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Our internal belief system influences how we interpret ourselves and the people around us.
As we grow, we knowingly and unknowingly instil beliefs that can make our lives miserable, limit our potential, and suppress who we are underneath.
In this summary, we'll explore the core ideas from Don Miguel Ruiz's book and see how we can reshape our mindsets to live a richer and happier life.
Let's start with:
Why we must break old agreements
From a young age, the people around us, primarily our parents, train us to think and interpret the world in a certain way.
Like a household pet, we're rewarded when we follow our parents' instructions and behave the way they want us to and punished when we don't.
This is how much of our identity and how we see the world and people around us develop — through other people's perspectives.
As children, we don't exercise much of our conscience to differentiate what or who is good or bad. We fall back on what our parents teach us.
This training runs so deep that as we grow, we develop an inner voice, a judge, who will reward and punish us for our actions for the rest of our lives.
When we do something culturally frowned upon or not considered normal by the people around us, this inner voice punishes us by making us feel guilty, stupid, careless, and sometimes crazy.
As a result, we learn to fear being our natural selves and speaking our minds because our inner voice tells us we'll be rejected by others and treated as stupid, weird or even outcasts.
Employees refrain from questioning their bosses or speaking out of fear of losing their jobs.
Now, while having a general direction is helpful when we're kids and still learning about the world around us, it suppresses our identity and wishes as we grow older.
