The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

Children learn and store information by forming agreements. They must agree with the information they receive to form beliefs because they aren’t given the opportunity to choose what to believe. Ruiz challenges the agreements people learn and presents new agreements that one can make with oneself to create a happier, more fulfilling life.

Humans focus on the information they want to retain by paying attention to it, allowing less important information to fade into the background. This is how humans learn. Adults are constantly trying to capture children’s attention to domesticate them.

This is what Ruiz calls people’s internalized belief systems. After being domesticated, humans continue to domesticate themselves and judge themselves and others according to this belief system they hold within.