143 The Four Agreements: Conclusion, Heaven On Earth, By Choice

We close the year with The Four Agreements’ final chapter and explore how a “new dream” becomes real through imagination, love, and steady action. From Bob Ross to Figment to mountain summits, we turn mistakes into material and choices into change.

• the new dream as practical freedom
• Bob Ross as a model for reframing error
• choosing heaven or hell in daily practice
• imagination prompts turned into actions
• love as a method and self-respect
• identifying and starving the parasite
• opening the door out of comfortable pain
• consistency, tiny habits, and resilience
• reading widely to expand empathy
• reflections on the season and what’s next

If you have enjoyed this series, please, we’re asking you to not only comment and and like and let us know, but share it with other people that could get value from this as well

Chapters

• 0:00 Season Close And Mixed Emotions
• 3:52 The New Dream In The Four Agreements
• 6:29 Bob Ross And Embracing Mistakes
• 11:05 Heaven Or Hell As Daily Choice
• 14:54 Imagination, Figment, And Action
• 18:49 Love As A Way Of Life
• 22:14 Shedding The Parasite And Old Agreements
• 26:09 The Door Out Of Comfortable Pain
• 29:29 Climbing The Last Stretch Of The Mountain

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 2:26

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: 2:39

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to 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 co-host is my friend Sam Powell. And today is the last chapter of the last book of the year. This is chapter seven, Lucky Seven. The book is called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and Sam. I always say I'm happy to be here with you, but I'm happy and sad at the same time because I can't believe that the book is done and the year is done, and there's this conflicting feeling of happiness and sadness as we move into the newness of a new year.

SPEAKER_01: 3:20

Yeah, that's um uh my cousin gave the speech uh for her graduation ceremony for college, and the title of her speech was Moving On to Keep Things Whole. And I think about that all the time of like, we have to like life doesn't stop, the world doesn't stop turning. It doesn't matter what happens to us, around us, through us, with us, the world keeps moving along. You can have earth-shattering, life-altering things happen, and the sun will rise tomorrow. And so you've got to keep moving forward so that you keep yourself, your community, your family, your friends, the world whole. Like you don't get to step out of life even when it moves too fast, even when it feels like we started this year about a blink of an eye ago. We've got to move forward. And I love, I we talk about this all the time. Like, I just love how this book is ending. I love how this year is ending because this last chapter of this book is called The New Dream, Heaven on Earth. And I think that as we end a year and we step into a year and we move on to keep everything whole, I really want to move into a new dream, a space that takes everything we've learned, not only this year, but last year and the year before, and creates this new dream, this new reality that we get to live in with each other, with ourselves, with the people around us, with everybody who listens to us. And like, isn't that just like the most poetic ending to season three here into the year? Like, I just I love it. It just kind of worked out so serendipitously and just great.

SPEAKER_02: 5:07

Makes me smile. This chapter makes me smile and it makes me happy because this chapter makes me think of Bob Ross. So Bob Ross, the painter. Uh, my mom, when we were little, you know, there was only a couple channels on the TV when I was little, because I'm a lot older than you and a lot older than our kids who have unlimited resources and channels and always say there's nothing on television. And so when we were little, my brother and I would watch Bob Ross, The Art of Painting, with my mom on PBS. And I don't know if it inspired my mom to become an artist or if it was just that we just were really at peace. Like, probably our heart rate variability was so perfect watching Bob Ross, who had, if you don't know who we're talking about, like this big afro, very much like probably somebody that was typical from that period of time that took extra things to make his body feel calm, let's say, that now you can get on the corner store with a prescription. But um, Bob was this guy who believed that on the canvas, your role was to dream up a creation. And that's what the book talks about is your dream is that you're living in is your creation. And so I I still watch little clips of his episodes whenever I feel like I need to sort of regulate my heart rate and things like that. And so the other day I was watching a short clip and he was doing a picture, and I'll and it brought back instant memories for me, Sam, of when I was a little girl, which was he would have this gorgeous painting, and then he'd be like, Yeah, we're gonna try something new. And he slaps on this paint, and my mom and I would be like, No, you're gonna ruin this painting. You just put like the biggest error on this canvas. And I remember one episode where he was like, Oh, well, you know what? Let's just make it into a happy little tree. And that kind of became a tagline for him. And what he found was that sometimes in the things that either are unexpected or don't turn out the way you want, or maybe in that moment don't look the way that you think you want it to look, all it takes is a little bit of magic and some paint and a paintbrush, according to him, to just put some little extra touches. And for sure enough, by the end of the episode, that that thing that looked so horrendous in the beginning was a beautiful, right placed thing that had to be part of that painting. And so when he was thinking about dreaming into what that painting looked like, he may not have pictured that there before he started on the canvas, but over time, as he evolved and transformed the dream on the canvas, he would say things like, Oh, I think I see a bird here. There's gonna be a little cabin over there, or let's put another tree over here, or let's see what happens if we want to see some ripples on the waves of the water. And and the lessons that we could probably learn just by watching him paint a picture about how to live life are likely some very peaceful lessons. And so when I read this chapter, I thought of Bob Ross. It made me think of my mom, who's my favorite person that lives on earth, and and we can make these choices. You can choose to have something that you don't like in life, or you can choose to have something that's a different dream. And that's the point of this chapter is living into a new dream.

