At a recommendation of a dear friend a while ago, I finally read “The 4 agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz. The book provides 4 simple rules (agreements) for life: 1. Be impeccable with your word 2. Don’t take anything personally 3. Don’t make assumptions 4. Always do your best.
While I loved the simplicity of the agreements, I can certainly say that these are about the toughest agreements/principles to follow and it takes a great deal of practice, patience, humility, self love and resilience to work on them every day.
Whether we want to admit it or not, we all fail on our words often. We say things in the heat of the moment that we didn’t mean, we let other people’s opinion affect how we think of ourselves, we may speak unkindly about someone based on their reaction, not really understanding where they are coming from and even if we are trying every day to “be impeccable with our word” we are human and we make mistakes. The important reminder is not to beat ourselves about it but to accept our failure and continue to try to “do our best”.
We often take things personally, especially when they are coming from the people we love most. The challenge with this agreement is we often perceive how other people react to us, depending on how we feel. How many times have we been in a situation where someone snaps at us and it has nothing to do with us? Yet, they hurt our feelings. Or you have reached out to a friend and they are short with you. We take it personally. This agreement helps us work on only working on the things that we have control over. We can’t control how others feel or react, but we can control if we allow those words to hurt us or we let them slide. I have to confess, my husband is a master at this, I am working VERY hard on this agreement.
Don’t make assumptions. Say what??? Don’t we always make assumptions? I called my parents and they didn’t answer, I immediately go into a stress mode assuming the worst!
This is our fight or flight nature. At home, I often notice that if I am focused on a project and one of my daughter’s come to talk to me, I don’t give them my full attention and they assume I am not interested. The truth is quite the opposite. I am very interested but they came at a time that was not convenient for me. I am working hard on letting them know in advance when I’ll be working on a project that needs my full attention and I cannot be interrupted and give them an alternative time/date when we can discuss whatever is bothering them. I am also working on asking first if they have an urgent matter or if it can wait. That response prevents them from assuming I think my project is more important than them.
The last agreement is my favorite because it recognizes that we are going to fail more often than not, but instead of beating ourselves up, we just “DO OUR BEST”. Every day we just need to do our best to be Impeccable with our word, to not take things personally and to not make assumptions. And as the adage goes “Practice makes perfect”. The more we practice it, the better we get at it.
So, tell us what is one agreement that you really connect with or one that you know you want to work on?
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