137 The Four Agreements: Waking Up From The Dream Of Society

We question the dream of society, how attention is trained by repetition, and why most of our beliefs were never chosen by us. We map the Judge and the Victim, explore fear versus love, and share practical ways to rewrite old agreements and reclaim energy.

• dreaming while awake and the dream of the planet
• attention as a spotlight that shapes belief
• domestication through punishment and reward
• cultural programming, normalizing and perspective shifts
• the book of law, the Judge and the Victim
• the cost of staying versus the risk of change
• moving from fear to love to conserve energy
• using neuroscience, gratitude and focus to rewire
• authenticity, masks and DISC awareness
• setting up new agreements for a personal heaven

Free agile brain assessments and discounted DISC assessments through the end of the year. Just reach out to us has ways for you to reach us in the show notes

Chapters

• 3:49 Welcome & Book Context
• 4:29 Dreaming While Awake
• 6:29 Attention And Programming
• 9:23 Culture, Normalizing, And Perspective Shifts
• 13:15 Agreements We Never Chose
• 17:03 The Judge, Victim, And Social Theater
• 21:21 Rewriting The Book Of Law
• 25:09 From Fear To Love And Personal Power
• 29:29 Authenticity, Masks, And DISC Tools
• 32:39 Offers, Next Steps, And Teaser

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 2:18

For the little welcome to What's on Your Bookshelf, a life and leadership podcast where we live out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves. With your host, Denise Russo and Sam Powell.

SPEAKER_02: 2:40

Hello, everyone. Welcome back. It's another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf. This is our Life and Leadership podcast where we're living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves. My name is Denise Russo. My friend is Sam Powell, and together we're reading The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. And we are going to be sharing today chapter one. Last week we talked about the intro to the book to set the stage. And uh today we're going to share some of the magic around dreaming and waking up from bad dreams.

SPEAKER_01: 3:16

Yeah, and it's interesting because he the chapter is domestication and the dream of the planet. And he gets, well, we'll get to this, but he talks about this is what I call the domestication of humans. And I just I like it just such an interesting thought process that, like, you know, we domesticate animals, right? Like, we're not domesticated, but he makes a good argument here. So it's very um, very, very interesting. And uh it's an inter it's a good first chapter, right? And he starts this out with um, you know, what you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment, you are dreaming with the brain awake. What did you think when you heard that?

SPEAKER_02: 4:02

I highlighted the whole entire next part of the chapter, which says that you're dreaming 24 hours a day when you're awake and when you're asleep. But the only difference is that when you're awake, we can perceive things in a linear way, but when we go to sleep, we don't have a frame or a linear frame around what we're thinking. And so those dreams can change constantly. So I'm not one that can remember my dreams when I wake up, unless they're bad dreams. Like some, you know, you could wake up from a pretty dramatic dream and remember it, but I have uh friends that can remember everything that they're dreaming, and maybe they journal it down so they don't forget it and they try to recall it. Or I had one friend one time that would try to go back into the dream because maybe it was so good that they just wanted to be there. And the question is, is that real? Is it an alternate universe? Is it is it just chemicals in our brain? Is it real? Is it not real? I don't know. But he talks about how we dream all day, but that dreams detach you from reality. And I guess my question is, is reality real or are the dreams real? And so this is a pretty deep chapter to get into to figure out what do we pay attention to? What are our belief systems? What does our inner judge tell us in our bodies and in our minds? Do we play the victim? And he talks about, and I guess we'll get into it this week on this episode, that we do, we play a victim in our lives, we live our life with fear over things that we may not even designate as fear. And um, and from there that we're all just seeking pleasant dreams, that we want this eternal search for truth and justice and beauty. And so this chapter sort of outlines how we can, I think, parse out our dreams and how we can prioritize thoughts that matter, look at our belief systems, and then untangle the way we judge ourselves.

