one important agreement

While I am not a woman who feeds her soul through talk shows, I have to say that sometimes on an idle Friday afternoon I do find myself in the company of an Oprah or Dr. Phil rerun. While most of the time the shows are filled with topics that barely tickle my interest, sometimes these TV sages present something that truly strikes a chord with me.

And sometimes it’s only a few words.

That happened with Oprah years ago, when in her book club segment she was discussing a book by Mexican writer Don Miguel Ruiz called The Four Agreements. The book focuses on four agreements you make with yourself to alleviate the negative energy that weighs down your life in order to attain the happiness you’ve been seeking. While I’m generally skeptical of the self-help genre, one of these agreements mentioned on the show forever changed the way I think.

Agreement Number Two: Don’t take anything personally.

So often those words had been said to me before, but Ruiz’s explanation was simply so pragmatic that I couldn’t help but feel silly for burdening myself with indignation throughout my whole life. His argument was that people view the world through their own sets of filters, and so what someone says to you is generally intended in a completely different way than you interpret it due to the difference in your filters. It is rare that you ever know the full context of someone’s thoughts, and so the series of triggers that go through their mind and lead to certain comments is unknown to you. For this reason, you can never be sure of what anyone really means. As we have been conditioned into a cynical state by the world we live in, we hardly ever give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they honestly meant no harm.

And so we bring the harm upon ourselves, turning the comment over and over again in our minds trying to create hidden meanings and agendas that were probably never even there to begin with. We analyze tone and body language, without ever thinking to stop for one second to just take comment at face value. In the end, we succeed in doing to ourselves exactly what we thought the other person intended—hurting ourselves.

If you never take things personally, you begin to realize how much easier life becomes. You free yourself of the constant self-doubt that envelops when you believe that others are scrutinizing your every move. Truth is, most people have enough of their own problems to even care enough about your flaws to criticize them.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to constructive critique, it simply means that if someone actually does mean to insult you, let them make more of an effort to actually do it. Stop doing their work for them.