We’ve all seen people puffing up, playing roles, performing a version of themselves they think will win the room or land the gig. In a world obsessed with optics, it seems there’s always someone performing poultry. Flapping their wings. Crowing in meetings. Even when the feathers obviously don’t fit.

But before we roll our eyes, it’s worth pausing. Not all performance is arrogance. Sometimes it’s driven by the need to belong, to feel ready before you are, or to prove you’re already what you’re still becoming.

Sometimes we try on the feathers before we grow them. And that’s not always a bad thing.

Chickens don’t strut out of the egg fully formed. They fluff, stumble and watch the world with eyes wide open. Eventually they find rhythm, or at least their version of it, and settle into their own plumage.

Humans are impatient. We often reward the appearance of readiness before the real thing has had time to grow. The problem isn’t about trying on the costume. It’s when the costume becomes the whole point. When theatre replaces growth and you start believing the feathers are the real chicken.

My own relationship with borrowed feathers began properly in my late twenties. One day I was in a technical role with responsibility for precisely no staff. Then, almost overnight, I found myself in a management role responsible for about 120 people.

I’d effectively gone from looking after myself to being responsible for a small village. And to be honest, on some of the early days I felt like the obligatory village idiot.

My boss, Cathy, had faith in my leadership potential and gave me the opportunity before all my plumage was in place. I remember stepping into the role acutely aware that the title had arrived before all the necessary experience. I had the job. I had the responsibility. But I certainly hadn’t grown all the feathers yet.

So for the first few months I instinctively stuck some up my arse.

I tried to look like a manager while learning how to become one. On day one I was quietly shitting bricks, convinced that every gap in my experience was about to be exposed for all the world to see. Instead, the senior leaders in my team took me under their wing. Guy, Steve and others showed me the ropes, quietly explained many things I didn’t know, gave me room to make decisions and enough support to recover when I got them wrong.

They also let me shine without needing to remind everyone how much of the light was being reflected from them. I remain enormously grateful for that.

Then somewhere along the way something changed. I stopped concentrating quite so hard on looking like I belonged in the role, or fearing being found out as a fraud, and focussed on simply doing the best work I could. This involved listening. Making decisions. Getting things wrong and thereby learning. Having difficult conversations. Taking responsibility, for myself and my team. Backing people, above, below and beside me. And perhaps most importantly, accumulating the scar tissue that eventually becomes judgement.

The borrowed feathers weren’t suddenly discarded. I just grew into them. Or perhaps more accurately, eventually I grew my own.

The first time I heard the phrase imposter syndrome, I was enlightened. Like the sound of one hand clapping. The next dozen times, I nodded knowingly. By the hundredth, I realised we were all busily auditioning for roles we already had.

Most of us have found ourselves somewhere new and wondered, what am I doing here? The harder question is whether that uncertainty means you’re growing or genuinely out of your depth.

Over time I’ve come to realise that feeling like an imposter can accompany quite different things. Sometimes we’re pretending—projecting a capability we have little intention of developing. Sometimes we’re practising—stepping into something we haven’t fully learned yet. And sometimes we’re simply progressing—pushing against the boundary of what we already know how to do.

All three can feel uncomfortable from the inside. Which means the feeling itself tells you surprisingly little. Feeling like an imposter doesn’t necessarily mean you are one. Sometimes discomfort is simply the price of doing something you haven’t mastered yet.

Along the way I’ve been given lots of advice. Fake it till you make it says perform confidence until it becomes real. You’re better than you think says ignore the doubt and back yourself. Both can be helpful. But neither asks whether the thought itself deserves quite so much attention.

Andy Puddicombe, the former monk behind Headspace, uses the image of sitting beside a road watching thoughts pass like traffic. You can notice them without chasing them. I liked that. Maybe I don’t belong here could simply be another ‘not in service’ bus going past. I could notice it, but then let it drive on by.

I’ve spent a good part of my life unsure. Not panicked, just unclear about the rules, the pass mark and whether I was even playing the right game. So I have relied on asking questions, staying curious and noticing the people around me who knew things I didn’t. Mistakes, feedback and experience gradually gave me something more useful than confidence: context.

The more I learned, the more comfortable I became with how much I didn’t know. And somewhere in that process, the unfamiliar became familiar.

Then you look down and realise you’ve grown a few more feathers.

Cathy understood that before I did. She wasn’t appointing the finished product. She was backing the possibility. And Guy, Steve and the other leaders around me gave that possibility room to grow. They didn’t need me to know everything. They needed me to be capable of learning, listening and doing my job well enough to let them do theirs.

I stuck feathers up my arse for a while. Fortunately, they gave me the space, support and occasional nudge required to grow my own.

Maybe that’s why I’ve become less interested in defeating uncertainty. You don’t have to believe every thought that turns up, dress up to satisfy it or chase it down the street looking for an answer. Sometimes you can notice it pass and keep doing the work anyway.

Not every thought deserves a costume change.

Chickens seem blissfully free of this problem. They don’t wonder whether they’re sufficiently chicken. They scratch, flap, bathe in dirt and occasionally shit in their own nest. They don’t audition for the role or seek applause or permission. They just get on with being chickens.

Which is probably fortunate, because if chickens understood their own value, they’d be insufferable.

For over 7,000 years they’ve fed families, communities and empires without once holding a mirror or posting about “hustling in the coop”.

Just scraps in, eggs out.

And that’s a remarkable piece of engineering. A $30 chook from the local produce store can turn leftovers into protein-rich food capsules, complete with biodegradable packaging, without Wi-Fi, instruction manuals or a power cord. Give the same challenge to the brightest engineers in the world and a million-dollar budget and I’m not convinced they’d beat her.

Yet the chicken doesn’t need to feel competent. She just keeps laying the evidence.

