Spiritist Society Towards the Light

The Fourth Agreement: Always Do Your Best

From The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz 

September 23, 2016

 

Under any circumstance, always do your best, no more and no less. But keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next. Everything is alive and changing all the time, so your best will sometimes be high quality, and other times it will not be as good. 

 

When you wake up refreshed and energized in the morning, your best will be better than when you are tired at night. Your best will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Your best will depend on whether you are feeling wonderful and happy, or upset, angry, or jealous.

 

In your everyday moods your best can change from one moment to another, from one hour to the next, from one day to another.  Your best will also change over time.

 

Regardless of the quality, keep doing your best — no more and no less than your best. If you try too hard to do more than your best, you will spend more energy than is needed and in the end your best will not be enough. When you overdo, you deplete your body and go against yourself, and it will take you longer to accomplish your goal. But if you do less than your best, you subject yourself to frustrations, self-judgment, guilt, and regrets.

 

Just do your best — in any circumstance in your life. It doesn't matter if you are sick or tired, if you always do your best there is no way you can judge yourself. And if you don't judge yourself there is no way you are going to suffer from guilt, blame, and self-punishment. 

 

This isn’t about hours and hours of meditation and being perfect. It’s about being human, loving yourself, your body, exercising and doing what makes your body feel good. If you honor your body things will change.

 

Doing your best, you are going to live your life intensely. You are going to be productive, you are going to be good to yourself, because you will be giving yourself to your family, to your community, to everything.

 

But it is the action that is going to make you feel intensely happy. When you always do your best, you take action. Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you're expecting a reward. 

 

On the other hand, if you take action just for the sake of doing it, without expecting a reward, you will find that you enjoy every action you do. Rewards will come, but you are not attached to the reward.

 

When you do your best you learn to accept yourself. But you have to be aware and learn from your mistakes. Learning from your mistakes means you practice, look honestly at the results, and keep practicing. This increases your awareness.

 

Action is living life fully. Inaction is denying life--things like watching tv, or repressing who you really are.

 

You can have many great ideas in your head, but what makes the difference is the action. Without action upon an idea, there will be no manifestation, no results, and no reward. 

 

By doing your best, old habits of taking things personally, making assumptions and misusing your word will become weaker and less frequent with time. Don’t judge or punish yourself for faltering. If you do your best you will still feel good about yourself. If you always do your best, then you will become a master of transformation. Practice makes the master, and by doing your best, you become a master. You learned everything you know through repetition.

 

Don’t resist life passing through you, because that is God passing through. God is the collective energy that is within us and connects us all. Just the fact that you exist proves your life and energy. You don’t need to keep proving it. Just enjoy your life. Say no when you want, and yes when you want. You have the right to be you, and you can only be you when you do your best.