SPEAKER_01: 8:27

Wow. I love I love that analogy. My dad's a painter, and I remember growing up and he'd be watching Bob Ross on PBS, and you know, I it always felt like a calm, happy thing to me, but my dad would be like doing what he was doing at the same time. But I have zero like painting, artistic ability, like writing I can do, painting, not so much. I definitely take after my mom and not my dad in that, uh, in that regard. But I I remember that feeling and that just like awe, a sense of awe of watching somebody like start something. I was like, oh, that looks really good. And then they would do something that does like totally looks crazy, and you're like, what is happening here? Like, why is this? What? Like you're you're messing it up, but then like seeing it through all the way to the vision and then creating this beautiful masterpiece. And I like I like to watch, you know, like artists on TikTok do the same thing, right? Like they'll layer like there's this one guy watching a spray paint, and he'll just like layer and layer and layer, and like the process, like at the beginning, I'm like, oh, this looks really good. Then in the middle, I'm like, oh, what is happening here? And then by the end, I was like, wow, like what a vision. And sometimes you're right, it's not that Bob necessarily was like, Yes, this is how this is going. It's like, oh, we made a mistake, let's turn it into something else, or oh, this isn't quite how this works. Let's let's adjust it. And I think that that's like how like such a such a great metaphor for life. Like, you just don't know what's going to come at you, but like you do get to create this reality. And the author talks this about like, you have the power to create hell and you have the power to create heaven. And that kind of harkens back to the very beginning of this book where he talks about like heaven and hell are things that we experience right here. It's not some like afterlife concept. Like when he talks about it in this book, he's talking about like the heaven and the hell we create between us and for ourselves in this world and in this existence. And so we are either living in hell or living in heaven or living in some hybrid of the two, depending on the world and the dream, as they call it, that we create here. And I love that the magic in that and the power in that of like, I can create this reality that is so beautiful, that is so wonderful. And he says, you know, like, I want you to see yourself living a new life, a new dream, a life where you don't need to justify your existence and you are free to be who you really are. And then he goes on for two pages, and I just like highlighted the whole thing because he talks about like all this like imagine that you have permission to be happy and really enjoy your life. Imagine life without fear. Imagine your life without being judged, imagine your life without judging others. Imagine, you know, like living without fear of loving people and not being loved. Imagine living your life, not being afraid to take risks. And like by the time he got through this whole list, I was like, I want this life that he describes so viscerally, like I can feel it in my bones that this is exactly the type of life that I want. And I think everybody wants at the end of the day. And it's just that freedom to be who I really truly am without all of this fear, without all of this the judge coming in to tell me, oh, don't do that, oh, hold yourself back, oh bite your tongue. Yeah, it's like it's then and this book is about personal freedom, right? It's like imagine that space. And he's saying, You've got the ability to create this heaven that you want and this new dream that you want.