Maybe that’s what took me years to understand. Confidence isn’t the same thing as competence, and uncertainty isn’t evidence of its absence.

Sometimes we genuinely aren’t ready. Sometimes we’re pretending. But sometimes we’re simply standing at the edge of what we already know how to do, wearing a few borrowed feathers while the real ones grow underneath.

These days I still feel under-feathered from time to time. The difference is that I no longer automatically interpret that feeling as evidence that I’m in the wrong place. Sometimes it means I’m exactly where growth happens.

Cathy took a chance on that possibility. Guy, Steve and others helped me grow into it. And somewhere along the way, the bloke flapping around trying to look like a manager became a leader.

Borrow the feathers if you need them. Accept the help of people prepared to take you under their wing. Keep learning. Keep doing the work.

Just make sure something real is growing underneath.

“Sometimes feeling under-feathered just means you’re still growing.” —Chicken Karma

It was September 10, 1945. Farmer Lloyd Olsen from Fruita, Colorado, went out to the yard to prepare dinner. His mother-in-law was visiting, and his wife had asked for a chicken.

Lloyd picked out an unlucky five-month-old rooster named Mike. With one clean swing of the axe Lloyd cut off Mike’s head. Well, nearly.

The jugular remained. So did one ear. And, crucially, most of the brain stem. Mike didn’t have a beak, eyes, comb or the top of his head. But miraculously, he didn’t die.

At first, Lloyd stood stunned. But rather than taking another swing to finish the job, Lloyd did something highly unusual. He took pity. A case of reverse Stockholm syndrome perhaps?

He started feeding Mike with an eyedropper—milk, water, crushed grain. And Mike, incredibly, adapted. He was able to perch and sleep with his neck tucked more neatly under his wing. He even tried to preen and crow—though the result sounded more like a lifelong smoker clearing his throat than a triumphant cock-a-doodle-do.

At this point, I had questions. What did the mother-in-law end up eating? And how awkward was dinner after the intended main course started walking around without a face?

Mike the Headless Chicken soon became a post-war roadside sensation. A feathered freak show. He toured the country in a custom trailer with merch, inspiring a curious America with the hopeful message that even if you lose your head, you can still get ahead. By some accounts, Mike made Lloyd rich. A tidy reward for an unfortunate axe swing.

Scientists later explained that enough of Mike’s brain stem remained to keep the essentials going: heartbeat, breathing, digestion and balance. In other words, the machinery of survival was still online, even if the executive function had clocked off.

Mike lived for about 18 months after the botched execution incident. One of the longest death scenes in recorded history.

In the end, he didn’t die from losing his head. He died because he choked on food and mucus after the family misplaced the syringe used to clear his throat. An inglorious end for a superstar rooster.

It’s an extraordinary story.

But these days I find myself wondering whether we’ve misunderstood why Mike still fascinates us.

For years I thought Mike was the perfect mascot for badly led organisations. We’ve all seen places that keep functioning after misplacing their head. Reports still get written. Meetings still happen. Budgets are balanced. Targets are updated. The machinery keeps moving.

Everything appears alive. Until you look for evidence that anyone is actively making choices. The lights are on. The calendar is full. The neck is still moving. But is anyone home?

But lately I’ve wondered whether Mike’s real usefulness isn’t as a joke about bad leadership. Maybe the harder question is whether we can see him in ourselves. Mike as a mirror rather than mascot. In the seasons when we keep moving but stop deciding. When we solve tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s habits. When we turn up without really showing up. When we are productive, responsive and outwardly functional, but no longer fully present.

Mike survived because his automatic systems kept working. Humans do the same. Autopilot helps us survive, but it cannot choose meaning for us.

A well-organised brain stem can keep a body going for a surprisingly long time. But it cannot choose a life.

Mike had lost the capacity to make informed choices about his next steps. But most of us still can. The uncomfortable question is whether we always do.

Habit is a remarkable servant. It keeps families functioning through difficult seasons. It allows organisations to keep operating during uncertainty. It enables us to keep moving when life becomes overwhelming. Routine can keep us alive, but it can’t tell us where we are going.

In this way, habits make terrible navigators. They can carry us faithfully in yesterday’s direction long after yesterday’s destination no longer matters. Perhaps that’s why Mike’s story has survived for eighty years. Partly because he lived without a head. But mostly because we can imagine our own head on his neck (or shoulders if he had any).

If I’m honest, there have been seasons of my own life when I was little more than a well-organised brain stem: functioning, responding, but not fully choosing or exercising agency over my life.

After 90 years of taking life largely as it came, my mum recently discovered the concept of self-agency and told me about it with the enthusiasm of a reformed smoker. She had found a new word for an old possibility: that even late in life, you can notice the script, question the routine, and choose differently.

Which proves it is never too late to learn from Mike’s mishap. And Mum continues to prove that even when an old chook learns new tricks, they can be hard to practice into habits.

Autopilot is one of humanity’s great survival mechanisms. It frees us from thousands of routine decisions so we can keep going when life is noisy, demanding or overwhelming.

Habit is not the enemy. Habit gets children fed, bills paid, teams through deadlines and tired bodies out of bed.

The danger comes when habit gradually takes over decisions that still deserve our attention.
When did I stop choosing?
When did I start turning up without really showing up?
When did movement replace meaning?

There are moments, months and sometimes years when we remain busy, productive and outwardly successful, yet drift through life powered more by routine than intention.

Mike’s story shows that movement is not the same as meaning. And resilience is not always proof of health. Sometimes it is just the body staggering forward because the deeper self has stopped steering.

Somewhere between routine and responsibility, many of us surrender the wheel.
Mike never had the chance to take it back.
But we do.

“Habit is a wonderful servant, but a terrible navigator.” —Chicken Karma

Once you’ve seen the beak, the wing appears. Then you name the bird, and suddenly the whole world turns poultry.

