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  • Sharon Wallen

Attitude is Everything

We are born to be creators, to rule the roost of our reality, to shine brightly. So what happens to us?
One tiny chick stood alone in the incubator. She was half the size of the eight other chicks that had hatched a week earlier and I didn’t know what to do with her. When I put her in the box with the older chicks, they acted upon some collective primal instinct and all attacked at once. The little one, acting upon her own pathetic instinct, crouched down and prepared to die. Complete victim mode. I scooped her out in a flash and held her against my body, cooing at her until I felt her little heart stop racing. Struggle has value as part of natural patterns of growth, but there was nothing natural about my throwing a few more eggs into the incubator a week after I’d started the first batch. That was pure screwed-up human intervention.

 As I write in Hatched, with a little help from me this baby bird stopped seeing herself as a victim and became the boss of the flock. As I watched her life transform, I felt pecked at by feelings of disappointment and apprehension about how I was living mine.

Despite my outward success and the smiling face I showed to the world at that time, I was hiding, playing small. There was a squirming ball of anxiety and discontent in my belly that only subsided when I had that first glass of wine each evening.
 
“Unlike chickens, we humans get bound up in false beliefs about ourselves; we let others tell us who we are and how we are supposed to fit into our groups, our families, and into society as a whole. We buy into collective beliefs about how we should age, how our children are supposed to turn out, how hard it needs to be to earn a living, and what a marriage is supposed to look like.”
Hatched, Lesson 4
 
Like many, I had unwittingly allowed others a big role in defining my beliefs and my attitude. Our attitude can be positive or negative; it is a measure of whether we are focusing on all there is to appreciate or how much there is to be angry, anxious or hurt about. Attitudes are contagious. When we live amongst a negative majority, we tend to follow the crowd. Complaining about things together is an age-old human tendency because it makes us feel bonded. The trouble is that our attitude defines our behaviors, how we show up in our world, whether we say Yes, I can or. No, I can’t. It is what our children see and try to model.
 
I’d made some bold moves in my life, but in those years before hatching the chickens, I was numbing out a lot and saying No the rest of time. I conflated sarcasm (which is always rooted in anger, fear, or hurt) with having a sense of humor. I proved it is possible to sleepwalk through the day-to-day of a normal adult life. I had settled into routines that, while perhaps quietly exhausting, didn’t demand much of me. I know I’m not alone. It’s the comfortable choice for many, but not for people like me who have that squirming ball in our bellies. The ball is there to push us toward our destiny, and the damn thing won’t go away until we start living it.
  
That tiny chick planted a seed inside of me and I started showing up differently in my life. Yes, all that change was uncomfortable and scary at times, but…
 
 Oh, it was so worth it!
 
Rather than crouching down with worry over how my taking big bold steps might intimidate someone else, I began to let my actions flow from my Authentic Self. This is the part of us that touches infinity, the part that instinctively knows we are big and connected to something even bigger. This is the source of intuition and higher guidance, which will always lead us to what’s perfectly next for us, and it doesn’t care a whit about what others think of the idea.
 
This expansive attitude is our birthright.
 
If you suffer from a less-than-stellar attitude, you can learn as I did to see the world through a clear appreciative lens rather than have your vision clouded by powerlessness and negativity. You can open your heart wide to love and joy, take up your space, and speak your truth. Once freed from troubling thoughts and emotional patterns, you will naturally become a master of your own mind and create a life that is more abundant than what you can currently imagine.
 
This is a freedom no one can ever take away.
 
A world filled with human beings who are able to use their beautiful minds to solve real problems and manifest their dreams is the paradise we seek.

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