Books We Recommend: The Four Agreements and the Practice of Keeping Your Personal Power

There are books you read, books you enjoy, and books that become part of the way you live your life. For me, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz belongs in that last category.

It is honestly one of my favorite books of all time. I have read it somewhere between forty and fifty times, and if you are going to work with me on any meaningful level through No Unfinished Business, I consider it required reading. I recommend it because the four agreements provide an incredibly practical framework for noticing where we surrender our personal power and learning how to take responsibility for the way we participate in our own lives.

Long before I knew my mother was terminally ill with Parkinson’s and dementia, I was reading this book over and over again. Looking back, I am incredibly grateful that I had already spent so much time with it, because eventually those ideas stopped being something I understood intellectually and became something I desperately needed to practice.

Taking care of my mother challenged me in ways I could never have fully prepared for.

My mother knew exactly how to get a reaction out of me. She knew my buttons because, well, she installed most of them. There were times when I could be a complete pain in the ass right back. I could become angry, defensive, frustrated and exhausted. I could let something she said take over my thoughts for hours. Sometimes I shut down. Sometimes I withdrew from her simply because I didn't know what else to do. There were moments when I seriously wondered whether I could continue taking care of her.

There were times, especially when medications, Parkinson’s and dementia were affecting her behavior, when my mother could become an absolute tyrant. She could create a scene in public. She could fall to the floor at home crying. She could say things designed to hook us emotionally. At times it seemed as though she was determined to prove that she was impossible to love and would push the people closest to her until they either reacted or walked away.

That is an important part of this story because I don't want to rewrite caregiving into some beautiful spiritual experience where I always responded perfectly. I didn't. There were days when I was angry. There were days when I couldn't stand another minute. There were days when doing my best looked a lot different from what I wished my best looked like.

That is precisely where The Four Agreements became so valuable to me.

The first agreement is Be Impeccable With Your Word.

Ruiz talks about speaking with integrity, saying what you mean and being aware of how you use your words toward other people and toward yourself. For me, that became much bigger than simply watching what came out of my mouth.

I had to start listening to the conversation happening inside my own head. When my mother upset me, my mind could build an entire case against her. I could replay what happened, assign meaning to it, argue with an imaginary version of her and convince myself that I knew exactly why she had behaved a certain way. Before long, the original incident wasn't even the biggest problem anymore. The story I was telling myself about the incident had become the problem.

Being impeccable with my word meant learning not to use my own thoughts as weapons against myself. It meant asking whether what I was telling myself was actually true. It meant recognizing when frustration had turned into judgment. It meant becoming aware of the difference between, This behavior is incredibly difficult for me, and, She is doing this because she doesn't care about me.

The second agreement is Don't Take Anything Personally.

This may have been the most important agreement for me during the years I cared for my mother.

When someone we love is angry with us, rejects us, criticizes us or behaves in a way that hurts us, taking it personally can feel almost automatic. We make their behavior mean something about who we are. We make their words evidence that we aren't appreciated, respected or loved.

But another person's behavior is taking place inside the reality they are experiencing.

That realization became particularly important as my mother's disease progressed. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't always interacting with the version of my mother I remembered. Sometimes I was interacting with Parkinson's. Sometimes dementia was part of the conversation. Sometimes fear was speaking. Sometimes medication was affecting her. Sometimes she was simply angry, scared, frustrated or desperately trying to retain control in a life where she was gradually losing control of almost everything.

If I personalized every one of those moments, I gave them power over me.

And when I gave away that power, I became less capable of serving her.

That doesn't mean accepting abuse without boundaries. It doesn't mean pretending something doesn't hurt. And it certainly doesn't mean allowing another person to treat you however they want because you are trying to become spiritually enlightened.

It means recognizing that you still have a choice about what you make their behavior mean about you.

That was one of the biggest transformations for me.

I began to see that my personal power wasn't something my mother could actually steal from me. I was handing it to her every time I allowed her behavior to determine my emotional state. Little by little, day after day, I started practicing keeping that power for myself.

The third agreement is Don't Make Assumptions.

This one is deceptively powerful.

Ruiz encourages us to ask questions, communicate clearly and express what we actually want rather than filling in the missing information ourselves.

I started noticing something fascinating about my own thinking: the moment I took something personally, I almost always made an assumption.

If my mother snapped at me, I might assume she didn't appreciate everything I was doing.

