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097 - The Only 4 Things You Need to Know

Hello there, Kevin here with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. The only podcast that’s helping you become more fluent in English, and more fluent in life.

Today’s episode I think will help you become much more fluent in life. One of my favorite books, at least one of my top ten books that I’ve read in my, not so short life, but not so long life either.

I’m going to talk about a book today called “The 4 Agreements”. This book was written by the author Don Miguel Ruiz, who is Mexican, and it was published in 1997.

This book is about our self-limiting beliefs . Beliefs that rob us of joy and also that create a lot of suffering, a lot of needless suffering.

So, I’m going to give you an introduction to this book and talk about each agreement, and share with you what I think are the most important ideas, and the ones that can help you get the most benefit from this book in a short fifteen-minute podcast episode.

As I go along, I will also explain some of the English that I use that you might not know.

By the way, I’m a little under the weather today if you can hear it in my voice. Under the weather, what does that mean? Well, I’m a little sick. I have a cold, just a head cold, and under the weather, feeling under the weather or to be under the weather means you are sick, a little sick. Not extremely sick, you wouldn’t say under the weather if you’re extremely sick, and again I have a cold, I have a head cold, see, you hear that? A head cold is just when you’re congested, stuffed up in the head. You might have to clear your throat sometimes like I just did, cleared my throat.

But anyway, that’s enough vocabulary on

being sick, we don’t make boring being sick vocabulary lessons here.

There’s plenty of being sick boring vocabulary lessons online, so go find those if you want to learn more about talking about being sick.

Here we talk about inspiring, life-changing lessons with a little bit of English vocabulary thrown in for good measure.

Going to talk about the book “The 4 Agreements, A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.” And as you might know, personal freedom is something I talk a lot about here on the Feel Good English podcast, and personal freedom is just that, it’s personal. It is different for everybody. Freedom can be a vague term. It means different things to different people. So what does freedom mean to you? What does personal freedom mean to you?

If you want a transcript to this episode you can find it at feelgoodenglish.com. There’s some other goodies on my website. So if you haven’t been there yet, go check it out.

Also, sign up for my email list, I’ll send you weekly motivational emails to help you stay on track with your English, stay on track with your life and to motivate your week just a little bit more. Those emails come out on Sunday. So if you want to be a part of that list go to feelgoodenglish.com, get on my email list there and we’ll connect through your email too.Now let’s get into the lesson “The 4 Agreements.

A Practical Guide to personal freedom.”

So the first agreement from the book is to be impeccable with your word, be impeccable. To be impeccable means to be flawless, faultless, of the highest standard. So what the author is talking about being impeccable with your word is to speak with integrity, to be honest, to be true. Big part of that is to speak honestly, to speak what you’re really feeling, to not hide things, to not lie.

Our words are powerful. They create energy, they put energy out there, so if you say negative things to other people or about other people it creates a negative energy, and this can come back to you.

And this even includes with yourself. If you speak badly about yourself this creates a whole negative vibe, a whole negative atmosphere and a negative chain of events around yourself as well.

Be careful with how you use your words. Speak truthfully, honestly and speak positively.

Often by speaking too much, we say things that we regret, meaning that we wish we hadn’t said it,

“wish we hadn’t said”. And a

big part of this is not gossiping, not using your words to gossip about others. So what is gossip, gossip, gossip is to talk, you know in a casual way, about other people and often it’s kind of negative things, bad things and often we don’t even know if these things are true or not. However we use gossip to connect with other people and by making things up about other people, talking badly about other people with your friends you can feel that you’re connecting more with your friends, but if the only conversation topics you can come up with your friends are about other people, you’re going to sound kind of stupid. Maybe you need to learn something new as opposed to just talking badly about other people that aren’t around you. Think of a couple high school girls talking to each other about another girl.

The other girl’s not in the room so these two girls are talking about her. Even though that other person isn’t in the room, there’s a negative energy created, and this native energy can affect things, can affect actions, can affect behaviors, can affect emotions, can affect events that happen to you.