SPEAKER_02: 12:01

I love that you described it that way because I have both of those pages also fully highlighted everywhere. He says, imagine this, imagine that. And it started to make me think about the mascot at Epcot is this purple dinosaur or dragon, I guess, named Figment. And Figment is about imagination. So you think about the statement fig, the figment of your imagination, except this figment comes to life. And so there's this kind of cute little corny, very old ride at Epcot, where you go through this journey in a in a train around your imagination. And what if you just thought of things a little bit differently than you think about them right now? And Figment is Olivia's most favorite of the pieces of Epcot and this particular ride, I guess. And so when I read this part of the chapter, the first thing I thought about was the joy that she gets when we go through that experience. And we always talk about after we get off of that ride, just about how we thought about the journey and what could we think about differently. And that's kind of the magic, really, of going to Disney World is that I can't really cite the exact quote, but it's basically Walt Disney has a lot of quotes about dreaming and doing and imagination and creativity and doing something other people wouldn't do. So there's probably a lot more lessons we could even talk about from Walt Disney himself, but he started it all with a dream and a mouse. That's kind of like the most famous of the quotes, is it all started with a dream and a mouse. And so when you think about this, this part of the chapter, for those of you that don't yet have the book, I want to encourage you to get the book and we'll make sure you have a link to get it. Because that in itself, even if you don't have a coach, you could walk through this page 125 and 126. You could walk through just those two pages and start a journal as you get ready to prepare for the next year. And it's exactly what you just said, Sam. Imagine dot dot dot. And it gives you the prompts. And then the idea is don't just keep it as a dream. This chapter is about the new dream, which is about you taking your imagination, waking up, and taking action. He goes on to say that the world is very beautiful, it's very wonderful. Life can be very easy when love is your way of life and you can be loving all the time. It's a choice. So, what I loved about the way he ended the book is that it is about if there's anything incongruent in your life, any unhappiness, any imbalance, it is your choice. And as hard as it is to not be the victim and blame other things and other people, there are things you can do uh to change that around. There was a book about this, right? About happiness, the the uh Will Smith book art movie that was from the guy's life and uh-huh. And it wasn't as like his name was happy or something. I don't know. It was something about happy something about happiness. Well, happiness.

SPEAKER_01: 15:01

Yeah, I don't know if you know what we're talking about, I could picture the um like the poster for the movie in my head. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02: 15:06

Yeah. And that guy had a bad, a bad circumstance and some bad things that he had to deal with, like extremely bad. But he turned it around and he wanted a new dream and he wanted a different life for him and his son. And he and he did it so much so that that that was a real life story that was turned into a movie of resilience and tenacity and and transformation. And so, my hope for anyone listening to the show is that you can have that dream for yourself as well. It's always easier if you walk through with a coach. If there's an uh listening that doesn't know how to find a coach, doesn't know what a coaching engagement looks like or could be like, the discovery call, the the initial get to know you call, it's free. Just reach out. If we can't help you, Sam and I know hundreds, if not thousands, of coaches around the world in all geographies that could help you if you're looking for ways to loosen yourself from these parasites that we've talked about in this book, to loosen yourself from not making the right agreements to put you on a path to freedom and living out this new dream.

SPEAKER_01: 16:12

Yeah. And I I highlighted that part that you were reading too. And I especially highlighted the part that said, love can be or life can be very easy when love is your way of life. And I think that the thing that we don't think about a lot of time is like the the where you have to start with love is with yourself. You have to love yourself for who you are. You're doing your best, right? Part that's one of one of the agreements here is always do your best. And if you are impeccable with your word, not taking things personally, not making assumptions and doing your best. Life is very easy when you love, when love is your way of life, when you love yourself, when you love other people, when it's like, I'm not gonna assume that you're, you know, that why you're doing something is anything else, right? Like I'm not going to, you know, speak against you or speak against myself. I'm going to assume, you know, some positive intent or maybe, or like, and it's not even assuming anything, right? He's telling us not to assume one way or the other, right? But like, I'm not gonna make an assumption about what's going on. I'm just going to let love guide me because like that's really what he says is like when you're creating heaven, he says, once you know that heaven exists, once you know it's possible to stay there, it's up to you to make the effort to do it. It's not, it's not just a given, it's not some like form of toxic positivity where you're like, I'm just gonna, everything's fine, it's good, it's whatever. Like we're just brush over everything. It's like, no, we feel the depth of everything, but we let love guide us in how we move forward and how we interact with ourselves and with other people. And if we give ourselves enough love, then giving other people love is much, much easier and much, much more in our grasp. And he says there really is no reason to suffer. The only reason you suffer is because you choose to suffer. And I loved this because we spent a year on happiness. He says, happiness is a choice, and so is suffering. And I think that, you know, when you think about what this book is about, and when I think about the whole year, right, we talked about obstacles, we talked about, you know, the difficulties that we face and what to do with those and how to use all of that and move through all of that and with all of that, that it's a choice at the very end of the day. And you talked the last time about the Robert Frost poem about the divergent paths, and like you get to choose which one you step on. You can choose suffering, you can choose to stay in the spaces, or you can choose the path of love, choose the path of happiness. And I think as we end a year and we think about how we step into the next year, like that's the choice to make. That's the choice I want to make, right? This whole thing, and like I said, I love the the idea of using pages 125 and 126, like as a personal coaching exercise. I'm absolutely gonna do that ahead of the year. Um because you get to choose the heaven that you create, you get to choose the dream that you create. And that is just such a powerful thought to me. And like as I end this year and I end this book with myself, and I can't wait to go back and to listen to all of this because I absolutely will as we end the year. Uh like I feel more powerful and more in control and more free than I did when we started this year. And you said, I think it was this episode or the last episode where it was like, we like to look ahead and think, like, what are we gonna uncover in this, you know, in this book in this year? And like to me, I think it's those things, right? I just I feel like I it's my choice on whether I live in heaven or in hell, and that's really powerful, a little scary, a little daunting, but we just spent a whole year figuring out how to do that. So I got the tools, I got the toolbook.