If she fought me about something related to her care, I might assume she was deliberately trying to make my life difficult.

If she became emotional, I might decide that she was intentionally manipulating me.

Sometimes she may very well have known exactly what she was doing. But other times, I simply didn't know.

That distinction mattered.

I could deal with what actually happened. What became dangerous was when I built an entire emotional reality around what I assumed happened.

And then I noticed how interconnected the agreements really were.

When I took my mother personally, I made assumptions about her intentions. Once I made those assumptions, my internal dialogue stopped being impeccable. I would begin telling myself stories that made me angrier, more resentful and more exhausted. Eventually, I wasn't responding to the present moment anymore. I was responding to everything my mind had constructed around it.

That cycle can happen in almost any relationship.

Your spouse doesn't respond to a text, so you assume they're upset. Your boss gives you short feedback, so you assume your job is in danger. A friend becomes distant, so you assume you did something wrong.

Someone changes their tone, and suddenly your nervous system is responding to an entire story that has never actually been confirmed.

This is why learning not to make assumptions can create so much emotional freedom. Instead of immediately deciding what something means, we can become curious. We can ask questions. We can communicate. We can leave room for information we don't yet have.

And finally, there is the agreement that gave me a great deal of compassion for myself: Always Do Your Best.

One of the most important pieces of that agreement is understanding that your best is not going to look the same every day. Your best when you are rested will probably look different from your best when you haven't slept.

Your best when life is peaceful will look different from your best when somebody you love is dying. Your best when you have emotional capacity will look different from your best when you are overwhelmed, grieving, angry and scared.

There were days caring for my mother when I could respond with patience and compassion. There were other days when my best was simply not walking away. There were moments I handled beautifully. There were moments I didn't. There were times I completely shut down because I didn't know what else to do. The lesson wasn't to beat myself up because I wasn't perfectly practicing the agreements. The lesson was to notice. To become responsible. To recognize that maybe I truly had done the best I could in that moment and also acknowledge that tomorrow I might be capable of doing better.

That is an important distinction in the work we do at No Unfinished Business.

Responsibility is not the same thing as self-punishment. You can acknowledge that you handled something poorly without spending the next ten years attacking yourself for it. You can admit that you hurt someone without deciding you are an irredeemable human being. You can recognize that you didn't know how to handle something then and still take responsibility for learning how to handle it differently now.

To me, that is where the four agreements stop being four nice ideas on a page and become a practice.

Be impeccable with your word. Don't take things personally. Don't make assumptions. Always do your best.

They continually lead back to one another. Watch the story you're telling yourself.

Notice what you're making someone else's behavior mean about you. Question the assumptions you have created around what happened. Then do the best you can with the awareness you have right now. And when you discover that you could have done better, learn something from it.

For me, The Four Agreements helped create the emotional foundation that allowed me to continue showing up for my mother. It did not make caregiving easy. It did not magically make me patient. It did not prevent arguments, exhaustion, anger or moments when I desperately wanted to run away from the responsibility I had taken on. What it did was help me see where I still had choice.

The more I practiced these agreements, the less interested I became in trying to control my mother and the more interested I became in understanding my own participation in what was happening between us. I could not always control her behavior. I could not control Parkinson's. I could not control dementia. I could not control what was happening to her body or her mind.

But I could work on Stanley. I could work on my reactions, my assumptions, and examine the words I was using toward her and toward myself. I could stop interpreting every difficult moment as a personal attack and I could keep asking myself whether I was genuinely doing the best I could.

That work mattered tremendously after my mother died because unfinished business doesn't begin at death. Many times, we're accumulating it while the person is still standing right in front of us.

Every conversation we're afraid to have, every assumption we refuse to question, every resentment we continue feeding and every story we've decided must be true can eventually become part of what we're left holding when the relationship changes or the person is gone.

That is one of the reasons I recommend this book so strongly to anyone beginning a journey of self-discovery, emotional completion or coaching with No Unfinished Business.

I had no idea during those first dozens of readings that one day these four seemingly simple agreements would become part of the framework I relied upon while navigating one of the most challenging and meaningful relationships of my life.

I'm grateful they were there when I needed them.

And if you're doing the work of becoming more complete with yourself, your relationships and the life you've lived, The Four Agreements belongs near the top of your reading list.

Not because following four agreements will suddenly make you perfect.

But because they might help you recognize the places where you've been giving away your power and remind you that you can choose to take it back.