Meet Your New Best Friend, The Four Agreements

The quality of our human relationships are impacted all the live long day, for good or ill, by the presence or absence of four simple, yet deeply impacting, agreements that were introduced to the world by Don Miguel Ruiz in his book, The Four Agreements.

• Be Impeccable with Your Word.
• Don’t Take Anything Personally.
• Don’t Assume Anything.
• Always Do You Best.

One of the gifts we offer through Being 101 programs is the chance to examine the inter-connectedness of the many, many ideas of emotional and social well-being.

In the chart below we view the relationships that exist between The Four Agreements and the Five Steps of Emotional Literacy. Click here for a version to print out: Building Our Strength- Four Agreements and Emotional Literacy

The tiny lines drawn between the two systems show which agreements build up the various parts of your essential emotional intelligence. Do you agree with how we connected them? Take note that Managing Our Relationships requires the most proficiency with The Four Agreements. Authentic success in life rarely occurs without mastery of most of these agreements.

After earnestly practicing these agreements for the past 18 years with my family, friends, colleagues, clients, and students, I offer the following Truths & Observations about The Four Agreements:

• The agreements are privately made between yourself and the Universe. Your commitment is real, or it isn’t- the Universe isn’t playing games and can’t be fooled.
• You must independently find the courage and willingness to make the agreements. No one can do this for anyone else.
• When you decide & do it- if you decide to do it– you get the reward of healthy power.
• The Four Agreements are like a magic compass:
  The Agreements always take you out of the worst part of a problem…
  and send you in a better direction.
• Just like a compass has 4 cardinal directions N, S, E, and W, so the agreements guide your:
  • Words/Thoughts
  • Reactions
  • Assumptions
  • Personal Standards
• Any one of these agreements will help you in ANY difficulty you face in life; the more of them you master, the more peace you experience.

For the next four weeks we will be examining the agreements and increasing our practice of each of them.

Prelude for the coming week: The author, Ruiz, states his belief that 80% of this world’s problems could be avoided if we honored one agreement, “Be Impeccable with Your Word”. This is a great agreement to focus on first.

Do you want homework? This week look for your errors, and yours alone, in regard to the words uttered by the tiny tongue in your body and the invisible speaker in your mind. Next week we’ll fully explore Being Impeccable with Our Word. 

This material was recently presented in the FREE weekly Well Being 101 Meetup Group, https://www.meetup.com/Well-Being-101/ via Zoom. You are welcome to join us as we explore the many basic tools of Being 101 in the coming weeks.

“Do the thing and you will have the power.” Ralph Waldo Emerson