She explained that it had always been a goal of hers to become a good skier, but she realised that she would never prioritise the time to do it.

“It is very liberating to realise you can complete a project by dropping it,” she said. “So as far as I am concerned, skiing is done. I’m still a lousy skier.”

Now, on skiing vacations, she sits in front of a fire with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book.

Once a person is clear about their goals, it is time to develop a “thrive tribe” — a support group of people who will help one another to meet those goals.

Ms Huffington explained that her own goal was to get more sleep, so when she wanted to stay up and watch Game of Thrones on television, she would call a friend, who would “talk her down”, encouraging her instead to go to bed.

“Changing habits happens in small steps,” she said.

Another of the Thrive pillars is wisdom. “Wisdom, strength and peace,” she said.

She described an “app for the soul”, which allows you to carry poems you love and pictures of peaceful scenes that can change your mindset when life becomes stressful.

Ms Huffington also talked about the importance of a “quiet mind”.

“Bill Gates would famously take ‘think weeks’ in his cabin with no devices,” she said, adding that Archimedes came up with his principle while bathing that the upward buoyant force exerted on a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces. And Isaac Newton devised the theory of gravity while having a picnic under a tree.

“The final pillar is giving. It’s about giving of ourselves,” she said, explaining that it was important to make connections with the people we see every day.

“My mother was a person with no sense of hierarchy,” she said. “In London, I was dating a Tory MP. He brought the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, to dinner.”

She said there was a plumber in the kitchen at the time and her mother asked him what he thought of the Prime Minister’s policies. When the plumber expressed his dissatisfaction, she said: “I’ll bring him in and you can tell him yourself.”

The Huffington Post has the same attitude in respect to their blogging platform. “Our blogging platform has no hierarchy,” she said.

Answering questions at the end of her presentations, she said: “The world of work was designed by men, and it’s not working.”

When the audience finished laughing, she said in serious tones that it was fuelled by burnout and sleep deprivation.

When a person tells you they are very busy, said Ms Huffington “it’s just not a good answer”.