SPEAKER_02: 19:45

I spent a whole three years figuring out how to do it. And in here's the here's the reality of it, because this is about real life. This is not about easy peasy cheesy. This is just real life. I love the way he ended the book. So I highlighted at the end where he said, This way of life is possible, it's in your hands. And then he goes on to say, Moses called it the promised land, Buddha called it nirvana, Jesus called it heaven, and the Toltics call it the new dream. Unfortunately, your identity is mixed with the dream of the planet. So even though this is about self-development, self-awareness, self-centered nature, he goes on to say that all your beliefs and agreements are there in a fog. You feel the presence of the parasite, you believe it is you. I highlighted that because I was like, that's the that's the thing. It's a thing that's in you that isn't you that you can expel, you can can rid it. And it's difficult to let it go. It's difficult to let it go and release it to create the space to experience love because you're attached to those things on your shoulders, the judge, the victim, the suffering, because it's safer there. I remember one time talking with somebody about the safety in being uncomfortable. It was somebody who was struggling because they hated their job, they didn't like their boss, they weren't resonating with their team, they just felt stuck. And we started envisioning in one of our uh exercises that we were going through that what if you were in a room? Imagine it's just an empty room and there's only two things there and two people there, you and someone else. You are on a bed of nails, and the person is laying on the floor. So you're telling the person next to you about how yours is much more comfortable because it's a bed and they're on the cold floor. And they're telling you, no, the floor is way more comfortable because I don't have these nails sticking in me. And right behind both of you is a door that neither one of you ever touch. You never go look out the window, you never grab the handle. And on the other side is a room full of goose-down feather beds and pillows and peaceful music and lots of candy. Well, probably not candy, it's bad for you, but you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_01: 21:57

Candy that is good for you.

SPEAKER_02: 21:58

Candy is good for you. And the idea is that we can get stuck thinking we're comfortable and thinking that other people um have it worse than we do, or that maybe people have it better than we do, but they still don't have it the best, all because we're just unwilling to stand up and open the door to a new dream that might be right on the other side of yourself. There was a lesson that uh I learned in one of John Maxwell's books, which was like 17 Laws of Teamwork. And the lesson was called the Law of Mount Everest, and it was about how everything worthwhile is uphill, basically, that mountain climbers don't climb downhills for the challenge, they climb uphills. But in the story, he was talking about how the uh research says that most climbers on these mountains stop when they're almost to the top, almost there, because there's lots of reasons, right? They lost oxygen, they're exhausted, they're freezing, they're fatigued, they've run out of food, they don't think they can make it. They're they become the victim and the judge, and they stop. And they've climbed so far up the mountain that they're almost to the top of one of the tallest mountains in the world, and they stop and they go back down. And how sad to think they almost made it. And all the point of climbing the mountain is so that you could see what's on the other side. It's not just to stand on top, it's to see what's on the other side. So I want to encourage you like go to end this. Yeah, end this year, thinking that next year, January 1 is a new beginning, but it's also just the continuation, right? It's not like you could just chop everything off, even though in the beginning of the book he says, forget everything you ever learned, but then he changes and says, it isn't really about forgetting it, it's about applying the things you learn and forgetting your old way. Forget your old way and move into the new way. We talked about all kinds of things that help you solve for happy, even despite the way that the life is. So I want to encourage you as you read through the book that that's the point is to look at the agreements, look at the how to unf yourself in your mind, look at the way that we've talked through making really bold choices despite obstacles, and then reflect on an entire year of how you solve yourself to become more happy in life and have more love, peace, joy, contentment. And that next year we'll be excited to talk with you about what the next evolution of our podcast will be.