SPEAKER_01: 6:06

Yeah, definitely. And he defines here at the end of the chapter, right, is that the dream of the planet includes all of society's rules, beliefs, laws, religions, cultures, and ways to be governments, schools, social events, and holidays. So basically everything that we've constructed as part of society and part of, you know, experiencing being human is what he's calling the dream of the planet, right? Like we're sort of living in this, like you said, 24-hour dream-like state. We've just all kind of agreed linearly to follow some of these rules. And he says that attention is the ability to discriminate and focus only on which we want to perceive, right? So we are constantly perceiving a million things, right? But we can focus our attention. And he then goes on to say that the adults in our life, when we're born, right, when we're coming around, hook our attention and put information into our minds through repetition. And that is how we learn everything we know. By using our attention, we learned a whole reality, a whole dream. You and I are both parents. I like, I really had to sit with this one for a minute and think about that because you know, what he's essentially saying, right, is that as we're growing up, as we're becoming humans, becoming adults, right? That the adults in our life, the people around us, are basically inputting and focusing our attention and creating this reality or this dream, as he's calling it by us, you know, by re like by teaching us through repetition, right? Like we learn that, you know, you do you behave this way, right? Like in the morning we do this, in the afternoon we do this. And when somebody does this, we respond this way, right? And it's this repetitive sort of existence that then creates this dream reality that we all exist in.

SPEAKER_02: 8:07

I had a mentor once, probably be right before you joined the John Maxwell team. And it was the at the time, the leader of the John Maxwell team, and he was talking about how we're all programmed at that young age. Like, I can't think of all the examples, but one of them was like, if I were to say to you, the early bird gets the worm. Right? It's who taught that? Like, who how do we know that the bird is the one that got the worm? Or, you know, like that the um that the tortoise wins the race or whatever, you know, there's like little sayings like that. And so we're programmed, but beyond it just being programming from our parents, like my dad for sure programmed me with certain thoughts, and my mom programmed me with different thoughts. Like my mom programmed me and my brother to have empathy and kindness and compassion and love. And my dad programmed us to be like, um, don't take any crap from anybody and show up early to work because being early is being on time. And those are things I remember from young age into my adulthood. But then it goes beyond that into your culture. It could be your neighborhood, it could be the state you live in, it could be the country you live in, it could be the job you work at. What's the culture that has programmed you to think a certain way? We were talking off camera even about the culture of burnout jobs at big corporations and that that is just the normal culture. And if we know that that is the culture and we don't want it, but we stay, then aren't we really saying, like, well, we really um do want it then because we're we're willing to subject ourselves to things that we don't want. And so when he talks about attention here, it's this part of the book. I really want to encourage you as a reader and a listener, take some time not listening to us and have quiet space to look at what you pay attention to. Like I even thought about that sentence, pay attention. You're paying something for your attention, you're paying your time, your resources, your energy, your your passion. You're paying something for attention. So, what are you, what kind of attention did you buy?

