Script: This is “Your Impact: The Podcast” Episode 3: How to stop giving a shit”, and I’m April. Today I’m diving into Don Miguel Ruiz’s book “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom”. Don Miguel Ruiz is a best selling author, known to have transformed his near-death experience to realizing the essence of personal freedom. To stop giving a shit, is to stop taking things personally; to be aware of what controls how you live, and to know how to love yourself. He says that when you take things personally, you are acting as if you have personal importance - you are assuming that everything is about you or that you are responsible for everything. When you respond in this way, you think that people know who you are. But really, they can only project their own beliefs, feelings and opinions of themselves. No one can know you, like you know you. When you don’t take what people say or do to you personally, you break out of the habits and routines that become like a nightmare in your mind that cause you to suffer. If someone is not treating you with love and respect, take it as a gift if they walk away from you. One day I was tidying up a meditation studio prior to an event, and many of the early arrivals of attendees were standing by the lobby while I was cleaning. I was softly asking each person I came across to quiet their voices and not block the doorways. One of the women staring down at me said aloud, “well you’re a shit leader”, rolled her eyes at me, and at some points during the day as the event went on, she asked me why I even had my job in the first place. At another event, towards its end, a woman came up to my desk and asked me for a refund because she did not like the teacher, and after receiving a no, she howled, said some crude things under her breath and left my desk saying, “what a fucking bitch.” I’ve had a few of these experiences, some worse than others, and at places I don’t expect. People coming after you with wild shitty energy, and you don’t understand what you did to cause that kind of reaction. I used to run these scenarios over and over again in my mind just to make sense of it. Most times when confronted by these people, I am too shocked and out of words to react and I feel like my seemingly aloof or dumbfounded facial expression triggers them to react more. I used to think there was some truth to what they said. But as Don mentions, when you take in what people say about you or to you with blind trust, what you are doing is absorbing all of their personal garbage. Don’t turn their garbage into yours. When it comes to who you are, you do not need to trust people as much as you need to trust yourself. You just listened to: Episode 3: “How to stop giving a shit”. I’ll be back with new episodes every Sunday so I’ll see you there with more thoughts on how to live better and find your impact. Be well.