So, biggest word of advice here is do not talk bad about other people.

This can seem obvious, however, I think we often fall into a trap of kind of automatically talking bad about others with the people that we’re around. When we don’t have things to say or if we just want to connect with the person that we’re with, often we’ll talk bad about other people so we can connect through talking bad about other people.

This is very common I don’t think it’s something that only bad people do. I think a lot of people do this, but if we pay more attention to this behavior and if we try not to gossip so much we can really feel better about ourselves and we can also make other people feel better as well.

And don’t gossip, gossip is for high school girls. And if you are a high school girl listening to this out there you don’t have to be gossipy, be better than your gossipy girlfriends. Stop talking bad about other people and be the coolest girl in school.

The next agreement here is don’t take anything personally. And this is huge. Don’t take what other people say or what other people do personally. Meaning don’t say what they say or do what they do based on you because of you is hard not to think this way. However, the second agreement don’t take anything personally.

When somebody says something bad to you. Let’s say they make fun of, they make fun of your weight. Somebody says to you oh you know you should lose a little weight, you’re a little chubby. Why do you get offended, why does that hurt? According to the book and I agree, the reason you get hurt when somebody says you’re not the ideal weight when they think you are a little chubby is because you agree with them because you believe them. You take it personally and you think yes maybe it’s true, maybe I am not the ideal weight, maybe I am wrong, and don’t believe me well let me ask you this. If somebody came up to you and said,

“wow you know I really don’t

like your skin color. You’re green! Nobody else is green but you’re green, why are you green?” Well, you probably aren’t green and so you’re not going to get offended. It’s not true, you don’t believe them, you don’t agree with them because you’re not green, so it means nothing! (sorry for those listeners out there who are green, If you are green person I’m not trying to offend you.)

So anyway, if they say that you’re chubby, if you’re overweight, somewhere inside of you, you’re going to agree with them and you’re going to think,

“wow, I guess what they’re saying is true”. But

instead of taking responsibility for this, or just realizing that if it is something you want to change (there are ways to change it) you get mad at the other person, you get pissed at them, you get pissed off at them and say “I can’t believe they said that, oh that’s not true. I’m perfect, oh why, oh poor me,

” that’s not going to help anyone. It

actually gives the other person power, and if you want to take away the power from other people, especially people that are not very nice, don’t take what they say personally, and realize that everything single thing that they say has nothing to do with you, it is completely about them.

It’s about their words, their opinions, their values, their ideas, their past, their struggle with life.All of these different things that they have make up their world and what they say is totally based on themselves, so don’t let other people get you down by the words that they speak.

Simply realize that it’s not about you, it’s totally about them.

Connecting this with another lesson this book seven habits of “Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. He talks about trying to understand people first before trying to be understood, so you can apply this here. If other people are making you feel bad, try to understand why they might be doing that. Put yourself in to their shoes, your acceptance and understanding and kindness will probably shock them when they realize you’re not affected by their bad intentioned words and actions.

Another very interesting concept in this agreement is why people lie.

People lie not to trick you or to hurt you, they lie because they are afraid of something, they’re scared of the truth they don’t want it to to tell you the truth because they don’t want to lose something, they don’t want to lose your trust, they don’t want to lose your friendship, your relationship, your love or whatever that may be. They’re lying because they are afraid of something, maybe they don’t want to go to jail so they lie. That’s an obvious one but look deeply into the person, person’s world. When somebody is lying, why are they lying? What are they afraid of?

Third agreement, do not make assumptions. To assume something is to think you know the answer to something, you think you know what’s going on, you think you know why somebody did something, you think you know why somebody is not doing something. We make assumptions all day every day.

So let me ask you this, when was the last time you assumed something to be true? Maybe it made you angry or jealous, sad, scared.

