“Relationships are great! …as long as everything is going my way.” — Rich Salsa
Agreement 3 was noticing. Sitting with the five Centering Questions. Becoming honest about where you are and where the other person is — without judgment, without agenda. Just awareness.
Agreement 4 is what you do with that awareness.
It’s your answer to the Centering Questions. Your determination to give rather than control — to lead and inspire rather than push and demand. In the broadest strokes, Agreements 3 and 4 are your commitment to guide a situation toward something that works for you too — starting in 3 and peaking in 4.
And it always includes this: releasing any effort to manipulate or control another person.
That’s it. That’s the whole agreement.
And that’s an enormous thing. Because your tendency to control is not a personality quirk. It goes all the way down.
There’s a line I’ve been credited with that I want to set straight. People sometimes attribute it to Yoda. Yoda didn’t say it. I did (but Yoda would agree):
There is no get. There is only give.
That’s the whole economy of love in eight words. You cannot extract love from another person. You cannot pressure it, maneuver it, guilt it, or wait it out. You can only give it — and either receive it or not. The moment you shift from giving to getting, you’ve left love and entered controlment. It’s that clean. And it’s that hard.
Agreement 4 isn’t just about overt control — the demand, the ultimatum, the broom. It’s about any attempt to get something from someone that they aren’t really willing or wanting to give. As the Arbinger Institute puts it: it’s about seeing someone as a means to something you want, or as a block to something you want. You can disguise this all you like. But people know whether you’re giving or trying to get. They respond to your generosity — not your agenda.
There’s also a useful way to think about what a “relationship” actually is — because we tend to misunderstand this from the start. We think of our relationship as something that exists between us, like a shared object we’re both responsible for carrying. But try this: think of someone you care about, and point to the relationship. Where did you point? To him? To her? To some space between you?
Here’s the truth: there isn’t one relationship. There are two. There’s my relationship with you, and there’s your relationship with me. My job is to tend to mine. Your job is to tend to yours. The only thing I actually control in this whole arrangement is what I bring — whether I’m choosing to give love or whether, like the baboon, I’m grasping.
The baboon. In a documentary from the 1960s, hunters in Africa are shown catching baboons with a remarkably simple trap. They dig a hole in an abandoned ant hill and fill it with wild melon seeds. The baboon can slip his open hand into the hole — but once he’s grabbed hold of what he’s decided is his, he can’t get his fist back out. That’s when the hunter gets a rope around him.
Even as the hunter approaches, the baboon will not let go. The seeds are his. Things must go his way. And in his panic, he loses his ability to solve the problem — or perhaps work something out with the hunter — and save himself from a situation that is rapidly getting worse.