That’s the trouble with worldview. We find what we’re looking for, then stop looking. Evidence that fits gets a red-carpet welcome. Evidence that doesn’t gets shown the door.

Algorithms don’t help. They turn our feeds into a festival of things we already believe, with the loudest headlines drowning out the smaller, stranger, more useful sounds.

Pascal noted that we’re most persuaded by reasons we discover ourselves. We like what feels ours, not necessarily what’s true. So, we pretend to be objective while our values quietly arrange the continents into a chicken.

My yard is not a map.
And still, some days, I can’t unsee the comb and the tail.

Confirmation bias isn’t a defect to delete; it’s a force to manage. Left alone, it narrows the world to the shapes we want to find. Handled well, it becomes curiosity with guardrails.

More than once, I’ve spotted beaks before the first workshop break, taken a small flap of faith and landed too far, too early, and, in hindsight, nowhere near the truth.

The real danger isn’t seeing a chicken where there isn’t one. The real danger is falling in love with the chicken.

Confirmation bias is often described as a thinking problem. But most of the time it’s an attachment problem. Once we’ve named the chicken, defended it, and built part of our identity around it, every coastline starts looking like confirmation.

You see it everywhere.

In politics, where people stop testing ideas and start defending dogma. In countries, where history becomes mythology and criticism is portrayed as betrayal. In careers, where yesterday’s expertise fades into tomorrow’s blind spot. Even in families, where old stories about us and each other survive long after they’ve stopped being useful.

The longer we carry a belief, the more it can feel like part of us. And when that happens, changing our mind doesn’t feel like learning. It feels like losing.

That’s why humility matters. Not the performative kind that says, “I might be wrong,” while secretly believing you’re right (despite how seductive this can feel). The real kind that remains curious enough to ask: What if this isn’t a chicken after all?

Wisdom isn’t finding a pattern. It’s remembering that other patterns may fit the same map. It’s being willing to rotate the continents, change the scale, borrow another pair of eyes, and ask: What if I’m looking at the right coastline but telling myself the wrong story?

Sometimes the most important discovery isn’t finding the chicken. It’s realising the map was always bigger than your interpretation of it.

A map is not the territory. A worldview is a lens, not the world.

If you want to see more truth, don’t just look harder, look wider.

“The danger isn’t seeing the chicken. It’s falling in love with it.” —Chicken Karma

Back in the day, someone from the local footy club or Rotary would weave through the crowd with a book of coloured raffle tickets, gently pressuring half-cut patrons to part with loose change for a worthy cause. A few bucks might buy the punters a handful of chances to win a frozen chicken or a meat tray. Or more importantly, the chance to legitimise time spent at the bar by taking home dinner with a side order of community goodwill.

Once the tickets were sold, everyone looked towards the big spinning wheel hanging on the wall. Numbered one to one hundred, it gathered speed with the quick flick of the wrist before gradually slowing with that wonderfully satisfying clickity... click... click... as the pointer bounced over each numbered pin.

Nobody really cared about the value of the prize. What everyone wanted to hear was their number: “Red 68.”

For a few glorious seconds, they were in with a chance while fate picked a winner.

The chook raffle was never really about chickens. It was about hope and having a good time. The tiny thrill that maybe, just maybe, tonight your number would come up.

It wasn’t until much later that I realised Australia once ran another raffle altogether. Only this one wasn’t held in the public bar.

Between 1965 and 1972, twenty-year-old Australian men had their birthdays entered into a national ballot for military service. Numbered ballot balls representing birth dates were placed into a rotating barrel, spun by hand, then drawn out one by one to decide whose birthday had come up. If it matched yours, you could be called up to serve in Vietnam.

You didn’t choose to enter. You didn’t buy a ticket. Your government handed you one based on a single arbitrary fact: the day you were born. At the time, it was described plainly enough as a lottery or birthday ballot.

Strip away the uniforms and politics and the mechanics were disturbingly familiar: numbered chances, a spinning barrel, a life redirected by the draw. Only the consequences were different. One raffle sent you home with a chicken. The other sent you off to war.

Recently I did some digging and discovered something that made me pause. Had I been born exactly twenty years earlier, my birthday—19 September—was one of those drawn in the National Service ballot. The same birthday, in a different decade, with completely different consequences. My birthday never changed, but history did.

It made me wonder how many turning points in our lives are truly chosen, and how many simply arrive with the quiet click of a wheel slowing down.

A mate of mine, Richard, born in 1972, owes his existence to one of those stories.

Richard’s father, John, had his birthday drawn. He went.

John served as a machine gunner with 11 Platoon, D Company, 6RAR. On 18 August 1966, he was one of 33 soldiers on the 11 Platoon manning roster but he remained at Nui Dat base, sick, while his unit unknowingly went out on the patrol that became the Battle of Long Tan. From the 105 men of D Company and three New Zealand artillery observers at Long Tan, 11 Platoon took the heaviest casualties: thirteen of John’s mates were killed and eight others wounded. Two of the men killed had only arrived on base that morning. The survivors returned carrying things far heavier than their packs.

John was later wounded in action during Operation Ingham in December 1966. But he survived the war, returned home, married, and had Richard. I am grateful for that chain of chance, because Richard went on to become a huge influence in my life.

History often remembers battles.

Families prefer to remember birthdays.

We like to believe life rewards merit. That discipline, judgement, and effort shape the path. And they do. But long before we made our first choice, chance had already dealt the opening hand.

The family we are born into. The country on our passport. The date and place on our birth certificate. These are raffle tickets we never bought, yet they influence almost everything that comes after. The circumstances of our birth may be the most significant raffle ticket we’ll ever be handed.

Some of the biggest forks in the road were decided before we had any say at all. That doesn’t make effort meaningless. It makes humility essential.

Before congratulating ourselves too much for winning, or judging someone else too harshly for losing, it’s worth remembering that sometimes the wheel simply stopped on a different number.

