Over the past several days, we have talked a lot about Don Miguel Ruiz’ book The Four Agreements. We’ve looked at what it means to be impeccable with your word, to not take anything personally and to avoid making assumptions. That means we only have one more agreement to review, and I can tell you that it is really Something Good.
The Fourth Agreement:
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 regret.
Learning to understand the fourth agreement has been pretty difficult for me, although it has certainly also been Something Good that I’ve done for my life. Until recently, I didn’t understand the difference between doing my best and being a perfectionist. I now understand that there is a huge difference. One of them has the potential to make you miserable, while the other offers the opportunity to be content.
Part of what is important to remember when trying to always do your best is that your best is going to vary from day to day. If you are healthy and have gotten a good night’s sleep, your best is going to be different than if you had been up all night with the flu. Even your mood can affect what your best is liable to entail. The trick is to recognize and accept this. Once that’s possible, it gets harder and harder to judge yourself too harshly. If you know that you have done your best for that moment in time, then the Judge can’t lay a guilt trip on the Victim, like we talked about in Part 1 of this series.
As I said, I’ve had trouble differentiating between doing my best and being a perfectionist. There are several problems with being a perfectionist, and one of them is that it can actually keep you from doing your best.
“If you try too hard to do more than your best, you will spend more energy than is needed and in the end your best will not be enough. When you overdo, you deplete your body and go against yourself and it will take you longer to accomplish your goal. But if you do less than your best, you subject yourself to frustrations, self-judgment, guilt, and regrets.”
As Ruiz points out, always doing your best means that you’re going to be taking action in your life. You will be a more productive person, which generally leads to feeling better about yourself, too. You end up doing things for the sake of doing them, rather than just because you want some sort of reward. In fact, the action can even become its own reward.
“Action is about living fully. Inaction is the way that we deny life. Inaction is sitting in front of the television every day for years because you are afraid to be alive and to take the risk of expressing what you are. Expressing what you are is taking action. You can have many great ideas in your head, but what makes the difference is the action. Without action upon an idea, there will be no manifestation, no results, and no reward.”
One of the wonderful things about this agreement is how we can apply it to the other three. Of course, it is very difficult to always be impeccable with your word. It is nearly impossible to never take anything personally or make assumptions. But we can do our best to live these four agreements, right? Some days we may be better at it than others, but we can always start over in the next moment.
That is really one of the most comforting things that I have gotten from my multiple readings of The Four Agreements. I don’t have to be perfect or strive for perfection. I need to do my very best at that moment in time; and if I fall short of where I would like to be, then I can go ahead and try again. Wonderfully, I can do this without disparaging myself, too, because I was doing my best.
“So if you fall, do not judge. Do not give your Judge the satisfaction of turning you into a victim. No, be tough with yourself. Stand up and make the agreement again. ‘Okay, I broke my agreement to be impeccable with my word. I will start all over again. I am going to keep the Four Agreements just for today. Today I will be impeccable with my word, I will not take anything personally, I will not make any assumptions, and I am going to do my best.’”
There is more in this remarkable little book. It teaches you how to go about transforming your own dream (life) into one of beauty. For me, it has taken many readings to understand some of what is explained, and there’s still probably some of it that I’m missing. What I discovered was that the more I implemented the four agreements, the more I was able to slowly make the changes I wanted to make. In some cases, I found that I was being mired down by things from my past that I didn’t know even had such a hold on me. By slowly breaking more and more of the small, damaging agreements I had made with myself and the world, I eventually gathered enough strength to break some of the much larger ones that I didn’t even realize had been there.
Okay, enough testimony, already. Once again, I want to recommend this book to those who are looking for ways to change their lives for the better. I hope that the brief articles I’ve posted over the last week have helped introduce you to Don Miguel Ruiz’ The Four Agreements and that it ends up being Something Good that you can apply to your own lives.