The Four Agreements
Welcome to the one day at a time podcast where we forget about yesterday. We don't worry about tomorrow. It's what are we gonna do today that's all the matters because you've only ever had or will ever have the fantastic twenty four hours a day you're about to embark on. So hopefully this episode is gonna give you some daily dose of wisdom that you can take action on today to improve your life. And remember, all it takes is one day at a time.
Speaker 1:Oh, good morning, everyone. But right now, it's quarter past ten in the night for me. Just finished a three hour marathon with Donald Robertson. So that'll be on this podcast soon for you to listen to all about values. So definitely worth listening to.
Speaker 1:It's, you know, you can break it up into chunks, but we wanted to cover values in their entirety, so it should help. And there's a lot of stuff towards the last hour of Donald's strategies to finding out your values. Anyway, I mentioned in the the chat about a book called the four arrangements. And if you're reading be water, my friend by Shannon Lee, which I recommend you % read, it's recommended in that book. It's one of her favorite books.
Speaker 1:So it's The Four Arrangements. It's a philosophy by the ancient Toltecs, I believe they're called, or Toltecs of, Mexico, South America. And they come to this realization of how to live so that is for arrangements. And it's honestly it's it's beautiful. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:I love it. I've read it. I love it, and I'm sharing with you now. So the first of all, starts saying it's not your the the author starts saying, like, it's not your choice You spoke English, that you got this religion, moral values, whatever. You were basically born into them.
Speaker 1:Right? So society, wherever you're born, different values, different things. Okay? That all ties in. And he explains that children are domesticated the same way as we domesticate a dog.
Speaker 1:So we do it via a system of punishment and reward, which is true. And it's all about repetition and habits. Right? So eventually, we go from being childlike and playful and saying whatever we want, being fully ourselves to these no, that's bad, yeah, that's good, this and that. And then basically you become your father or mother.
Speaker 1:You have the same beliefs. You follow the same political party, blah blah blah, and typically end up the same. That's what happens to most people. Right? They're not saying they're not being wrong there.
Speaker 1:So we grow up then it says to basically learn to live our lives trying to satisfy other people's demands. People pleasing is very common and that's basically what we end up doing. And it goes on the block, I'll quote it exactly. It says, we dishonor ourselves just to please other people. We even do harm to our physical bodies just to be accepted by others.
Speaker 1:You see teenagers taking drugs just to avoid being rejected by other teenagers. They are not aware that the problem is that they don't accept themselves. They reject themselves because they are not what they pretend to be. And this is the big hit home, right? But nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves.
Speaker 1:And it is the judge, the victim, and the belief system that we that make us do this. Self abuse comes from self rejection, and self rejection rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect and never measuring up to that ideal. Okay. Important. That's the the preface to this.
Speaker 1:Now the first arrangement, this arrangement keeps an arrangement. The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. Right? And I thought, well, what's that mean really? Like, what being good my word being like saying well.
Speaker 1:So basically says that the human mind is like a fertile ground where seeds are continually being planted. The seeds are opinions, ideas and concepts. You plant a seed of thought and it grows, right? Obviously, that's good. So the more we talk about something, you know, the law, the law of attraction type of thing kind of like going on where you're self fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 1:Right? So you go against yourself when you judge or blame yourself for anything. So you're gonna against yourself. You're judging that immediately against yourself. Being without sin is exactly the opposite.
Speaker 1:Being impeccable is not going against yourself with your word. When you're impeccable with your word, take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself. Okay? So the I'm impeccable means without. So impeccable means without sin.
Speaker 1:Sin begins with the rejection of self, and self rejection is the biggest sin that you can commit. Okay? One can't infamous is like if if you're being true to your word and you're using your words in a in a good way and, you know, you do trip up, like, don't beat yourself up about it. Right? Stuff like that happens.
Speaker 1:If you're poisoning yourself with really bad words yourself, like self hurting yourself with these terrible words, you'd nasty to yourself. You're saying, oh, I'm the worst person. I'm such a failure. I'm always gonna be I'm not gonna I'm gonna be knowing you where I want be. I'm such a failure.