The strangest thing about fate is that it sometimes sounds exactly like a raffle wheel slowing down. And luck doesn’t care who it chooses.

“Some raffles hand out chickens; others hand out consequences.” —Chicken Karma

Postscript: I’m publishing CK013 a few days before the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan (18 August 2026). My thanks to Richard for confirming his father John’s story and allowing me to share it. Some histories live in official records. Others live in families, friendships and birthdays.

More specifically, they thought I’d misspelled Chicken Korma. They quickly followed up with “I love chicken korma. How hot do you like it?” They were looking forward to my take on the classic Indian dish. Instead, all I served up was words.

To be fair, the closest I’ve ever come to writing a cookbook was winning one.

In the early days of dating, I was helping my future wife’s family cook dinner. We chopped sausages, vegetables and a generous handful of fresh chillies into a rich tomato sauce.

Somewhere between chopping the chillies and stirring the pot, I ducked off to the toilet.

A few moments later I discovered something they don’t usually include in cookbooks.

Chilli doesn’t stop burning just because you’ve walked away from the chopping board.

The extended family watched me sprint laps between the kitchen and the bathroom, trying water, ice, milk, yoghurt, and every other dairy product we could think of to soothe my singed sacred site. My future mother-in-law laughed so hard she could barely stand, propped against the wall with tears streaming down her face. The recipe for “Chilli Willies” became family folklore, and years later I retold the story on talkback radio and somehow won... a cookbook.

I’ve often thought life is a bit like chilli.

We all say we want a bit more spice. More excitement. More adventure. More challenge.

But what we usually mean is just enough to make dinner interesting—not enough to make us run around the kitchen looking for yoghurt.

The strange thing is that our tolerance changes. The curry that once seemed impossibly hot becomes our regular order. The challenges that once felt unbearable become stories we tell with a smile.

Maybe that’s karma’s favourite recipe: not removing the heat but slowly increasing our capacity to handle it. The trick is building tolerance without pretending the burn doesn’t matter. We want spice because it wakes us up, but discomfort only becomes wisdom when we respect what it is telling us.

There’s a difference between stretching your limits and ignoring them. The heat from the chillies isn’t trying to hurt you; it’s telling you where your current limits are. You don’t become someone who enjoys hot food by ordering a ring of fire vindaloo on day one. You become that person by gradually expanding what you can comfortably handle.

Based on trial and error I’ve been developing a Chicken Karma recipe for handling life’s heat.

1. Start mild.

2. Add a little more heat than last time.

3. Stir regularly.

4. Expect tears.

5. Don’t confuse bravado with resilience.

6. If it burns, learn.

7. Repeat until tolerance becomes taste.

Unlike us, chickens are largely insensitive to capsaicin, the compound that makes chilli feel hot to mammals. They can happily peck away at a chilli that would have a human hiccupping and reaching for a glass of milk. A natural reminder that life’s heat is less about what’s served up and more about who’s tasting it.

Life, like chilli, rewards gradual exposure. A little heat wakes you up. Too much, too soon, overwhelms you. Pretending you can handle more than you can doesn’t impress anyone—especially your digestive system.

The trick isn’t avoiding heat. It’s learning which discomfort helps you grow, which discomfort warns you to stop, and how to tell the difference before you reach for the yoghurt.

Yesterday’s challenge can become today’s flavour. But only if you respect the burn.

And above all else, wash your hands thoroughly before and after going to the toilet.

Chickens don’t taste chilli. But we do.

How hot do you like it?

“The spice isn’t always in the meal. Sometimes it’s in the person eating it.”—Chicken Karma

The liver was the gold standard: complex, veined, dark enough to hide messages from Olympus. The Greeks, along with several other ancient cultures even drew maps to decode what the guts were “saying.”

Talk about gut instincts.

I never trained as a haruspex, but I did serve a short apprenticeship in chicken entrails.

My parents ran a small fishing bait business and one of the bestsellers was, wait for it, frozen bags of chicken guts: cheap, oily, irresistible to flathead and whiting.

As a young kid, in early Primary School, I’d often ride with Mum after school to collect entrails from the local chicken farm once they’d finished slaughtering for the day. The open 20-litre plastic buckets were typically full to the brim. No lids. Warm. Slippery. Slowly going rank in the afternoon sun.

I saw nothing unusual about this arrangement, which tells you something about the era, the business, and possibly our family’s risk appetite.

You could smell the buckets before you saw them. And when you saw them, you wished you couldn’t. Every now and then I wonder how differently my life might have turned out if Mum had sold flowers instead of fishing bait.

We’d bag and freeze the chicken guts for sale at tackle shops up and down the coast. That’s where I perfected the art of mouth-breathing.

One day Mum used the small family courier van for the regular pickup and appointed me Acting Payload Stability Supervisor. It was a significant promotion but we both felt I was up for it. The duties were simple and clear. I was to sit in the back and ‘keep an eye on the buckets’ until we got home. That was as far as the briefing went.

I took a few deep breaths of clean air and climbed in the back with the buckets. Seat belts weren’t mandatory back then and many older cars didn’t have them. In our case, there weren’t any seats in the back to attach them to.

None of this seemed to matter because Mum had complete faith in what I now understand was the Standard Australian Safety Arm fitted to all vehicles of the era. If she braked suddenly, her left arm would automatically shoot across the passenger seat and somehow prevent several hundred kilograms of children and other cargo from continuing their journey towards the windscreen.

Physics was never invited into the discussion.

On the way home, something darted across the gravel road and Mum braked hard.

That emergency stop taught me two important scientific principles long before I understood the science behind them. First, Mum’s famous Safety Arm wasn’t nearly as quick as she’d advertised. Second, my premature promotion to Acting Payload Stability Supervisor involved inadequate due diligence and risk mitigation measures.