SPEAKER_01: 24:21

Yeah. And I just like, gosh, you just said so much gold in in all of that there. And I it's funny, I just had a conversation last week with a client about becoming more comfortable, being uncomfortable. And um, I think that you know, you're talking about this in a way that's like that is real, right? Like we take on so much of like what we think is normal, what we think is whatever. And then anytime it's like things get disrupted, it's like, oh, I just like I'm uncomfortable, so I shy away from it. I don't finish climbing the mountain because it got really hard for a while. And like it's one of the things I've learned is like being an entrepreneur and like of all the like business advice I've gotten is like the people who are successful are usually pretty boring. Like they just show up every day, they just push through every obstacle that comes their way, they just get good at moving forward, continuing on, doing the non-glamorous work. And I think we think like, especially beginning of the year, right? I'm gonna set these lofty goals for myself. I'm gonna do all this stuff. It's gonna be so amazing. But like this new dream that we create, this new heaven on earth is a slower, more peaceful thing. It's that iteration, it's the atomic habits, those tiny little changes that compound over time. It's you and I meeting every week and recording an episode, and all of a sudden we're at, you know, like, you know, very slowly, and then all of a sudden we're at a hundred and some episodes, over 6,000 downloads of the podcast, like all this stuff, but like it didn't start out that way. It started out with an episode. There were day there were weeks when it's like there were months where we're like, oh, we can't meet, like I got sick, you got sick. That happened to us last week. We both got sick and like couldn't meet, couldn't record, and you know, wanted to wrap things up a little bit earlier, and like it just didn't happen, but it doesn't matter, it's the pushing through. And I think that's what we've learned this year of this journey. And I think that's just so much gold that you've said is like that awareness that he talks about in this book of like first and foremost, of you've got to figure it out, you've got to like do the things that expand your mind, expand your perspective. It's why I'm such a big fan of reading in general, but it's also one of the things I take away, like we've talked about this a lot. Like, I read these kinds of books with us, but I also read like 120 romance novels a year. And like the thing that I love about those is like I read a whole spectrum of you know different books and different genres and life experiences, and like my my perspective about humans opens up because I get into reading, because I sit in someone else's shoes. I had this huge like breakthrough in therapy because of a character in a book that I read this year, like whole thing, right? And so it's like get the awareness, expand your thoughts, be spending time with us does that, spending time with yourself does that. But then you've got to know that it's this like unsexy pushing through and getting through the obstacles and using, like we said, the obstacle is the way that moves you into next year. Because you're right, there's no difference between December 31st and January 1st. It is one sunset, one sunrise, just like it is every other day in all for all of time, up until the sun explodes, which we don't need to worry about personally.

SPEAKER_02: 27:38

Yeah, I love how you ended that. I thought when we started this year, Sam, there's no way this could be as good as last year. And last year I said, there's no way this can be good as the year before. But I think I can end with confidence by saying, man, this was such a good, refreshing, healing, therapeutic, really awesome, live out loud time together about real life, moving through obstacles in real time, learning how to get outside of our head and into the life that we really want together. I know that we haven't shared anything about next year yet. So you're gonna have to wait until the first episode of the year for us to lay out our vision, but trust that we've spent a lot of intentional thinking time and invested that time to plan out for what's coming. If you have enjoyed this series, please, we're asking you to not only uh comment and and like and let us know, but share it with other people that could get value from this as well. We started it because we like reading books and just found that other people were asking us what we were reading and how we were learning what we were reading and and what we were finding from these different books. And we're hoping that next year we'll be no different. We've got some good ideas that we'll share with you next time about where we're headed with this. But for this year, we'll end the year by saying happy holidays, happy new year. Thank you for being with us. My name is Denise Russo, and on behalf of my friend Sam Powell and our producer Zach Elliott, this has been another and the last episode of the year of What's on Your Bookshelf.