Welcome back to my Nonfiction Book Party!
Today’s featured book is one of my favorites. It’s a wonderful book for stress management and personal growth. These concepts can help you reduce a great amount of stress by helping you avoid thought and behavior patterns that create frustration, blame, hurt feelings, and other negative emotions.
Title: The Four Agreements
Author: Don Miguel Ruiz
Themes: Spirituality, Self-help, Personal growth
Synopsis: The Four Agreements was published in 1997 and has sold around 9 million copies. It has been on the New York Times Bestselling list for almost a decade. Everything we do is based on agreements we have made – agreements with ourselves, with other people, with God, with life. But the most important agreements are the ones we make with ourselves.
The Four Agreements are:
- Be Impeccable With Your Word.
- Don’t Take Anything Personally.
- Don’t Make Assumptions.
- Always Do Your Best.
In The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.
- Agreement 1: Be Impeccable With Your Word
This agreement discusses avoiding gossip, lies, empty promises, and other ways in which we cause problems with our words. Say only what you mean, and realize that you can cause damage if you’re not careful with what you say.
- Agreement 2: Don’t Take Anything Personally
This concept deals with understanding how other people’s behaviors are a reflection of them only. When someone gives us feedback about our behavior or about us as people, it’s important to remember that no opinions are truly objective; we all have our biases, our filters through which we view the world. Because of this, we shouldn’t take anyone else’s view of us or our actions as entirely accurate. When someone says something about us, they’re really saying something about themselves and how they view the world.
- Agreement 3: Don’t Make Assumptions
A lot of stress can be created when you assume you know what other people are thinking without checking with them. Understanding that other people might have different motivations for their actions, even drastically varying worldviews from yours, and remembering to really try to understand others and discuss these motivations before jumping to conclusions about their behavior, can go a long way toward preventing interpersonal conflict.
- Agreement 4: Always Do Your Best
By this, Ruiz means to do the best you can at any given moment so you’ll have no regrets. Some days, your best isn’t as good as other days, and that’s okay. As long as you put an honest effort into life, you will have nothing to be ashamed of, and won’t beat yourself up over a less-than-stellar performance in retrospect.
Bonus Links:
What is the Nonfiction Book Party? All month long I’ll be sharing newly released nonfiction titles and some of my 5-star favorites too! Join me on Instagram for an epic book party with an amazing prize pack. Tag all your posts #NonfictionBookParty
Bloggers: Make sure to blog along with DoingDeweyDecimal, JulzReads, What’s NonFiction, and Shelf Aware and follow #NonFicNov. Over on BookTube, get the details on #NonfictionNovember20 and join the Goodreads Group here.
Want to see which books I’ve posted about in previous years? (And which books are STILL on my list?!)
2019 Posts Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Wrap Up
2018 Posts Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4
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The OC Book Girl 
This sounds great! Thanks for sharing!
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