SPEAKER_01: 10:21

Yeah. And I think that it's that, and and this is some of the most uncomfortable work I think we ever do in our lives is to look at this programming, this attention that we've spent on stuff, this repetition, right? And like you said, with um, we talk about it all the time, it's like we use the word normalizing, right? Like, oh, we've normalized this toxic culture, oh, we've normalized, and again, like right, he's saying that's what he's saying is we've normalized everything because we've repetitively sat in this existence. And so then we think that this is how everybody thinks. We think that our experience is everyone's experience. And if we live in very closed cultures, right, like we don't travel outside of the physical space that we live in, we don't talk to people who've been raised in a completely different, you know, culture, religion, mindset, thought process, then you never realize, right, that there's there's so much more out there in the world, right? The things that you were raised to believe are normal are in fact not. There is no normal, right, outside of breathing and eating, right? These are things, and even those people, you know, we have a spectrum of, right? And so it's it's really uncomfortable work because it makes you have to question so much. And I think that a lot of times we shy away from this work, right? We shy away from this looking at what are all the things, and I feel like I get hit in the face with this all the time with something. Someone will say something, especially like listening to diverse ideas and listening to people who are different than me, who have a different background than me, and they'll say something and it's like, oh dang it. Like I didn't, I didn't even know. Like I didn't know what I didn't know. And now that you've said this, like my eyes are open in a different way because it's you know, it's something like when I was 15, we moved from to uh south of Dallas, Texas, right? Which is its own very special community and all itself, right? Southern, uh, you know, very Christian, very, you know, kind of divided on some, you know, some ideas and beliefs and things like that, right? Like it was very normal. We had a social group called Ropers in my high school that were literally cowboys, like people in belt buckles and you know, tight jeans. Like that was that was actually like a social class inside of our school, right? Like jocks ropers, like that was a thing, right? And so we pick up and we move when I'm 15 between my freshman and my sophomore year of high school, and we land in Japan, and I'm all of a sudden in a completely different culture. I have absolutely no experience with whatsoever. I am on a military base, which I also have no experience with whatsoever. And I'm going to high school with kids who have moved all over. Their parents are military, right? Like it is completely different. And I'm an American in this little like kind of third culture outside of either place that you're, you know, in Japan or whatever, right? And that experience like really rucked the foundation of a lot of my thoughts and my beliefs and how I view things because it's so different, so 180 from how I had, you know, the cultures and the beliefs and the thoughts that I'd have been raised in, like to that point. And it's it's really uncomfortable, like really, really uncomfortable to sit in those thoughts. But like he says here, you know, we never had the opportunity to choose to believe or not believe. We never even we never chose even the smallest of these agreements, right? And so the word agreements that he's talking about is basically saying that like when we store information, right, we're brought this reality to us through repetitive people telling us what's going on. But to store it in our mind is to agree to it on some level. And so what he's saying is that we were given all of this information. We didn't get to choose any of how we were raised, where we were raised, who we were raised around, who was telling us or not telling us information. And so we never even chose the smallest of the agreements. He says we never even chose our own name, right? Like, and so we're all sitting and starting from this place that we had absolutely no choice in in the matter. And as soon as we agree, right, as soon as it becomes an agreement, like we believe it. And that belief is really what drives a lot of our life moving forward, unless we do that hard work of looking at those belief.

SPEAKER_02: 14:56

Hard work. I mean, that's the key. It's hard. This is hard. There's there's this foot. And in the lyrics of this song, it says, We were meant to live for so much more, but we've lost ourselves. And then it goes on. It's a it's a great song. Maybe we'll give the link after we do this episode. But um Vincent is notorious for not cleaning his glasses, and I'll look at him and be like, oh my God, there's no way you can even possibly see. And glasses are meant for you to be able to see better. And when they have fog and when they have dirt all over the lenses, you can't see well. So the other day we were somewhere and it was so hot outside, and so we were sweating, and there was like sweat on the glasses, there was fingerprints all over glasses. And I just said, just give them to me, let me clean them. He's like, No, I don't want to give them to you. So finally I convinced him to give me his glasses, and I looked at him and I was like, And see, can't you now see better? And he curt kind of smirked at me because he didn't want to say yes, but he could, but he could, and that's the point is that if this is hard work to be able to give up something you're comfortable with, and it kind of makes me think about I was watching, I don't know, something boring on C SPAN or something like that, where there was like a hearing in the government where one side questions the people that are there for the hearing, and it doesn't matter what side of a political spectrum you're on, or if you sit on one aisle or the other, or in the middle, or not in an aisle at all. The point is they're all the same. There's the person questioning the person that's in the hearing, and the person in the hearing is supposed to be telling the truth about whatever it is they're being questioned on. But it's like that's why they call it political theater, because it's a drama. And the one person will start questioning the other person, and they won't let the other person even answer. And if the person starts to answer, they cut them off and they're like, You're wrong, and it's not that. And then the other person starts telling things that are clearly not there's like word salad, weird stuff. It's not even close to answering a question. And I feel like this this piece of attention is that we've lost attention because we're so looking for the theater. We like drama, we like separation, we like division because that's what gives people ability to gossip or create their own cultures or have the ability to say I'm better than you, or I'm the winner and you're the loser. And it's so unfortunate that that is what creates the belief systems. Because in our own country, if people would actually just be quiet and start to listen to one another and elevate their communication skills and communicate, like John Maxwell's book, Everyone Communicates, but few connect. If the leaders would actually connect with each other and listen, we might actually make progress instead of being a divided states of America.

