PNTV: The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (#10)

Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes TV episode number 12. Today we're going to do another great book, the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. As always, we've got a great book. We've got The Philosopher's Notes 6 page PDF with about 10 of my favorite big ideas from this great book. And today I am decked out in a bamboo Philosopher's Notes T shirt. Thank you, Lisa Marie. And we've got the workbook that I was so excited about in the last episode, plus the MP3 player just hanging out here with me. So let's get to work. Four Agreements. The subtitle is A Toltec Wisdom Book. So this is one of my favorite books and I read it many years ago. It was one of the earlier ones in my path. Really simple, really powerful and I think we're going to have fun with this quick episode. So Toltec Wisdom, just as a quick aside to Mexican South American philosophy school of wisdom, we also cover Toltec with Carlos Castaneda, another great teacher. We do his book the Wheel of Time. We'll do an episode on that soon. So the four Agreements, really quickly. Number one, first agreement is be impeccable with your word. We'll get into the details of these. Number two is don't take anything personally. Number three is don't make any assumptions. And number four is always do your best. So number one, be impeccable with your word. Number two, don't take anything personally. Number 3, don't make assumptions. And number four, always do your best. So we'll quickly go through all four and see what we can do here in the 10 minutes. So first the context. Don Miguel Ruiz likes to say that we're domesticated. Kind of like animals, right? So the same way that you domesticated dog, he says, we've been domesticated, we've been trained, and we've been trained in unhealthy ways. And these four agreements are really tools to train ourselves freshly to give ourselves a new way of being in the world. So the first agreement is the agreement to be impeccable with our word. So what this means is we stop doing things like criticizing, complaining, blaming, gossiping, all the negative things that we can do with our word, we stop doing. And not just in how we communicate with other people, but also in our own minds. So we want to be impeccable with our own word. And again, for me, this means no longer complaining, no longer blaming, no longer criticizing, no longer gossiping. When I was in Bali, I made that a practice where every Day throughout the day, I would check in and see how I was doing on that. And it's a lot of work to become more aware and see just how often we fall into criticism, blame, complaining, and gossip and criticism. Blame and complaining really are bad for a number of reasons, including the fact that they put us into victim mode. If we're complaining or blaming or criticizing, someone else has power over us. It's never a good idea. One other idea. On the whole idea of impeccability. Don Miguel Ruiz talks about this, this book. Paulo Coelho talks about it as well. The idea of impeccable. We're not talking. The word comes from the. I think it's two Greek words, impeccable, which means to be without sin. Now, we're not talking about sin in the sense of kind of Judeo Christian morality, where you're sin and you're evil and all that kind of stuff. We're talking about the classic sense of the word, the word impeccable, to be without sin. Sin meant in its original incarnation, it meant to miss the mark. So Paulo Cueva likes to say, think of it like an archer, right, who's taking aim at a target. And if they miss the target, they send. They missed the mark, they missed the target. Not a big deal. There's no need for shame or guilt or remorse. You simply take another shot and you realize this time how to get more closely to your target. If you miss again, okay, no problem. Get onto your target again and again and again. So that's the idea of impeccable. I love the word to be without sin, to make the mark, to hit our target. Pretty cool idea. So that's the first one. Be impeccable with our word number two. The second agreement is don't take anything personally. This is one of my favorite ones. So don't take anything personally. Don Miguel Ruiz teaches us that nothing anyone does has anything to do with you. All about their own issues that are just being projected onto you, basically. And in the note, I talk about some pretty fun ideas here. One, do you know the ink blob, the Rorschach ink blob test, right? Where psychologists can have people come in and look at an ink blob. It's literally just a piece of ink, like, spread between two pieces of paper. So they're kind of mere images of one another. And they ask people, what do you see in that ink blob? And there's nothing really in the ink blob. Buddhists would say it's empty of meaning. But when people look at it and they describe what they see in that ink blob. What it tells the psychologist is a lot about what's going on in that person's subconscious mind, right? So they're projecting their issues onto that ink blob and they're revealing who they are in the process. So the same thing with us when we interact with people, how they interact with us often is a reflection of who they are and where they are in that moment. More than anything else, I like to tell the story of imagining you showing up at work one day, right? You're the same exact person in two different situations. One, let's just say your boss, just to use the example, or a colleague or whatever. One situation, the colleague has a terrible morning, the other one, the colleague has a great morning. So in the first scenario, the colleague, you know, or boss is, you know, the alarm doesn't go off, the child's sick, they get in a car accident on the way to work, they've lost a lot of money in the stock market or whatever it is, and they show up to work that day not feeling too good about life for themselves. How do you think they're going to interact with you? Might be a little negative, right? But you're just sitting there. You just are who you are. Now imagine that same exact individual having an awesome day. Everything goes great. Their kid got straight A's, their wife or husband tells them how much they love them. They found $10,000 under the bed. You know, everything is going great, and they show up to work. How do you think they're going to see you? Probably a little more positively than in the negative event. Now, the important thing to know here is that you didn't change. You were exactly the same person in both situations. But how this person treated you depended on where they were. So this idea comes back to the second agreement. Don't take anything personally. Another quote here that I share from Marcus Aurelius. In the note, Marcus Raelius says, why would I care what someone thinks of me when they don't even have a good opinion of themselves? Such a great idea. Why would I care with someone who doesn't even like themselves Whether or not they like me doesn't make any sense. And the fact is, most people who go around criticizing and complaining and blaming and being angry and mean don't like themselves very much. So why do we worry about what they think of us? Important thing to think about. One other thing I share here. Quickly. Deepak Chopra talks about a mantra in his book. I think it's from the spontaneous fulfillment of desire. We have a note on that and we'll cover that in a TV episode later. But he has a mantra. I've said thousands, probably tens of thousands of times. It is, I am totally independent of the good or bad opinion of others. I am totally independent of the good or bad opinion of others. I'm totally independent of the good or bad opinion of others. Really powerful. We want to be independent of what other people think of us because it rarely has anything to do with us. Says more about them than us. That's the second agreement. The third agreement is don't make assumptions. This one's pretty straightforward. Oftentimes we can make assumptions about what someone's thinking. Are they angry? Do they like us? Do they not like us? His thought here is have the courage to ask. Don't make assumptions. Clarify what's going on. As I learned in sixth grade from a guy named Michael Labriola, when we assume we make an ass out of you and me, it's not a good idea. We want to avoid making assumptions. Don't assume. Just ask. Take some courage, but go ahead and do it. That's the third agreement. The fourth agreement is always do your best. And this is the agreement that brings all the other ones to life. And we talk about this a lot throughout the notes, that it isn't about thinking about things, talking about things, it's about doing them. So we need to do our best. And Don Miguel says that our best will change. Some days it's rock star, you know, we're just feeling great and we go out and our best is really high. Other days we're just not feeling well physically or emotionally. And our best isn't that high. It's more like this. But we need to go for it. And again, do our best. So the fourth agreement is always do your best. So those are the four agreements. Obviously we went through them very quickly, but hopefully you got something out of it. Number one is be impeccable with your word. Number two is don't take anything personally. Number three is don't make assumptions. Number four is always do your best. So I hope you enjoyed that. We've got some other big ideas here in the note you can check out. He also says that breaking our domestication is getting out of the conditioning. Doesn't happen like that. It took years and decades for us to get conditioned. Well, it's going to take time for us to build new habits. So we need to practice, practice, practice and be diligent in applying these truths. So my question today is what's the number one thing you got out of this quick show and how can you implement it into your life today? Go for it and if you're feeling called, comment on it and have an awesome day. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.