The third agreement is Don’t Make Assumptions. The second, Don’t Take Anything Personally, asks you to watch what you let in. This one asks you to watch what you make up.
We make assumptions every day, all day long, and we’re usually not even aware that we’re doing it. Saying don’t make assumptions is a little silly in some ways, because it’s what we naturally do to try to make sense of the world we live in.
Where assumptions really tend to cause our own suffering is when we assume the worst. We have one sliver of information, then we make up a whole story about the sliver of information and believe the story as if it’s true. Then we react to the false story and spend loads of emotional energy responding to a reality that isn’t even real!
The brain is trying to help here. Somewhere along the way, suggestion, critique and contempt got bundled together, so when someone offers a suggestion, a part of us hears a critique with contempt tucked inside. The parts that react to that bundle are the ones writing the stories, and they work fast: when a friend’s reply is one word long, the next three chapters are drafted before you set the phone down. These parts are trying to keep you safe, and you can sit down beside them.
The first trick to not making assumptions is recognizing when we’ve made up a story. But the real work is in communication. Relinquishing assumptions requires a willingness to vulnerably inquire. Getting curious is the cure to assumptions. If someone says something underhanded, or a bit bitchy, you can say, “Hey, ouch, that felt a little abrasive to me. Was that your intention?”
That one question keeps the relationship honest. It shows the other person where they were being unmindful. It is also a good way of calling people on their shit: maybe it was intentional, and we are letting them know we noticed and will not accept being treated that way. We are also giving them the opportunity to apologize and come home to their own grace.
Most of our assumptions are rooted in our own perception of the world and our own unhealed wounding. We project our history onto other people’s behavior and motivations. Perhaps you had a very controlling mother. Now your partner is directing you in some project and you start making up a story about how controlling they are and you start resenting it and getting really irritated. You can pause, breathe, soften, and check in with them. You inquire as to their intentions. And maybe you discover they’re not intending to be controlling. Maybe they just think this is the most efficient way to get the project done, and their intention is to finish it as quickly as possible so that you two have more time to play or make love later.
Making up a story has a body, and it may be quick eyes hunting for evidence, breath climbing high and thin, hands gone cold or gone looking for something to do. Or the whole body goes dense and certain, a lid pressed down on the question. Yours may keep different company. The next time a message ends without a goodbye, give your own body that first minute and see what it does before the story gets going.
Not making assumptions requires courageous communication. It requires dropping the arrogance and reactivity of the story, and yielding into the vulnerability of not knowing. It requires not only stating feelings and gathering information; it also requires naming needs.
Asking is not always safe, and it is not always answered. With someone who has hurt you, the question can cost more than the answer is worth, and that call is yours to make. Some people will tell you what you want to hear, and some will tell you nothing. Someone who has shown you the same thing four times has handed you far more than a sliver.
Most of us learn this the long way, one wrong story at a time. The stories that come with total certainty cost the most. The ones that end in a question are the ones we can live with.
May you recognize the stories you create.
May you fearlessly enter into the vulnerability of inquiry.
May your relationships be satisfying and authentic.
The Toltecs were a people who lived in central Mexico, and people who carry that ancestry are alive today. Nearly everything said about the Toltecs of the past comes down to us through the Aztecs, who looked back on them as a vanished golden age. No Toltec text survives that anyone can hold these agreements up against. What travels under that name in modern spiritual writing runs through a twentieth-century line of teachers, Carlos Castaneda among them, whose account of his own apprenticeship did not hold up when it was examined. None of this makes the four agreements less useful to you. Their authority comes from what they do when you try them. If they work, they work because they work, whoever said them first in Tula, the old Toltec capital.
Where the agreements come from: The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz.
More in the Four Agreements series