The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

Ruiz begins Chapter 3 by examining personal importance and how it negatively impacts everyone’s lives. He considers personal importance the ultimate expression of selfishness because one believes that everything is about them. He notes that people live in their own mind, which is a completely different world than those of others. When people take things personally, they assume that someone else understands their internal world and try to impose it onto someone else.

What people say or do comes directly from their agreements with themselves—and has nothing to do with anyone else. Everyone can choose whether to take the negative behaviors of others personally. When they do, they accept that emotional poison and allow it to infiltrate their minds and bodies, and they feel offended. Offense leads people to defend their beliefs and creates conflict. This too reflects their internal agreements.

Ruiz uses a personal anecdote to convey how he no longer takes things personally. He realizes that people will praise him when they’re happy with themselves. When they’re unhappy, they’ll criticize him. He doesn’t take these comments personally because he knows that whatever someone feels is their own personal problem. People are dealing with themselves, not with him. Even if someone tells him that his words hurt them, Ruiz knows that his words aren’t causing hurt; they’re simply touching a person’s existing wounds.

Ruiz compares human life to a movie. All individuals are the director, producer, and star of their own movies. The movies they create are based on the agreements they’ve made. No one else is responsible for another person’s movie. The movies of those who live with love are free of fear. Because they love themselves, they love what’s around them, and everything makes them happy.

Ruiz urges people not to take even their own thoughts personally. He writes that the mind lives in more than one dimension. It can perceive reality through more than just the eyes and can hear ideas that originate outside itself. Like the body, the mind is divided. Just as a person can use one hand to feel the other, the mind can talk to itself. Mitote, or confusion, occurs when multiple parts of the mind speak simultaneously. Each part of the mind makes its own agreements, and those agreements often conflict. One can clear mitote only when one understands these agreements and can resolve the internal conflicts.

Ruiz concludes the chapter by stating that taking things personally is setting oneself up to suffer needlessly. He describes what life can look like when one chooses to adopt the second agreement. He writes that choosing not to take things personally gives individuals freedom from anger, jealousy, envy, and sadness. They become immune to the negativity and emotional poison that others try to impose. In addition, they break many small self-limiting agreements and are therefore free from others’ opinions, needing to trust only themselves to make wise decisions. They aren’t hurt by others’ carelessness and can love others wholeheartedly.