The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz (Summary)

Have you ever wondered when every element in your life is not suited to the way you wanted them to be? You are not alone and it will never be to late to fix that issue. Let’s take a few words from Miguel Ruiz himself before getting started: “Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art“. This story is based on ancient Toltec wisdom. Toltec are were known throughout southern Mexico as “women and men of knowledge”. The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.

It is our agreements which rule our life. If we don’t like the life we had right now, that’s the time that we change our agreements. When we are finally ready to make our agreements change, we may always remember that there are four powerful agreements that will help us break those agreements we made out fear that depletes our energy. Each time you break an agreement, all the power you used to create it returns to you. If you adapt these four agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements. You just need to be determined enough to be able to adapt the Four Agreements. The transformation with your life will be extraordinary if you start to live a life with these agreements. You will discern the drama of hell vanished right before your eyes. Instead of living in a dream of hell, you will be creating a new dream — your personal dream of heaven.

Be impeccable with your word. This is the first agreement and the most significant yet it is the hardest to honor. Why your word? Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God. Speak with integrity and 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. Avoid gossiping, lying, making empty promises, and other ways in which we cause problems with our words. A lot of people don’t realize the power of their words and don’t see the harm that can be caused by speaking carelessly, thoughtlessly, or aggressively. Being Impeccable with your word means using your thoughts and words to in integrity, to feel good.  Our thoughts and words are a matter of choice. Everyone should learn how to think and speak accordingly to deliberately make what you desire that can be of immense value to your life. Being impeccable with words means to think and speak with integrity, with what we truly mean and with what we truly desire. Word are so powerful that one word can change a life or destroy the lives of millions of people. It is the most powerful tool we have as a human. It is like a sword with two edges—either it can create the most beautiful dream or can destroy everything around you.

Don’t take anything personally. This is the second agreement. Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering. It deals with knowing how other people’s behavior reflects them only. It is very essential to remember that no opinions are truly objective when people give feedbacks about the way we behave—we are all biased and we all have different perspective on how we view the world. Because of this, we shouldn’t take anyone else’s view of us or our actions as entirely accurate. When someone says something about us, they’re really saying something about themselves and how they see the world. This agreement will help us become less reactive, defensive and retaliatory but keep it in balance. When you don’t take it personally, it will help you to break many habits that trap you in the dream of hell that causes you to suffer. If you will learn to practice the first two agreements, you will surely break 75% of the tiny agreements that trapped you in hell! Write this agreement on paper, and put it on your refrigerator to remind you all the time: Don’t take anything personally. By keeping this agreement, you will surely travel the world with a heart that is completely free and open. No one can hurt you! You won’t need to place your trust in others action or words.

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 this third agreement, you can completely transform your life. Everyone is capable to make assumptions. And the problem with it is that we believe that they are the truth. Assuming what other people are thinking without confirming them can create a lot of stress and chaos in one’s mind. We make assumptions based on people’s behavior—we take it personally and then blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word. One assumption may lead to another assumption, making us jump into conclusions and take the story personally. And blame other people and try to gossip them to justify our claim. And through gossiping, a distorted message becomes even more distorted. The whole world of control between humans is about making assumptions and taking things personally. Our whole dream of hell is based on that. Always discern the truth before concluding something—don’t every assume, it will drive you crazy and make you sad! By making this agreement a habit, your whole life will be completely transformed.

Always do your best. This is the fourth and last agreement. It allows the other three to become deeply established habits. The fourth agreement is all about the action of the first three: Always do your best. Do you best but don’t overdo! No more and no less than your best. When you overdo you deplete your body and go against yourself making you take longer to achieve your goals. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are tired as opposed to well-rested. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret. As long as you put an honest effort into life, you will have nothing to be ashamed of, and won’t beat yourself up over a less-than-stellar performance in retrospect. On the other hand, if you do less, you subject yourself to frustrations, self-judgment, guilt, and mostly likely you will regret the outcome.  Just do your best — in any obstacle that comes in your life. It doesn’t matter if you are sick or tired, if you always do your best there is no way you can judge yourself. By doing your best, you will learn to accept yourself. But always note that we have to be aware and learn from our mistakes. Learning from your mistakes means you practice, look honestly at the results, and keep practicing. This increases your awareness. By doing your best, the habits of misusing your word, taking things personally, and making assumptions will become weaker and less frequent with time. You don’t need to judge yourself, feel guilty, or punish yourself if you cannot keep these agreements. If you’re doing your best, you will feel good about yourself even if you still make assumptions, still take things personally, and still are not impeccable with your word.

            After knowing the four agreements then we can now break our old agreements out of biases, fear, assumptions and being incompetent. Breaking these old arguments lead to personal freedom. Everyone talks about freedom! Who stops us from being free? We blame the government, we blame the weather, we blame our parents, we blame religion, we blame God. The freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves. Sometimes, looking back to our lives, we are guilty of doing things just so we can please others, just to be accepted by others rather than living our lives to please ourselves. That is what happened to our freedom. We are not even aware that we are not free—that’s simply the worst! The first step to personal freedom is awareness, if you are not aware, there is nothing you can change. The second is to master your own dream; our lives are the manifestation of our dreams; it is an art.

There are three masteries that lead people to become Toltecs. First is the Mastery of Awareness. This is to be aware of who we really are, with all the possibilities. The second is the Mastery of Transformation — how to change, how to be free of domestication. The third is the Mastery of Intent. To be Toltec is a way of life. It is a way of life where there are no leaders and no followers, where you have your own truth and live your own truth. A Toltec becomes wise, becomes wild, and becomes free again. The three masteries for people to become Toltecs are the following:

1. Mastery of Awareness- you are aware of who you really are from all the possibilities.
2. Mastery of Transformation- you know how to change and how to be free from domestication.
3. Mastery of Intent- From Toltec’s point of view it is the part of life that makes transformation possible and one that encompasses all energy—unconditional love. Thus, it is therefore the mastery of love.

If you live with the four agreements, there is no way that you will live in hell! Always start a day saying: Today I choose to honor the four agreements. If you happened to break an agreement, never give up and begin again tomorrow and again the next day. It will not be easy at first, but as the time goes by you will get used to it and it will become easier until someday you will be amazed how you are ruling your life with these four agreements. And, you will be surprised with the transformation of your life. I challenge you to live with these agreements starting today! This is your calling.