SPEAKER_01: 17:52

Yeah, exactly. But it takes that, like you said, that hard work of like looking inward, of not right, because it's so easy for us to look outward, right? It's so easier to throw blame to like look at this shiny thing and this drama over here and whatever, right? Like me gossiping feels good, right? Because it's me connecting, feel it's a false connection, right, with somebody else, of like you and me are on this side and they're on that side. So therefore it's us versus them, right? And we've been taught all of this, and it's it's not real, right? And if we were to take it down and really understand what we're doing, right? It gets hard. It gets hard to do. And he says, you know, and this is where he gets down to the domestication of humans. He says the result is surrendered to the belief of our agreement, right? Like we've been taught all this stuff, fed all this stuff to store it into our brain. We agree to it on some level. Like, okay, yes, like the early bird does get the worm, and so I store it. And that's the thing that I know. And he calls this process the domestication of humans. And he says, we train our children who we love so much, the same way we train any domesticated animal. And I'm like, this that was like, oh, oh, he says, with a system of punishment and reward. And if I think about that, right, like take a step back and step away from that, like, oh, I'm not punishing my children and rewarding, but like, yeah, sure I am. Of course I am, right? Because I'm teaching them what it is to be human. I'm domesticating them to the ways of society, the ways of the culture to make things go smoothly and fit in and to set them up for their best success in life and all that stuff. But to do that, I have to teach them the agreements that we've all come up with in society to make that work. And they might be ones that I don't necessarily agree with or have learned not to agree with over time. And so then it's I teach them a new set of agreements, then the ones that maybe I learned growing or I learned in, you know, the space that I grew up.

SPEAKER_02: 19:50

The point you're making there, Sam, is you have to maybe break some agreements, right? Like you um, you we create this belief system, the author says is called the book of law, which becomes our truth, even if it's not true. And it comes from our parents. Like I said, my mom gave me very different lessons than my dad did. They were both good lessons, and I probably got not so good lessons, probably as well. But at the same hand, they got their lessons from their parents who got them from their parents. I had you're younger than me, but there used to be this shampoo commercial from Herbal Essence, and there was this lady on the beach, and she was washing her hair on the beach because yeah, that's where you wash your hair, and she was saying, Oh, this shampoo smells so good, it smells so great that I'm gonna tell my friends and then they're gonna tell their friends, and they're gonna tell their friends. And it started looking like Brady Bunch on the screen with all these faces of people who were washing their hair. And it was to try to tell you that if you wash your hair on a beach, that I guess it smells good and you'll be cleaner. But nonetheless, the point is that they told someone who then told someone, who then told someone, who then told someone. And so the point of this book that I love is that this is about reawakening what these scientists and musicians and artists were saying. And in the beginning, it says very clearly there were rich and powerful people that wanted more power and made them hide the truth. And so this book is to illuminate through the light what truth actually is, because this book of law that we store in our minds is a law that says that regardless if this is something true, I'm gonna judge you on everything that's happening in through and around you. What you do and don't do, what you think and don't think, what you feel and don't feel in your life are stored in this book of laws, and you in your subconscious mind become the judge to those laws.

SPEAKER_01: 21:48

Yeah, exactly. And and it's that feeling of safety. And I talk about this all the time, like of you know, we are trying to feel safe always at our core, right? And that's the atomic habits thing of like you're either moving to pleasure or away from pain. Those are the two things we're only ever doing, wrapped up in really complicated packages, but it's all about safety, right? At the end of the day. And so even if all those laws are wrong, right? There's there's safety in that. And in trying, and that and like you said, this book is awakening that consciousness around what are the laws that you're following, what are the things that you've agreed to that, you know, maybe don't serve you. And I feel like that's I don't know, I feel like I've met a lot of people who like they get to like midlife type of vibes, right? And it's like you start to have this awakening of, you know, really questioning some of that stuff, right? Like we spend our childhood learning it, and then we spend our 20s just trying to survive, and then you get into like mid 30s, 40s, 50s, right? And you're like, you have wisdom, you have things, and you can wake up to that space if you let yourself to really question these like laws and rules and and this judgment that you're you know that we've got.

