The four agreements book review

The Four Agreements Book Review

The four agreements is a short but very powerful book written by Don Miguel Ruiz. This book contains lessons for life and these lessons can help in managing stress and self-improvement.

Personally, after reading this book I adopted these agreements which left a huge impact on me, it helped me to change and transform my beliefs, habits and behaviours and a good news is that anyone can adopt these four agreements.

This book has been written in very simple language, easy to understand and these steps are quite practical easy to adopt. This book is a life changing book, the reason is it can help in changing our childhood’s beliefs, habits and behaviours that we adopted consciously or unconsciously.

Truly mentioned by the author, in childhood we adopt different beliefs, behaviours and habits we think these are true. We learn these from parents, friends and from the society we live. In childhood, we do not have opportunity to choose beliefs but we accept and adopt what we have been told by parents and the society we live and the author called this process as ‘Domestication of Humans’.

The author further mentioned that, you made many agreements with yourself, with parents, with friends, with society, with spouse, with children, but the most important agreements are you made with yourself , for example who you are, the feelings you have, your beliefs and how you behave.

In order to have an amazing and transformed personality the author suggested four agreements, which are below;

Agreement 1: Be Impeccable With Your Word

As mentioned by the author, this agreement is the most important but difficult to adopt. Being impeccable with your word it seems simple but very powerful concept.

The words we use in daily life have huge impact. As very well said, the words can make you or break you. I personally noticed that, in our society people are unaware of the importance of words’ impact. The words we use have magic. The author mentioned, your word is a pure magic if used in good manner, and black magic if misused. The word can change the life of someone or destroy it.

As a keen observer I saw many people in the society they do not realise the importance of words, they do not know how the misuse of words can hurt someone. According to the author being impeccable with your word means the correct use of your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself.

I fully convinced that, if we adopt this agreement it can bring great changes in our life as I experienced myself.

Agreement 2: Don’t Take Anything Personally

Adopting this agreement I think a bit challenging, the reason is we are in control of our behaviour but we cannot control and monitor the behaviour and attitude of other people. According to the author whatever happens around you don’t take it personally.

Don’t take it personally whatever the people think about you, what they feel about you because its not you what they think and feel about you, their opinions do not define you. As mentioned by author, if someone says to you that you are stupid without knowing you, its not you but he thinks you are stupid, when you take it personally it means you agree with him and you believe you are stupid.

Therefore, it is highly important to make habit of not taking anything personally. When we adopt this agreement it can help us to avoid careless comments or actions of others. In this way we can make ourselves responsible for our actions, not the actions of other people.

Agreement 3: Don’t Make Assumptions

Human being has the tendency and habit of making assumptions about everything in life. The author says, problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are true. In societies we live people make assumptions about anything, they believe these assumptions are correct for arriving a decision and they make judgement on the basis of those assumptions, sometime it creates problem and chaos.

 we also make assumptions about ourselves, we think this task is easy but in reality we just make assumptions rather than understanding the situation and circumstances.

Therefore, this agreement can help us to reduce stress by not taking assumptions but rather gathering facts about a particular situation.

Agreement 4: Always Do Your Best

This is the last agreement that we should adopt. The author says, you should do your best in any circumstance and situation, no more no less. But, the best may not be the similar because everything changes, therefore your best will be sometimes of high quality and in other situation it will not be the same.

We should do our best regardless of results and quality  in any situation, no more no less. If we do more than our best we will spend more time than needed and at the end we will not achieve the best. If we do less than our best we will regret, will be frustrated and feel guilt.

At last, just do your best in any circumstances in life. When you do your best you are going to live your life in better way. You become productive and you become good to yourself, family, community and to the society as whole.