The eruption of Krakatoa had nothing on what happened next. As I was involuntarily upgraded from cargo to cabin class, I had just enough time to make three critical observations.

First, Mum’s famous Safety Arm had not deployed and was instead holding the steering wheel like it was an additional emergency handbrake.

Second, all six buckets had achieved perfect synchronisation as they tipped forward together, and their contents achieved temporary weightlessness.

Third, and most importantly, the eruption of raw chicken entrails was travelling remarkably close behind me. And as instructed, I was keeping a very close eye on them.

They arrived in the front seat with me about half a heartbeat later.

Chicken entrails cascaded through the van, over the floor, the seats, the gear stick, and whatever remained of my innocence.

The smell was… unholy. No amount of vinegar could erase it. It lingered for months—in the van, in my nostrils, and in my career choices.

I didn’t need a Roman priest to read those entrails. The omen was clear.

Bait retail was not my destiny.

That sounds obvious now, but at the time it mattered. Family businesses have their own currents. They offer a channel already marked out: familiar work, familiar people, familiar expectations, and the safety of belonging to something already built. Before long, those currents can become a vortex, drawing generations into the same water.

Most of us kids worked in the business in some way during our lives. A few of my brothers swam in that ocean more than the rest of us. But when it came time, years later, for me to decide whether I wanted to be part of it, something deep inside me voted against that future.

At the time I couldn’t fully explain why. I simply knew it wasn’t for me. A hunch backed up by my then girlfriend, now wife (sorry Mum).

I didn’t fully know what my future would entail. I only knew, with unusual clarity, that it probably should not entail entrails. Of any kind.

That was one of the best things my gut ever told me. Warm chicken innards behind me. Fresh air straight ahead. Sometimes the body recognises the right direction before the mind knows the destination.

Modern neuroscience suggests the old phrase “gut feeling” is more than poetry. The gut and brain are in constant conversation through nerves, hormones and chemistry. The gut doesn’t predict the future. But it does register patterns from years of lived experience, often long before the conscious mind has finished assembling the evidence.

That may be why fear tightens your stomach before you’ve named the danger. Why something can feel wrong before you can explain it. Why experienced surgeons, firefighters and pilots sometimes act in seconds and only later justify the decision with logic. The body has been keeping notes.

We call it a gut feeling. Maybe it’s simply the body knowing before the brain can explain that something just doesn’t smell right.

Perhaps the Romans weren’t completely wrong. Maybe they were just listening to the wrong gut.

We’re often encouraged to follow our hearts. We spend years educating our minds. Both matter. But somewhere along the way many of us stop listening to the steady conversation our bodies have been having with us all along.

Gut instinct isn’t a replacement for careful thinking. It isn’t permission to ignore evidence or abandon reason. But it is evidence, just a different kind of evidence.

Sometimes your head knows first. Sometimes your heart does. And sometimes your gut notices something neither of them has managed to articulate. Maybe wisdom isn’t deciding which one to trust. Perhaps its learning when each one is trying to tell you something useful.

Looking back, those six buckets of chicken entrails never predicted my future. They simply helped me recognise one future that wasn’t mine. Sometimes that’s enough.

“Sometimes the body recognises the path before the mind can draw the map.” —Chicken Karma

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We’d flown nearly 2,000 kilometres to witness the Channel Country and Lake Eyre in flood. We expected pelicans, spoonbills and egrets.

But bin chickens? What the duck?

There they were: white ibis rising from Australia’s flooded heart as if someone had whispered the news to them before the rest of us knew the desert had turned to water.

From the window of the ten-seat Cessna Caravan, the Channel Country looked less like desert than a living circulatory system. Water braided through channels and claypans. Green growth flushed across country that usually holds its breath. Flying low—often around 1,000 feet—temporary lakes caught the light in long, impossible sheets, and at certain angles Lake Eyre dissolved into the sky: shoreline, water and horizon blending seamlessly from coffee brown to silver to blue.

This was Burke and Wills country too: Cooper Creek, Innamincka, the Dig Tree, and all the misplaced European confidence that assumed unfamiliar country needed conquering rather than understanding. Indigenous people had been reading its signs for tens of thousands of years.

When floodwaters spread across the Channel Country and Lake Eyre Basin, water-dependent birds converge in enormous numbers to feed and breed. Huge flocks often inhabit temporary islands, a safe nursery to raise young away from predators.

What I hadn’t understood until we were above it was how quickly birds answer water in the desert. Within days or weeks of flood, they arrive from distances that make a mockery of our maps. Scientists still don’t fully know how they know. Weather systems, river lines, and social cues are all possibilities. But from the air, the mystery felt less like a gap in science and more like an old intelligence moving across the continent.

Only then did it properly land on me. The much-maligned ibis had made the same journey as the pelicans…and me. We had all flown from the coast to the inland sea. For all I knew, one of them had played chicken with my car at the local tip just a month earlier. Coast and desert, rubbish tip and inland sea, bird and bloke—all nearly 2,000 kilometres apart, yet somehow connected by floodwater, instinct, and a strong desire to fly inland.

The ibis had not become a different bird because I usually met it beside a shopping-centre rubbish bin or at the tip. It had simply learned to survive in the habitat we gave it. It had never forgotten it was a wetland bird. But we had.

Long before satellite imagery, river gauges or weather apps, white ibis somehow knew where the water was. Perhaps the Bureau of Meteorology should put them on the payroll?

In Australia, nicknames are given, not chosen, and once declared, they stick. We call the ibis the bin chicken in jest and in judgment. When being chicken is already an insult, adding bin cuts even deeper.

We named it for where we noticed it, not for what it still knew how to do. Then we laughed at it.

But the bin chicken is partly a creature of our creation. We laugh at it for adapting to the world we built around it, which means the joke may be on us.

