abhijit1981's Blog

Tag: Personal growth

  • The Third Agreement: DO NOT Make Assumptions

    There is a quiet violence in the assumptions we carry. They arrive unannounced, dressed as certainty, and we rarely think to question them. Don Miguel Ruiz, in The Four Agreements, names this clearly in his Third Agreement: Don’t make assumptions. And the more I sit with it, the more I see how much of our suffering — the small daily ache and the larger ruptures — begins here.

    The trouble with an assumption is that we mistake it for truth. We could swear it is real. We decide what someone meant, what they felt, what they intended, and then we react to the story we invented rather than to the person in front of us. We misunderstand, we take it personally, and we manufacture a whole drama for nothing. Ruiz is unsparing about this: most of the sadness we have lived was rooted in assuming, and then taking that assumption to heart.

    What strikes me most is why we do it. The mind hates an open question. It needs to explain, to justify, to fill the silence with an answer — and it does not much care whether the answer is correct. Any answer makes us feel safe. So we guess, and we believe our guess, and then we defend it as though our life depended on it.

    Why we stop asking

    Here I find myself looking back at my own childhood. Like many of us, I grew up in a world where asking too many questions was quietly discouraged — curiosity made the adults uncomfortable, and so we learned to stop asking and start assuming instead. That habit does not leave you when you become an adult. It hides. It becomes second nature.

    When I later came to understand these Toltec ideas, something clicked. I realised that nearly every assumption I made came from one of two failures: either I hesitated to ask the question, or I never developed the communication to draw out a real answer. The fix was never in thinking harder. It was in asking.

    So I made it a practice. I refuse, as best I can, to take things personally, and I refuse to let an assumption stand where a question would do. When I do not understand, I ask — again and again — until the picture is clear. It is uncomfortable at first. Asking can feel like exposure. But it is far less costly than the suffering an unspoken assumption creates.

    The courage to communicate

    This is why I have become such an advocate for clear, transparent expression. With my family, my friends, my peers, I encourage the same: say what you mean, ask what you don’t know, make your wants visible rather than hoping to be read like a book. So much heartbreak in relationships comes from the silent expectation — you should have known — when the truth is, we never said.

    Ruiz reminds us that everyone has the right to ask, and everyone has the right to answer yes or no. There is freedom in that simplicity. Find your voice to ask for what you want. Once you hear the answer, you no longer need to invent one.

    Clear communication is not a small thing. Ruiz believed that if all of us could speak this way — without poison, without assuming — there would be no wars, no needless conflict. I believe it too, at the scale of a single conversation. The word becomes impeccable when it stops carrying our inventions.

    The seed is the idea. The transformation is the action — repeated until it becomes who you are.

    So here is my question for you, and I’d love your honest reflection:

    When was the last time an assumption cost you something — and what question, asked in time, might have saved it?

  • The 2nd Agreement- DO NOT Take Anything Personally !

    Refer to my previous blog (3 blogs down the thread) — I had started writing about the Four Agreements of life inspired by Toltec wisdom, where I wrote about the 1st agreement: “Be impeccable with your word.” I was recently not at my best of writing, and hence delayed by several months. Here goes the 2nd wisdom: “Don’t take anything personally.” Interestingly, this also ties beautifully into my earlier post “Is This Worth My Roar??” — both, in their own way, ask us to step back before reacting to the world’s noise.

    Of all four agreements, this one might be the most liberating — and the hardest to actually live by. The idea is simple: whatever someone says or does is a reflection of their inner world, their wounds, their fears, their agreements with life — not a statement of truth about you. And yet, almost everything in how we’re raised teaches us the opposite. We’re trained to believe that other people’s reactions to us mean something about who we are.

    Let’s take a hypothetical exmaple through my own lens…. 🙂  Imagine you’ve recently made a significant life decision — perhaps stepping away from a stable, well-paying path to pursue something that feels more aligned with who you are. A close relative hears about it and says, with quiet disappointment, “I just don’t understand why you’d give up something so secure. After everything you worked for.” The words land heavily. You might feel a wave of doubt creep in — maybe I am being reckless, maybe I really am throwing something away.

    But pause for a moment and look at where that comment is coming from. That relative may have grown up in a time or circumstance where security was everything — where stability wasn’t a choice but a survival necessity. Their reaction isn’t really about your life or your path; it’s about their relationship with fear, shaped by their own history and the agreements they made with life decades ago. When they look at your decision, they’re not seeing you clearly — they’re seeing it through the lens of their own unresolved anxieties. It’s their movie, their script, their fears playing out — you simply happened to be the screen they projected it onto.

    This is where the depth of the second agreement really lives — in recognizing that everyone is dreaming their own dream, living inside their own mind, shaped by their own domestication. When someone reacts to you, they are reacting through the lens of every agreement they’ve ever made about how the world works. Their words are a mirror of their beliefs — not a window into your truth.

    Here’s another hypothetical: a close friend forgets to check in during a time when you needed support. The old reflex says, they don’t care about me, I must not matter to them. But what if, instead, you considered that they’re going through something overwhelming in their own life right now — and their absence is about their own bandwidth, not your value to them? This doesn’t mean you ignore patterns or stop having honest conversations. It simply means you stop manufacturing suffering out of someone else’s distraction.

    What’s beautiful about this agreement is that it applies just as much to compliments as criticism. If someone praises a decision you’ve made — “you’re so brave for doing this” — that, too, is their perception, their dream. You don’t need it to feel whole. And if someone doubts you, you don’t need to crumble or justify yourself endlessly. Either way, your sense of self stays rooted in something steadier than other people’s opinions.

    When you genuinely practice this, something shifts. You stop bracing for impact in conversations, especially with family. You stop replaying things people said years ago, wondering if they were right about you. You become less reactive, more spacious — able to love people without needing them to validate your path, and able to hear hard truths without losing your footing.

    Next time, I’ll continue with the 3rd agreement — “Don’t make assumptions” — which builds naturally on this one.  Until then, may you walk through your relationships a little lighter, carrying only what’s truly yours. 🙂Share

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