It caused some suffering for you for a little while but when you found out the real answer to your dilemma, when you found out what was really going on it turned out that you were completely wrong.

Has this happened recently probably?

This is the effect that making assumptions has on us. We assume things based on our past, right, what has happened to us in the past.

What we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, sometimes we even assume things based on other people’s lives or movies. If you watch novellas, like the soap operas, and there’s always drama in these shows, you think life’s like that. So you assume things in your life are going to be the same way. Well that’s pretty ridiculous, isn’t it?

So try to not make assumptions, try not to assume things to be true until you have all the information you need to know exactly what’s going on, what’s going to happen. Making assumptions is often why we worry about the future because we think things are going to happen when we really don’t know. Often those things don’t happen.

So pay attention to the assumptions that you make from now on, in the future, maybe just today, and realize those are just based on past experiences, and we’re just trying to make sense of or connect experiences and emotions from the past in an attempt, well in a futile attempt to predict our futures, and if you let go of that and you’re more present and more mindful you wouldn’t have to deal with the stress of assuming bad things will happen.

Last agreement here, always do your best. Does that sound kind of cheesy? Always do your best!

Well, your best will change, your best changes from moment to moment, from day to day, from week to week. We can’t always expect to be at the same level, however always try to be your best at that given moment. You’ll be sick, you’ll be tired, you’ll be depressed, you’ll be unmotivated, but at any given moment, do your best. And why? When you put your best effort into everything you do, you will avoid self-judgment, you will avoid other people’s criticism, because you’re doing your best, so even if they do criticize you, you won’t take it personally because it’s not true, correct? Remember, you only take things personally if what you think someone said is true and you’ll feel better about yourself.

So think of the next step at this moment, what’s the next thing that you could do that would be the right decision that would be your best, and if you’re performing an activity, focus all of your attention on that activity. Do your best on that activity at any given moment.

This doesn’t mean you’re going to be excellent at that. We’re not even talking about how well you do something, we’re talking about you, giving your best effort in everything you do all the time and knowing that your best changes. So your best is going to be different than it will be at other times.

Connecting this with English. Does it feel like some days you wake up and your English just sucks? It’s not good that day you can’t speak well. You’re like,

“what the hell is happening? I’m not speaking

English well today!” Maybe you had a English class, or a presentation or something in English, and you’re just terrible at that day. Your English sucked that day.

Well, even when we’re putting our best in sometimes maybe it’s not working, maybe your mouth isn’t flowing that day. The English isn’t coming out of your mouth, it doesn’t matter. You’re trying your best, you’re learning a lot, you’re learning from your mistakes, you could put your best into listening, listening to what other people are saying, listening to your English teacher, listening to yourself, putting in your best effort to learn as much as you can from that moment. So the next day when your English is back to normal, you would have learned something the previous day even though you weren’t speaking wonderfully, you’re putting in your best effort. Learning more and more doing your best and feeling good.

So I’m going to summarize these 4 agreements with a quote on each agreement.

The first agreement and I’m quoting the book:

“Be impeccable with your word, speak with integrity. 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.”

The second agreement:

“Don’t take anything 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.”

Quoting from the third agreement,

“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 just this one agreement you can completely transform your life.”

And finally the fourth agreement, quoting the book:

“Always do your best, your best is going to change from moment to moment. It will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick.

Under any circumstance simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and self-regret.”

Wow, awesome episode, wonderful book, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something, of course, if you want to go deeper into this book, there’s a lot more to learn. You can find a link to the book on my website, feelgoodenglish.com or just type in the “four agreements” on good old Google, Google is always there for you.

Again if you want a transcript to this episode, go to feelgoodenglish.com. You’ll find it there.

Hopefully, I didn’t sound too sick in this episode, but hey, I’m doing my best right.

And how about a joke:

How can you tell (how can you tell is the same as how do you know) if a mummy (like in the Egyptian days) if A mummy has a cold?

He starts coffin.