Before it became a meme, the Australian white ibis belonged to wetlands, elegantly probing mudflats and marshes for crustaceans and worms. As wetlands disappeared and bins multiplied, it simply adapted and changed menus.

Now it struts through our carparks and public spaces, using its long, curved beak to pull half-eaten chips from paper bags with the same self-assured dignity it once reserved for shellfish.

Whenever floodwaters spread across Australia’s inland deserts, something extraordinary happens. White ibis rise from parks, rivers, estuaries and even city rubbish tips, and fly deep into the continent. Birds we’d spent years mocking as bin chickens suddenly reveal who they always were.

They leave the rubbish behind and fly more than a thousand kilometres to temporary wetlands that didn’t exist a month earlier, gathering in the thousands to raise their chicks in places most Australians will never see. Then, as the water disappears, so do they.

The bird we reduced to a punchline turns out to be one of Australia’s finest navigators. Burke and Wills walked into this country and lost themselves. Indigenous people had spoken its language for millennia. And the ibis reads the floodplain from somewhere beyond the range of our instruments, then arrives exactly when the desert becomes a nursery. Not bad for a dumpster diver.

Human Insight

Watching those ibis thriving in Australia’s flooded heart changed the way I see them.
I thought I knew what I was looking at. Then Lake Eyre showed me I didn’t.

Perhaps people are like that too.
We meet them in the habitat of the moment: under pressure, out of place, making do, scavenging dignity from whatever scraps the world has left nearby. Then we mistake the coping for the character. A single scene for the whole story.

The ibis never forgot it was a wetland bird.
Perhaps people don’t forget their deeper nature either.
Sometimes they are simply waiting for the conditions that let it rise again.

“Never mistake someone’s habitat for their nature.” —Chicken Karma

When a chicken is particularly annoyed, threatened, or ready to assert itself, it raises its hackles—the long, pointed neck feathers. Depending on the breed, they are typically bright, distinct, and easy to spot if you know what to look for.

A chicken with its hackles up is saying: Not today. Not you. Not here.

People don’t have hackle feathers. But we do have our tells: the clipped tone in our voice, sudden stillness, jaw set a shade tighter, a sharp exhale. Maybe even a good old-fashioned eye roll. Call it “ruffling your feathers.” Or, on a bad day, the unmistakable look that says: Don’t you dare!

I have a friend, Murray, who I’m pretty sure was born without any hackle feathers. He’s almost monastic in his approach to disagreement, an impression reinforced by his beautiful bald head. Even when he disagrees, his views are delivered with feathers down, not feathers up. In a world addicted to escalation and drama, Murray has survival value. I’ve tried to mimic that, but I don’t always pull it off.

A well-intended counsellor once suggested I should practice feeling and expressing anger rather than bottling up frustration. When I talked to Murray about that one day he looked at me calmly and said: “Why waste your energy doing that?”. Good point. Game. Set. Match.

When my own hackles rise, I imagine they must be obvious. One time, on a late-night call with too many lawyers from too many time zones, we were trying to solve a hard problem. At least I thought we were. The conversation was intense. And I found myself talking slower, more emphatically and with a bit too much attitude—the unkind kind. Inside, I felt like I was about to lose my shit entirely. But when I checked in with colleagues the next day, they said they didn’t notice it. Maybe that awareness smooths me out—catching me before I cross the line and signal a fight worth picking. Or maybe they just lied.

Hackles evolved as a visual signal for both defence and courtship. They make the bird look bigger to rivals, more impressive to mates. Which feels about right. Half our conflict displays are defence; the other half are performance. Pick up a hen with hackles up and you’ll often find a surprisingly small body under all that bravado. Just like us.

In chickens, hackles warn: “I’m uncomfortable. Respect my space.” Push past that signal and you’ll get a peck and a poultry growl. Respect it and everyone goes back to scratching in peace.

We’re no different. Our hackles are often speaking long before we are. Learning to notice them—in yourself and others—makes you a better partner, leader, human. It’s less about avoiding conflict than recognising when the feathers are trying to tell you something.

Human Insight

However they show up, hackles are our early warnings. The body notices first. Words usually catch up later. The trick is learning to use them to lower heat, not raise it—which in my experience requires more practice than I usually manage.

And it’s a two-way process: learning to read both your own hackles and those of others.
The trick isn’t stopping your hackles from rising. They’re simply information.
The trick is recognising them before they start making decisions on your behalf.

Strength isn’t measured by how high you raise your hackles. It’s measured by how quickly you realise you don’t need to. Because in the coop, the office, or the lounge room, knowing when to back off is wisdom, not weakness.

“Feathers down beats feathers up.” —Chicken Karma

It started with an acorn.
One small bump on the head, and Chicken Little ran screaming through the farmyard, convinced the sky was falling. Within minutes, she’d stirred the whole cast—Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey—into a full-blown poultry panic.

No evidence. No pattern. Just one seed of worry, magnified into a movement.

It turns out you don’t need facts to start a frenzy; just a bit of frantic flapping, a loud voice, and a half-heard story that feels familiar enough to believe. Before long, the whole yard is on edge. A hair trigger from chaos.

When I first started keeping chickens, I realised the story was an ancient moral wrapped in real behavioural science. Because chickens do startle easily: a shadow, a thump, a rustle in the wrong key. One hen reacts and the others follow.

There’s a flurry of motion, no clear cause, and no one sure what they’re reacting to. And then, just as quickly, they calm and go back to scratching. The generous part of me suspects they’re more alert than alarmist.

For humans, however, the fable has become a documentary of modern life. We spiral—and then stay there—feeding the emotion with dramatic headlines, outrageous claims, fear-laden forecasts, and worst-case scenarios. We replay the metaphorical acorn until the echo becomes our roaring reality. And often, we don’t return to calm, we settle into the heightened state like it’s the new normal. It’s no wonder we feel frayed.