SPEAKER_02: 23:04

I think the good point you just made there is that if you take the time to question it and not just be okay with what you're sitting in, he goes from judging to victim mentality, which is where you blame not just necessarily blaming other people, you blame yourself. Do you sit in blame? Do you carry blame? Do you carry guilt? Do you carry shame? Do you say things like, Oh, I could never do that, or I'm not good enough for that? Like, how many times have we ever coached people that they really think they want something and they say they want the thing, but they're not really, really willing to do the things that it takes to get to the thing? So the question is, what's stopping you? Do you really want it, or are you just saying that you want it?

SPEAKER_01: 23:48

Yeah. And he says that 95% of the beliefs we have stored in our mind are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe the lies. And he goes on on the next page to say, if we compare the dream of human society, right? All these things that we've made up with the description of hell that religions all around the world have promulgated, we find they are exactly the same. No human can condemn another to hell because we are already there. Like, dang, wow, like what is that? But it's this, right? It's like it's what you're saying. It's this like we believe these things and we, you know, sit in them and we're we live in our own misery, right? Like we say we want something different and we don't go act on it, we don't go do it. And it's that question of we're living, we're creating and living in our own hell. And why and what's in our way? Like, what are the things that we would need to do or change or think to move us out of this space, to move us towards a direction that is a lot more like heaven and a lot less like hell.

SPEAKER_02: 24:58

Well, the positive piece of this part of the chapter is he says it is possible to enjoy a pleasant dream and get out of that nightmare. That's what this book is about, how to get us to the pleasant dream. And then he says that all of humanity is searching for truth, justice, and beauty. We're in the eternal search for truth because we only believe the lies we stored in our mind. We're searching for justice because in the belief system we have or that book of law that's in our subconscious mind, there really actually is no justice. And we search for beauty because it doesn't matter how beautiful a person is, we don't believe that person has beauty. And that's sort of like that mirror mirror on the wall piece with the with Snow White's stepmother. So if you're searching and you're searching and you're searching, and you're searching for something outside of yourself only to realize that it's actually inside of yourself. And that truth is inside of yourself. But he says our eyes don't have uh this truth. And so this is again about kind of like cleaning your glasses, removing the fog, and being able to know that it's actually right there in front of you. There's something blinding you, which is called false belief systems in your mind. And how do you deprogram that? This is partially neuroscience. There's lots and lots of research that talks about how, for example, if you prioritize thoughts of gratitude, you can never get rid of all the super highways of all the millions of thoughts that come to your mind every day. In fact, some of the science we read last year was about how many thoughts enter our mind on a daily basis. It's it's a number that is doesn't even have like a calculation, it's so many things. And yet, what we can do is elevate through positive intelligence and things like gratitude and things like prioritizing what matters most. And the neural pathways scientifically get stronger if you focus your attention there, which was the whole point of the beginning of this chapter is where are you putting your attention and discriminate and focus on what you really want to perceive versus what your brain is tricking you into thinking? It's like we talked about in a couple episodes where you've got kind of like this um nemesis on one shoulder, and you've got this thing that loves you on your other shoulder. And this one saying, You can't do that, you're not good enough. What are you even thinking? Why would you even think that you should go to your boss and ask for a raise? Or why would you think of um asking that person out on a date? Or why would you ever get out of your miserable abusive relationship at work or at home because that place pays your bills or takes care of you? But the other side is saying, What do you really want to perceive? Truth, justice, and happiness.

