Don’t assume, ask! My journey through The Four Agreements, Part III

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

I am going to honestly admit, the last few weeks have been a struggle. A few weeks ago, I discovered The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, written by Don Miguel Ruiz. My discovery of this beautifully written book has changed the way that I think about life, and how I have wanted to conduct my life. The book illuminates the source of many of our self-limiting beliefs; the beliefs that tend to rob us of joy and just create unnecessary pain and suffering. The Four Agreements can be viewed as codes of conduct that when practiced can rapidly transform a person’s life. There is a reason that it has been a New York Times bestseller for over eight years.

What the book failed to tell you is just how difficult it can be to implement these four agreements. What I decided to do for my readers is take it upon myself to implement these agreements (one agreement biweekly), and then report on how they had affected my life. Report one; the agreements are extremely hard to follow, and until I began to bring the agreements into awareness, I did not realize just how domesticated I was.

I thought that because of my rebellious nature, I was impervious to the rules. I didn’t think that I had given into the beliefs and agreements that had been laid out for me. I thought that I was resistant to it all, but unfortunately I was wrong. I realized in the last few weeks that I am actually auto-domesticated. I have made agreements with myself that have domesticated me and have kept me stuck in a way of thinking.

I have found that my Achilles heel happens to be taking things personally, and making assumptions. It was important that I went through this exercise to figure it out, because now I am making adjustments to deal with these clear deficits in my character. Today, I want to tackle making assumptions.

The thing is, assumptions are sneaky. You find yourself doing it and don’t even realize it until it is too late. One psychological term for assumptions is fundamental attribution error. Lee Ross coined this term and what occurs is there is a tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual’s observed behaviour, while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behaviour. In other words, people have a cognitive bias to assume that a person’s actions depend on what “kind” of person that person is rather than on the social and environmental forces that influence the person.

A very common example of this is you are driving down the street and someone cuts you off in traffic and races away. What we might say right away is, “What a jerk! Why are they driving that way? They are such a jerk!” Many of us don’t take that extra minute to think, “Hmmm! I hope that person is okay!” We never think that maybe the person just heard that their wife or husband was just in a car accident and they are rushing off to the hospital. We assume right away that the person themselves are idiots, instead of thinking of the situation that may have caused them to be driving the way they are.

Now, I will say this; that person might just be an idiot, and think that they are in a new instalment of The Fast and the Furious. The thing is that we do not have proof of it, so the worst thing that we can do is make assumptions. When you make an assumption about something you accept it to be true without any real proof. We are just hardwired this way, which is why it is such a difficult agreement to keep. It is natural to immediately fill in any missing information by making up our own story; it is the way that we make sense of people and situations. The problem with this; most of the time our story is incorrect because we have not gathered any true Intel about what ever it is we are assuming.

These next couple of weeks, I want you to think about some of the assumptions you make on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Have you ever made an assumption that turned out to be wrong? What were the consequences? Feel free to comment, and let me know. Don’t feel bad. Believe me; we all do it.