Speaker 1:Why am I even alive? And all these like literally poisonous words that you're saying thus thus you're going against our self arrangement right away. Right? So you're planting really bad seeds in your mind and you're not being impeccable with your word, right? You're not.
Speaker 1:So if we adopt the first arrangement and we become impeccable with our word, any emotional poison will eventually be cleaned because we will never self harm ourselves with the word. Word is so powerful. Think about how powerful the word is. Written word, the verbal words are words are what have caused wars. Words are what have what cause can can help someone fall in love with someone else.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of the words are very powerful. So be careful. Don't hate yourself with the word. Don't say these things to yourself. It's not good.
Speaker 1:Right? And he goes on to explain this is important. You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self love. How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word. When you're impeccable with your word, you feel good, you feel happy and at peace.
Speaker 1:Be impeccable with your word. This is the first agreement you should make if you want to be free, if you want to be happy, if you want to transcend the level of existence that is hell. It is very powerful. Use the word in a correct way. Use the word to share your love.
Speaker 1:Right? Beginning with yourself, self love, tell yourself how wonderful you are, how great you are, tell yourself how much you love yourself. Use the word to break all those teeny tiny agreements that make you suffer. Okay, We got that. The second agreement is don't take anything personally.
Speaker 1:Whatever happens around you, don't take it personally. Okay? If I said to you, no, you know, you're stupid. Like, you can't take us. You can't take that personally.
Speaker 1:Like I could be talking about stupidity in many different ways in monies where you can't, you can't put, you can't accept that. Right? You can't just say, you can't just take it personally, right? Personal importance or taking things personally is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about me, me, me. There's definitely a massive, there's definitely a massive, truth to that.
Speaker 1:If you take things personally all the time, you think everything's about you, didn't you? Like what someone says something in a meeting and you take on this, it's just it's it's just words spoken and you take it and make it about you. That is the selfishness because you think everything's about you when it wasn't. You're assuming, right? This author goes on to say and you might agree with this or not, nothing other people do is because of you, it is because of themselves.
Speaker 1:All people live in their own dream, in their own mind, they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world. Okay? That person try to send poison to you. If you take it personally, then you have to take the poison, and it becomes yours.
Speaker 1:Very important. It's easier said than done. Right? But you need to be immune to these things. You got to not take anything personally.
Speaker 1:It says more about them than it says about you. Okay? We've been told this through the years, of course, but we don't take it seriously. Okay. The third agreement is don't make assumptions, we have the tendency to make assumptions about everything.
Speaker 1:The problem with making assumptions that we believe they are truth, we could swear they are real. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking. We take it personally, and then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word. And it's always better to ask questions and to make an assumption because assumptions set us up for suffering. Right?
Speaker 1:That's important. Like, god. There's been so many I've had so many issues due to assumptions. And I mentioned in another voice note, maybe it was on your the turtle membership. If you are gonna assume, right, and you're gonna do one assumption, if you've got if you're starting anything off with, well, this happened, but then this, I think they did send out and they think someone said that and you've got, like, four assumptions on the job.
Speaker 1:Call it like, it's not true. Like, think about it. If one assumption is bad enough, you got them before on the goal. Right? Don't do it.
Speaker 1:I know it's easy to do and run away with assumption. But we have to stop making assumptions because we're then living in this perception of perception of perception. I'm assuming that of them. They are assuming that of me. But in reality, in cuckoo land, where all these assumptions in cuckoo land, they're even truth.
Speaker 1:They're assumptions we both got. I think it was our philosopher Cooley, which I heard in an interview in Impact Theory with Jay Shetty. He was like, I'm not who I think I am. I'm not who you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.
Speaker 1:Just look it up and read it out 10 times. It's so true. It's so true. The fourth one, the fourth arrangement agreement Scott is agreement meant you can read yeah the fourth agreement is just do your best in any circumstances in your life it doesn't matter if you're sick or tired if you always do your best there is no way you can judge yourself So true, right? Doing your best, you're going to live your life intensely.
