Book Week: The Wisdom of The Four Agreements

On this week's episode, I share how I've been trying to apply the lessons from the book The Four Agreements to regulate my nervous system to stay in aligned energy. 
 
As a way to remember the agreements, I am using  four words integrity, immunity , knowing, and excellence.

Main points: 

• Integrity - I like to think of integrity as a straight line - and on either side of it are the values that drive my decisions.
• Immunity - don’t take things personally. Not taking anything personally for me looks like allowing the people in my life to think any thought, feel any feeling and do anything.
• Knowing - There's a difference between knowing and assuming. How do we stop making assumptions? Stop to notice. Ask clarifying questions.  
• Excellence - Always do your best with the time & energy limits you have in each present moment. This can change dramatically and only you know what “your best” is from moment to moment, day to day. 
  • Sometimes “doing your best” is literally laying down and simply breathing in and breathing out.  

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz
• Let Them, Mel Robbins

Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:00

Hey friends, this week, I want to share a little bit about a book that I've been using over the past few months to help me grow in self awareness and to become more of the person I want to be, it's called the four agreements, and I'll be telling you a little bit more about it on the podcast this week. Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Kibbitz, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Welcome wanted to share how I've been trying to apply The Four Agreements to regulate my nervous system to stay in aligned energy. If you haven't read the book, highly recommend it. I'm going to summarize it in a way that it worked for me. If those four words help you, that's awesome. The four words that I'm going to talk about today are integrity, immunity knowing, and excellence. Integrity is a way to summarize the first of the four agreements, which is to be impeccable to your word. When I think of that and the idea of integrity, I think of like a straight line and on either side of it are the values that drive my decisions. My coaching company, values are to be collaborative, to be generous, and to help people, including myself, create expeditious results. And so that's the straight line. If I'm 100 percent accurate, those three ideas will fit on that straight line, but we're all human. And so what happens when I move to the left or the right? When I move to the left of collaborative, sometimes I lose myself. When I move to the left of generous, sometimes I overgive. I overgive my time, my energy, my money. And when I move to the left with expeditious, I can move quickly and end up rushing. So then what's on the other side of collaborative end up holding onto things that I should be sharing freely, whether it is information or money. So you can see how the narrow road is narrow and how human of us, we're going to go back and forth from those ideas, but that would be the first thing I would offer you is what does integrity look like to you? What are your values? What are the boundaries of those values? And how do you notice when you're moving away from them? The next word I wrote was immunity. How do we, you know, develop immunity to things? And in the four agreements, The immunity we're developing is the immunity to not take anything personally. Mel Robbins is putting out a new book that comes out in December called Let Them. Immunity of not taking anything personally for me looks like allowing the people in my life to think any thought, feel any feeling and do anything. Most of the energy I lost over the last week was specifically because I had an expectation that wasn't met and the gap between my expectation and reality created a loss of a lot of energy, instead of allowing myself to be immune to the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't have my own purpose on this world, and that I have to stay in aligned energy and do my work. Part of my work is to create a community of people who can feel seen and known and loved and go out and do their important work. Integrity, immunity. The next thing I would summarize knowing, and the phrase from the four agreements is Don't make assumptions. There's a difference between knowing and assuming, and I did a lot of assuming over this last week, and I'm still doing it. I have to work on my human brain all the time because I can assume I know what is going to happen, and so the proverb, about the farmer and his son and the horse, has served me a lot. What happens when something happens? I don't know. I don't know what the consequence will be. My brain thinks I do. And then I try to make all kinds of decisions around that. So don't make assumptions is the third agreement in these four agreements. How do we stop making assumptions? We ask clarifying questions and that involves emotional energy. And maybe you're like me and you just don't have any right now. So sometimes we have to delay conversations, defer them, decide not to have them when we don't have the energy to hold on to the clarifying question, the curious energy, right? Sometimes we're out of energy and we don't have that. So just notice that. But by not making assumptions, what we do is we avoid drama and sadness that comes from going into a situation and thinking we know something that we don't know. So what do you know? What do you know today? Today I know I'm still breathing in and breathing out. The sun is actually shining today outside of my window. In this breath, for me, right now, all as well. That is not true around the world. One of the things that happened for me over the last week was this deep compassion for people that I had lost compassion for. So what do I know? I want to go back to that on repeat and I want to work on not making assumptions. So integrity, immunity Knowing, and then the last thing is excellence. Always do your best. Now, this can absolutely turn into something that doesn't serve anybody when we decide doing our best is past the limits we have. And so, if Christmas is a holiday you celebrate, it's a holiday I celebrate, and I decide that for my family, I want to buy them all a million dollar present, I don't even have access to credit for that. There is absolutely no way I could buy anybody, never, let alone my entire family, million dollar presents. It's just past, past my limits. So that would not be doing my best. And what I realized this last week that on one of the days, the day after the election, the doing my best was laying in bed and breathing in and breathing out. And this is not the first time I've had other occasions where people I love have passed away, where roles that I loved having ended, um, where scary things happened in the world. And so sometimes doing your best is literally laying down, breathing in and breathing out. Only you know what your best is, but that is one of the four agreements. I'm going to do my best. I'm not going to go past my limits though. I'm going to do my best within the limits. So as we think about this last seasonal sprint of the year, those are the four phrases, the four words that I hope will help you direct your intentional energy. You have mental, emotional, physical, spiritual energy. Where do you want to invest it over the next season? Maybe your seasonal sprint is only two weeks long. Great. Maybe your decision for the seasonal sprint is, I don't want to do anything. I want to read books and drink hot cocoa and stay in my house because I need to refuel. I'm extremely exhausted. You That's a beautiful decision to make. What we want to do every single week is take the time to notice what we're thinking and feeling, how our energy is. Decide if there's anything important that may not be urgent, because when something's important and not urgent, it's easy to let it drop. So let's decide today. If it's important but not urgent, we're going to put it on our schedule. And it might be five minutes at a time. That's doing your best. It might be deciding you don't have the energy currently to engage in some conversations that other people would like to have with you. Let's not take it personally. Let them have their human experience. Let's not make assumptions. Let's not decide that we actually know anything other than what is occurring right this moment. A big comfort to me over these last eight days has been the work of Eckhart Tolle. And his belief that there's power in the now, it's actually the only thing we have. We're not living in the past and we are not currently in the future, we're in the present. There's the power in being in the now. That helps us to not make assumptions. Assumptions are based on something in the future. Be impeccable in your word. The reason we're meeting today is there's a dream inside you that matters. For that dream, what next step aligned with integrity would you like to take? Where would you like to move? I know for me, I want to keep moving into love. I want to be someone who's patient and kind. And in order to do that, I have to take very good care of myself and I have to follow these four agreements. I hope these words encourage you today. If there is something you would like to name, take the time, write it down, find two or three small practice steps. Take a few moments, decide what your next sprint is going to be Reach out if I can help you with that. Thank you for joining the live a vibrant life podcast. I hope our time together encourage you and we'll equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave creative. Purpose filled life. And if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly Tibbetts life coach, or visit my website, kelly tibbetts. com. I look forward to connecting again soon.