We live in an age of acorns mistaken for asteroids. Fear is infectious. And every day, the algorithm shouts: The sky is falling! Fear also sells. And that makes falling acorns big business.

I’ve seen one loud moment derail years of work: a nervous leader who blinked too early, a bad headline that would have faded if we didn’t feed it, an inside thought that escaped through our mouth or keyboard. In these moments priorities collapse. Plans get abandoned. No one remembers the original “threat,” but they keep running anyway.

Most of the time, the sky isn’t falling. It’s just the world turning on its axis. And even when the air is thick with smoke, it doesn’t mean the whole world is on fire.

Human Insight

We’re not wired for overwhelming input. Our brains evolved for village-scale vigilance, not 24/7 global catastrophe feeds.
It’s exhausting and unproductive. We mistake urgency for importance and confuse noise for signal.
We let the loudest cluck set the flock’s direction.

But leadership—like chicken-wrangling and parenting—demands discernment.
If there is real danger, you need to move fast. But for everything else, maybe we should do what chickens do: tilt the head, check the sky, and return to the business at hand.

“Not every noise is a threat. Sometimes it’s just the world turning.”—Chicken Karma

For most of human history, fear kept us alive long enough to conquer the planet. Fear of heights. Fear of snakes. Fear of predators. Fear of doing something stupid in front of other people and having them remember it forever.

Fear has an evolutionary purpose. Phobias, on the other hand, seem to play by different rules. They’re often irrational. Or at least they appear that way from the outside.

One of the smartest people I know is my mate Dave. He has a brain about the size of an average solar system but suffers from what he calls rectal silica phobia: a profound fear of sand finding its way into the crack of his arse.

Going to the beach with him requires an unusually large beach towel and personal hygiene practices normally associated with hazardous material containment.

He is smart enough to know the sand won’t kill him, but he feels the fear anyway. The fear makes little sense to me. But it makes perfect sense to him.

That should probably have been my first clue.

A few weeks after I started publishing weekly Chicken Karma stories, I noticed that a close friend hadn’t subscribed. This was unusual. And honestly, a little disappointing.

She loves reading. She’s endlessly curious. She’s one of those generous souls who instinctively builds other people up and encourages their projects. Except, apparently, when it came to mine. And I really needed her to tick over the first 100 subscribers, yet she was nowhere to be seen.

A few weeks later, during a mahjong night, she finally explained herself.

It turns out she has a bird phobia. Not just chickens. All birds and all their parts in every conceivable form. Feathers. Wings. Poultry packs at the supermarket. Cock au vin recipes can be especially triggering. Even mention of aggressive magpies on the local bike path sets her off.

Apparently, my invitation to the weekly newsletter was about as appealing as a weekly appointment with a gastroenterologist. The irony made her partner piss himself laughing. She found herself caught between a rock and a hard place, and chose to hide behind the rock.

Suddenly a few things started making sense. Her complete lack of enthusiasm for chicken dinners. Her visible discomfort and desire to redirect discussion whenever backyard chickens became a topic of conversation. And a strange incident from years earlier that I had never fully understood.

I was away for work when one of our chickens died unexpectedly. My wife was left with the unenviable task of dealing with the evidence. This is typically part of my role description so she had a very clear selection criteria in mind. She started ringing friends. Looking for a substitute man, any man, to do the dreaded deed of dead chook disposal.

One by one, the male occupants of nearby households were found to be conveniently unavailable or unsuitable. Busy. Out of town. Otherwise engaged. Conscientious objection. Sorry.

Eventually she rang Jen.
Her husband was also away.

Running out of options, my wife explained the situation. Without hesitation but with surprisingly great delight, Jen volunteered her younger brother who lived around the corner. He arrived shortly afterwards, in his pyjamas, to remove and bury the chicken cadaver. My wife provided the shovel and an X to mark the burial plot, then retreated.

At the time, I thought that was especially generous of Jen. But during the newsletter confession, she admitted that while she was thrilled to volunteer her brother for undertaker duties, her first instinct had been to invite my wife over first, and then burn our house down. A comprehensive cremation solution to the problem at hand.

That seemed a little excessive.
Until she told me the story.

As a young city girl visiting relatives on a farm in far-north Queensland, she wandered out to inspect the backyard chickens. It was her first encounter with a flock of feathers. One vigorously flapping bird seemed surprisingly easy to catch. Delighted with her success, she picked it up and proudly held it above her head to show her grandfather and extended family now gathered in the yard.

What she hadn’t noticed was the carpet python. But the carpet python had noticed the chicken. In fact, it was already halfway through eating the still flapping bird, and was very committed to finishing the meal.

For a brief and unforgettable moment, Jen was holding a creature that was equal parts chicken and snake—a sort of feathered reptilian hybrid assembled by nature during a particularly wild experimental phase.

Recently, a nearly 50 year old family photograph of the occasion resurfaced. There stands Grandad smiling in the middle with his arms outstretched and a child on each side. He held a dead snake in one hand and a dead chicken in the other. The side that Jen was on.

And somewhere inside that photograph sits the origin story of a lifelong bird phobia.

Looking back, the phobia makes perfect sense. What surprised me most wasn’t that Jen feared birds. It was how quickly I had assumed she saw them the same way I do.

For me, chickens are curious little philosophers. Teachers disguised as livestock.

For Jen, somewhere deep in the nervous system, a chicken was something else entirely. A python with a mouthful of feathers. It was the same bird for both of us. But a vastly different reality. And perhaps that’s true of far more than just chickens.

We spend much of our lives assuming other people experience the world the way we do because our own experience feels normal. Obvious, even. But every person is carrying a unique collection of memories, fears, triumphs, embarrassments, lessons, and scars.

The same event, object or even casual conversation can all have completely different meaning and consequence.

To me, a chicken became a lens to learn about life.