SPEAKER_01: 27:43

Yeah, absolutely. And I the one thing I highlighted and starred and circled was he said to be alive is the biggest fear humans have. And I think that, you know, that's that's it, right? We go in this back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, but then we pull back inside of ourselves, we default back to these agreements, to this book, to this thing that we've created that isn't real. 95% of it isn't real because it's easier, because we're afraid, because it feels safer even when it's not. I heard you ask somebody today, right? Like they were talking about going versus staying in something. And you said, you know, all the caught they were talking about all the cost of leaving and what that would be. And you said, but what's the cost of staying? And I think that's the question, right? Like, what the what is in your way? What is that cost to not change, to not make those differences? And he says towards the end of the chapter, right? Each time you break an agreement, all the power you use to create it returns to you. If you adopt these four new agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements. He says you'll see the drama of hell disappear right before your very eyes. Instead of living in a dream of hell, you will be creating a new dream, your personal dream of heaven. And like that is like, I want that. Like, that's the page turner right there.

SPEAKER_02: 29:13

I want that too. But he also says agreements that come from fear, which is where the 95% of what we believe come from, expend a lot of energy. But the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy. First of the four agreements, he says at the very end of this chapter, you need to have a really strong will. And we talked about will in the last book.

SPEAKER_01: 29:44

We talked about will in both of the last books. Both of the last books.

SPEAKER_02: 29:48

Yeah. And it's you have to have a strong will. Are you willing, are you willing, are you willing this to work? And if you're willing to put in the work and you're willing to look at what these four agreements are, and you're willing to make change in your life, even if it's hard, he says in here that the point of what happens here, and the reason we don't change, is because we get stuck wanting to live our lives trying to satisfy other people, other people's demands, other people's points of view, because we have some sort of image we've created about what is perfection in our life. And we create this image, but to your point, Sam, the image isn't real. We have these inauthentic social masks. And I'm gonna tell you, friends listening, if you want to find out a lot more about this, even beyond this book, reach out to us because Sam and I are both certified in uh um an assessment called Disc. And part of the assessment that we use, which is from a company called People Keys, has an a section in the assessment that you look at the mask that you have on yourself. So what's your authentic self? What's the mask you have on yourself? How do other people see you? How do you see yourself? How do you see other people? And then how do you interact with people around you, whether it's at work or in your personal life? And so that it's not so that you can manipulate yourself or others, but it's so that you can elevate your awareness of how to be a better communicator.

SPEAKER_01: 31:17

Yeah. I think when you bring awareness to anything, right? When you put your attention on something, you give power to it, whether that's negative or positive. And I love the discassessment and I love going through the charts with people of like, hey, at your core, at your default mode, right? When all this, all this is running, this is how you show up in the world. This is how you think you show up in the world, and this is how you're showing up in your current environment. And like, I don't know how many people, as we go through that, sit down and go, oh my gosh, yes. Uh-huh. Yep. Yeah, that's exactly it. And then it's that question, well, why do you think that that's the case? And you know, going through that whole, like, well, what does that mask tell you? What does that look like? And then it always gives people these just wonderful like insights and awareness to themselves of like, okay, well, if I don't want this, right, then what do I need to do to make a difference? And I think when you draw awareness, you give yourself so much power that you just didn't have before, right? Walking through the fog, you can't see what's around the corner, clearing the fog away. gives you visibility to make all the decisions that you really want in life.

SPEAKER_02: 32:24

Absolutely. Well, if you want an assessment, uh friends, we will, I think that we can commit, I don't want to speak for Sam, but I'm going to speak for you that we'll commit to giving discounted disk assessments and debriefs through the end of the year. And I will also say that we're willing to give away complementary agile brain assessments. If you want to go deeper and have a debrief, we could talk about that as well. But from now to the end of the year, we'll give away free agile brain assessments and discounted disc assessments. Just reach out to us has ways for you to reach us in the show notes. Next week we start the second chapter of the book, but it's the first agreement and it's all about being impeccable with your word, being who you are, saying what you say, meaning what you mean. I'm looking forward to that with you next week, Sam.

SPEAKER_01: 33:17

Me too.

SPEAKER_02: 33:19

Okay, well on behalf of my friend Sam Powell, my name is Denise Russo. Thanks for joining us today on another episode of What's on your bookshelf