Speaker 1:You're going to be productive. You're going to be good to yourself because you'll be giving yourself to your family, to your community, to everything. But it's the action that is going to make you feel intensely happy. When you always do your best, you take action. Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you're expecting a reward.
Speaker 1:Stoicism 101, you do the virtue for the virtue itself. The virtue is the reward. Being honest is the reward, not what comes after being honest, the praise. Being moderate with your food intake, that is the reward, not so much maybe the weight loss that comes with it. Having doing a courageous action, that is the reward, not benefit you might get after it.
Speaker 1:Right? We often stop expecting the things of doing something to expect things after it because are we being genuine in that regard? No, we're not. So we must we must we must do our best. Take action without expecting anything in return.
Speaker 1:There's no point you being nice just for you to just for you to have someone come back and say, oh man that's the best thing you've ever done thank you so much you just should be nice for the sake of being nice right you should say nice things to people for just because you want to say nice things and give out love not because you want people to like you right very important You know, I'll try my best doing this as well. So I'm learning as we all are. This is all stuff that we all need to work on every day. Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you're expecting a reward. Most people do the exact opposite.
Speaker 1:They only take action when they expect a reward and they don't enjoy the action and that's the reason why they don't do their best. When you do your best you learn to accept yourself but you have to be aware and learn from your mistakes. Learning from your mistakes means you practice, look honestly at the results and keep practicing. This increases your awareness. Doing your best really doesn't feel like work because you enjoy whatever you do and you know what you're doing your best and you enjoy the action of doing it in a way that you will not have negative repercussions for you.
Speaker 1:You do your best because you want to do it not because you have to do it. You get to live this life. You get to do this live like Louise challenge. You get to improve your fitness every day, you get to learn martial arts, you get to do yoga, you get to listen to Donald Roberson speak three hours about philosophy. You get to do these things, you don't have to but you get to do them.
Speaker 1:We're very fortunate to be able to get to do these things. Remind yourself like there's people in this world who were born in the slums with nothing or even not even water, literally no nothing to improve their life, they've literally just born in the gutter, die in the gutter and that's the that is the grim truth of this planet is that people are in those positions. So we need to make sure that we are, doing the best with what we've got and actually seen as a reason we get to do these things. We're not forced to do it, but it's such an opportunity. And this challenge is an opportunity for you to learn JKD from one of the best instructors yoga from the beginning.
Speaker 1:You're speaking every week on a Monday with Don Robson, bestselling author, an amazing guy, psychotherapist, always is an expert. Right? You get to do these things. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
Speaker 1:If you do your best always over and over again, you will become a master of transformation. Practice makes the master. By doing your best, you become master everything you have ever learned you learn through repetition you learn to write to drive and even walk by repetition you are a master of speaking your language because you practiced repetition action is what makes the difference Right? So you're one big thing today. Four agreements just for today.
Speaker 1:Today, I will be impeccable with my word, which means I'll be nice to myself. I'll be giving myself self love with my words. I will not take anything personally. I will not make any assumptions today, and I'm going to do my best and I'm not concerned about the future. You can keep my attention on today and we're staying in the present moment so you just live one day at a time.
Speaker 1:Right? One day at a time beginning today. Try the four agreements. See what you get on. Do your best.
Speaker 1:Focus. All you gotta do just for today. Let me know you get on. And that's it. Thank you for listening to the one day at a time podcast with your host, Scott Fleer.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, you understood something I said. I hope that some wisdom kind of distilled through into your mind, and I want you to now action it today. I don't want you to think about tomorrow. I don't want you to think about yesterday. I don't want you to think about leaving a review on this podcast.
Speaker 1:I don't you to think about going to another website. What I want you to do is as soon as this podcast ends, you will take action and make the most of today. Ground yourself today. Follow the one day at a time philosophy and your life will change.
