Don’t Take Anything Personally

The Four Agreements

By Don Miguel Ruiz

The Second Agreement. Don’t Take Anything Personally.

p.50. “It is not important to me what you think about me, and I don’t take what you think personally.” [Whether positive or negative]. “Either way, it does not affect me because I know what I am. I don’t have the need to be accepted.”

p.51. “No, I don’t take it personally. Whatever you think, whatever you feel, I know is your problem and not my problem. It is the way you see the world. It is nothing personal, because you are dealing with yourself, not with me. Others are going to have their own opinion according to their belief system, so nothing they think about me is really about me, but it is about them.”

p.52. “Your point of view is something personal to you. It is no one’s truth but yours. Then, if you get mad at me, I know you are dealing with yourself. I am the excuse for you to get mad. And you get mad because you are afraid, because you are dealing with fear. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will be jealous or sad.

            “If you live without fear, if you love, there is no place for any of those emotions. If you don’t feel any of those emotions, it is logical that you will feel good. When you feel good, everything around you is good. When everything around you is great everything makes you happy. You are loving everything that is around you, because you are loving yourself. Because you like the way you are. Because you are content with you. Because you are happy with your life. You are happy with the movie that you are producing, happy with your agreements with life. You are at peace, and you are happy with the movie that you are producing, happy with your agreements with life. You are at peace, and you are happy. You live in that state of bliss where everything is so wonderful, and everything is so beautiful. In that state of bliss you are making love all the time with everything that you perceive.”

p.53. “Don’t take anything personally. Even if someone got a gun and shot you in the head, it was nothing personal. Even at that extreme.”

p.56-58. “Don’t take anything personally because by taking things personally you set yourself up to suffer for nothing. Humans are addicted to suffering at different levels and to different degrees, and we support each other in maintaining these addictions. Humans agree to help each other suffer. If you have the need to be abused, you will find it easy to be abused by others. Likewise, if you are with people who need to suffer, something in you makes you abuse them. It is as if they have a note on their back that says, ‘Please kick me.’ They are asking for justification for their suffering. This addiction to suffering is nothing but an agreement that is reinforced every day.

            “Wherever you go you will find people lying to you, and as your awareness grows, you will notice that you also lie to yourself. Do not expect people to tell you the truth because they also lie to themselves. You have to trust yourself and choose to believe or not to believe what someone says to you.

            “When we really see other people as they are without taking it personally, we can never be hurt by what they say or do. Even if others lie to you, it is okay. They are lying to you because they are afraid. They are afraid you will discover that they are not perfect. It is painful to take that social mask off. If others say one thing, but do another, you are lying to yourself if you don’t listen to their actions.”

p.59. “There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally...The whole world can gossip about you, and if you don’t take it personally, you are immune. Someone can intentionally send emotional poison and if you don’t take it personally, you will not eat it. When you don’t take the emotional poison, it becomes even worse in the sender, but not in you.”

p.60. “You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you.”

p.60. “You can choose to follow your heart always. Then you can be in the middle of hell and still experience inner peace and happiness. You can stay ion your state of bliss, and hell will not affect you at all.”

p.64. “We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.”

p.64-65. “Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions, and believe we are right about the assumptions; then we defend our assumptions and try to make someone else wrong. It is always better to ask questions then to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up for suffering.”

p.65. “We only see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. We don’t perceive things the way they are. We have the habit of dreaming with no basis in reality. We literally dream thing up in our imaginations. Because we don’t understand something, we make the assumption about the meaning, and when the truth comes out, the bubble of our dream pops and we find out it was not what we thought it was at all.”

p.69. “We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make. And this is why we have a fear of being ourselves around others. Because we think everyone else will judge us, victimise us, abuse us, and blame us as we do ourselves. So even before others have a chance to reject us, we have already rejected ourselves. That is the way the human mind works.”

p.73. Conflicts arising from mistaken assumptions: “The way to keep yourself from making assumptions is to ask questions. Make sure the communication is clear. If you don’t understand, ask. Have the courage to ask questions until you are clear as you can be, and even then do not assume you know all there is to know about a given situation. Once you hear the answer, you will not have to make assumptions because you will know the truth.”

(California, US, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1997).