Attitude Isn't Everything, But It's A Lot

In his book, Writing for Impact, Bill Birchard my long time friend, collaborator and writing coach, delves deeply into the science behind writing that fires up our brains and writing that makes us want to skip to the next sentence, the next page, or give up. The science says, according to Bill, that words written with feeling are a sure fire way to grab your reader every time….

See Strategy #4 Keep it Stirring

• You feel faster than you think. Ponder that for a second: When you open a book, you absorb the thoughts only after feeling the emotions that carried them.

• Science shows that a message, together with its emotional charge, is what creates meaning. Our brains are wired to interpret language that way. No emotion, no full comprehension.

I thought of Bill because of my two current projects — the project that fires me up every morning and the other one that feels like the cleaning tool in my mouth at the dentist that day.

At the time, I thought this I was sitting in the library in the company of four other women who were busy working on their writing own projects. We meet every Tuesday evening for an hour and a half. We cheer each other on. It’s great.

I was quietly discouraged as I looked at all of them, heads down, tapping away. But suddenly I remembered the sheet of white, now yellowing paper I had stuffed in my backpack on my way to the library that night. I was so taken with these words when I first found them sometime in the 1990s that I wrote them out on that sheet of paper by hand. My cloud of discouragement lifted when I read them

Until today, I did not know anything about Charles (Chuck) R. Swindoll, other than the words you will see below. We could not be more different. He is devout Christian minister. I am a religiously agnostic occasional believer that there is some higher power who may do good. But more often you wonder why inexplicably sad and horrible events happen too often. I guess that’s just life.

Anyway, I like Swindoll’s attitude and his smile. In my own way, no doubt very different from his, I try to live by his words.

ATTITUDE

by

Charles Swindoll

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.  Attitude, to me, is more important than facts.  It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think, say or do.  It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill.  It will make or break a company... a church... a home.  The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we embrace for that day.  We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way.  We cannot change the inevitable.  The only thing we can do is play the one string we have, and that is our attitude... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

And so it is with you... we are in charge of our Attitudes”