The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom are essential
steps on the path to personal freedom.
The agreements you made with yourself
There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements are the ones you made with yourself.
In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave.
The four agreements:
You need a very strong will in order to adopt the four agreements–but if you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation of your life will be amazing.
The First Agreement: Be impeccable with your word
Why your word?
The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life.
The word is so powerful that one word can change a life or distroy the lives of millions of people.
The Second Agreement: Don’t take anything personally
Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally.
Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in.
Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds. Their point of view comes from all the programming they received during domestication.
The Third Agreement: Don’t make assumptions
We create a lot of emotional poison just by making assumptions and taking it personally.
The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth.
The big mitote in the human mind creates a lot of chaos which causes us to misinterpret everything and misunderstand everything. We only see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. We don’t perceive things the way they are. We have the habit of dreaming with no basis in reality. We literally dream things us in our imaginations. Because we don’t understand something, we make an assumption about the meaning, and when the truth comes out, the bubble of our dream pops and we find out it was not what we thought it was at all.
The way to keep yourself from making assumptions is to ask questions. Make sure the communication is clear. If you don’t understand, ask. Have the courage to ask questions until you are clear as you can be, and even then don’t assume you know all there is to know about a given situation.
The Fourth Agreement: Always do your best
Under any circumstance, always do your best, no more and no less. But keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next. Everything is alive and changing all the time, so your best will be sometimes high quality, and other times it will be not as good.
Regardless of the quality, keep doing your best–no more and no less than your best.
Just do your best–in any circumstance in your life.
Complement The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom with Erich Fromm on the fear of freedom