Excerpts from Miguel Ruiz’s book “The Four Agreements”:
Be Impeccable with Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
Don’t Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own personal dream. If you develop an immunity to the opinions and actions of others, you will avoid needless suffering.
Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
Now, let’s dive a little deeper into each agreement…
The First Agreement / Be Impeccable with Your Word
The First Agreement is the most important, and therefore the most difficult to keep. It is so important that it can elevate you to a level of existence that I call heaven on earth.
The First Agreement is this: Be impeccable with your word.
It sounds very simple, but it is incredibly powerful.
Why are such demands placed on the word? The word is the power that you create yourself. Your word is a gift that comes directly from God. The Gospel of John says about the creation of the universe: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Through the word, you express your creative energy. The existence of all things is created with the participation of the word.
No matter what language you speak, your intentions are expressed through the word. What you see in your dreams, what you feel, what you truly are — everything finds its embodiment in the word.
The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force, a powerful human ability to express yourself, communicate, and think — and thus, to create the events of your life.
The word is humanity’s most powerful tool; it is a magical instrument. But, like a double-edged sword, it can either create a wonderfully beautiful dream or destroy everything around you. One edge is the misuse of the word, which creates a living hell. The other is the precision of the word, which creates beauty, love, and heaven on earth.
Depending on how it is used, the word can set you free or enslave you. It is hard to imagine the full power of the word.
Impeccability of the word is the correct use of energy. Impeccability means using energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself. If you accept yourself, you will be filled with the truth that cleanses you from the inside of emotional poison.
But accepting such an Agreement is difficult because we are accustomed to something else. When communicating with others and, more importantly, with ourselves, we are used to lying. We are not impeccable with our word.
The precision and impeccability of your word can be measured by your level of self-love. The degree of self-love and self-awareness is proportional to the quality and integrity of the word. If your word is impeccable, you feel good, you are happy and calm.
The Second Agreement. Don’t Take Anything Personally
The next three Agreements stem from the First.
The Second one goes like this: Don’t take anything personally.
Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. Let’s recall the example given: when I, not knowing you, meet you on the street and say, “You are terribly stupid!” then in reality, this statement is about me.
You can take it personally only because you yourself believe in it. Perhaps you think to yourself: “How does he know? Is he clairvoyant? Or is my stupidity already obvious to everyone?”
You take the statement to heart because you agree with it. As soon as this happens, the poison enters you, and you are trapped in a hellish dream. And you fall for it because of your sense of self-importance. Which, along with touchiness, are extreme expressions of egoism, because each of us thinks that everything revolves around our “self.” During training or domestication, people get used to taking everything upon themselves. It seems to us that we are responsible for everything. Me, me, me — always me!
But those around you do not act for your sake. They act based on their own motives. Each person lives in an individual dream, in their own consciousness; they are in a world completely unlike ours. By taking something personally, we assume that people are oriented in our reality, and we try to merge our world with theirs.
When we truly see other people as they are, without taking anything personally, they cannot hurt us with word or deed. Are they lying to you? So what. They lie because they are afraid. They are afraid you might discover they are imperfect.
Taking off the social mask is painful. When people say one thing and do another, you are deceiving yourself if you don’t notice their actions. But when you are honest with yourself, you can protect yourself from emotional pain. It may be quite painful to tell yourself the truth, but you don’t have to attach yourself to that pain. Recovery is not far off: a little time, and everything will be fine.
Free yourself from the need to take everything personally. 6 steps of a woman to her true freedom.
The Third Agreement. Don’t Make Assumptions
We have a habit of making guesses about everything. The difficulty lies in our belief that they are true.
We could swear that our assumptions are real. We make them about what people do or think (taking it personally), and then we blame them and send emotional poison. That is why every time we voice assumptions, we are asking for trouble. We make them, misinterpret them, take them personally, and create huge problems out of nothing.
The suffering and drama of your life are the result of making assumptions and taking everything personally.
Take a moment to reflect on this statement. All the complexity of managing relationships between people boils down to controlling assumptions and taking everything personally. This is the foundation of our dream of hell.
We create a huge amount of emotional poison simply by making assumptions and taking everything personally, because we usually also start discussing our hypotheses. Remember, gossip is a way of communicating in the dream of hell and passing poison to each other. We are afraid to ask someone to explain what we don’t understand, and so we make guesses and are the first to believe them; then we defend them and try to prove someone else is wrong.
It is always better to ask questions than to make assumptions, because assumptions bring us suffering.
To refrain from making assumptions — ask questions. Let there be no ambiguities in communication. If you don’t understand — ask. Gather the courage to ask questions until everything falls into place, and even then, don’t delude yourself into thinking you already know everything about the situation. Once you receive an answer, you will know the truth, and there will be no need for guesses.
Gather your courage and ask about what interests you. The person answering has the right to say ‘no’ or ‘yes’, but the right to ask is always there. Similarly, everyone has the right to ask you a question, and you can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
If you haven’t understood something, it’s better to ask again and clarify everything without resorting to assumptions. On the day you stop making assumptions, communication will become pure and clear, free of emotional poison. In the absence of guesses, your word becomes impeccable.
The Fourth Agreement. Always Do Your Best
There is one more agreement, and it turns the previous three into established habits. The Fourth Agreement concerns the application of the previous ones: Always Do Your Best.
Under any circumstances, always try to do your very best — no more and no less.
But keep in mind that your capabilities in this regard are not constant. Everything is alive, and everything changes over time, and sometimes your efforts result in high quality, and sometimes — not so much. When you are rested and get up in the morning feeling fresh, your capabilities are greater than late in the evening when you are tired. You can do more when you are healthy than when you are sick; when you are sober than when you are drunk. Your potential will depend on whether you are in a wonderful and happy mood or upset, angry, or jealous.
‘Doing your best’ doesn’t feel like work because you enjoy what you are doing. When you like the process itself and there is no unpleasant aftertaste after the work, you know you are giving it your all. You try because you want to, not because you have to, trying to please the Judge or those around you.
The first Three Agreements will only work if you do your best.
- Don’t expect to be impeccable with your word right away. Your habits are too strong and deeply ingrained in your mind. But you can do everything that depends on you.
- Don’t think you will never take anything personally; just do your best to achieve that.
- Don’t dream that you will never make assumptions, and yet you can still strive to live that way.
If you do your very best, the habits of using words carelessly, taking everything personally, and making assumptions will weaken and gradually leave you.
You should not judge, feel guilty, or punish yourself if you cannot keep these agreements.
Do the best you can, and a feeling of relief will appear, even if you continue to make assumptions, take things personally, and are not always impeccable with your words.
That is all the knowledge — take it and use it.
See also: Three steps necessary to activate a feeling of inner strength
Write in the comments which of the 4 agreements have already firmly settled into your life?
What still needs work?