To Jen, a chicken became a python wearing a feather headdress.

It made me think that maybe empathy isn’t agreeing with someone else’s view of the world. Maybe it’s recognising they didn’t arrive there by the same road you did. And maybe the greatest mistake we make is assuming we’re all looking at the same chicken.

Human Insight

What looks irrational from the outside often makes perfect sense once you know the story behind the behaviour.

Every person carries a private history that shapes how they see the world. The trick is becoming wise enough to recognise they probably aren't seeing what you see—and being curious enough to ask why.

And for the record, I felt ok sharing this detail because I figured Jen was unlikely to ever read it.

“We don’t all see the same chicken.” —Chicken Karma

P.S. Jen did end up approving release of the story and even subscribing (apparently?). And who knows, maybe Chicken Karma will help calm her bird phobia.

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Inside the egg, the chick has everything it needs to start life—except freedom.
To get there, it must chip the shell from the inside. Bit by bit. Tap by tap.

It can take hours. Sometimes days. But no one can do it for them.
If you crack the egg to “help,” the chick might not make it.

They need the process.
The struggle of doing hard things for themselves.
It’s how they build the strength to survive outside the shell.

Early in my chicken-keeping, I watched a chick peeping through a starburst crack, struggling and slow to work through their first life crisis.
My instinct was to intervene—to lift the shell, hurry it along.
Thankfully I’d read just enough to know better.
What looks like suffering is often preparation. The process is the point.

In change and leadership, I’ve seen the same mistake made in human environments.
A new staff member is failing to find their feet? We restructure the role to their level of comfort.
A team struggles with ambiguity? We rewrite the plan with precise next steps that immediately become outdated.
Our child is having difficulty finishing the homework essay? We finish it for them with some of our own ideas for extra credit.
With good intent, we see discomfort and rush to “fix” it.

But not all pressure is bad.
And not all help… helps.

Sometimes the best support is to stand back, give them time and space, and trust the problem-solving instinct to kick in.

Human Insight

Modern life conditions us to value ease and convenience. But over half a century of lived experience tells me growth often starts with friction.

The egg tooth is built for exactly that. A single purpose tool—like the break-glass hammer on a bus.
Use only when ready.
Use only once.
Then quickly move on.

Once the chick is free, the egg tooth falls off.
Nature gives us what we need—when we need it—and not a moment longer. Elegant. Honest. True. We just need to trust that we’ve got this.

So next time you see someone struggling, ask:

Is this suffering… or strengthening?
Do they need rescue… or just room?

Because the shell isn’t just a barrier; it’s part of the design. A passageway to the next life stage.

The egg tooth is really Stoicism in action. It demonstrates how:

The obstacle isn’t in the way—it is the way.
Strength is built through struggle, not in its absence.

It’s a healthy reminder that we’re equipped for the challenge, but we still need to do the work ourselves.

Chickens don’t wallow.
They don’t wish for a softer shell.
They tap. Rest. And tap again until they break through.
Then the tool disappears. No fuss. Onward.

It turns out that while Stoics wrote about it, chickens lived it.

“What looks like suffering is often preparation.”—Chicken Karma

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When our eldest turned sixteen, we agreed to host a backyard party for fifty of her schoolmates—complete with fairy lights, pizzas, playlists, and a no-alcohol policy we promised other parents we’d enforce.

My wife and I divided duties: one of us on snacks and vibes, the other on general surveillance. Things hummed along fine until the crowd shifted from early-evening polite to end-of-term bold. Somewhere between the music creeping louder and the fairy lights swaying a little too hard, we realised we were outnumbered.

One more adult with a functioning moral compass would’ve been handy.

On a routine circuit, my wife sensed something was burning. And she knew where there is smoke, there is fire.
She spotted a cluster of teenagers loitering in the dark near the chicken coop. It felt suspicious in itself—no one hangs out by the coop unless they’re fascinated by poultry or up to no good. It wasn’t the birds.

There was scrambling as she approached, but the ringleader—a teenage boy full of misguided confidence—stood his ground. In the kind of deadpan tone only a mother-of-two can deliver, she served up a short, sharp lecture that ended with an accidental classic:

“You’re being a dick. If you want to stay at this party—don’t be a dick.”

Silence.

Then feathers rustled in the coop behind them.
The chickens, long since roosted for the night, stirred in confusion—probably wondering what they’d done wrong. They were on their best behaviour for weeks afterwards.

Even the chickens have rules. You peck too hard, you get pecked back—or left out entirely.

The party ended without further drama. The kid stayed. And the line stuck.
Don’t be a dick became part of our family vernacular. Neighbours even started using it. A kind of ethical speed bump. A reset button. Not a grand philosophy—just the lowest bar for staying in the flock.

It’s not just for teenagers.

I know a business that uses “No dickheads” as their hiring rule. That’s it. Doesn’t matter how talented you are—if your behaviour brings ego, politics, or toxic energy into the room, you’re out. And to be honest, it works.

Some problems don’t need frameworks.
They just need standards.

Of course, saying it out loud at work can be tricky. HR doesn’t generally endorse blunt language—especially on your landing page. But how often would we save time, conflict, and half a ream of performance documentation if someone just had the courage to say:

“You’re being a dick. If you want to stay on this team—don’t be a dick.”

Human Insight

It’s not about perfection.
It’s not about political correctness or walking on eggshells.
It’s just the behavioural baseline we should expect from one another—at home, at work, in traffic, online.

Let’s be clear: you don’t need a cock to be a dick.
The behaviour is universal. So is the choice not to be.

“Rule #1: Don’t be a dick. If in doubt—don’t be a dick.” —Chicken Karma

Every roast chicken growing up, ten kids would eye it from the moment the carcasses hit the table.
Not for the meat—there wasn’t much—but for the ritual. The pull. The possibility.
We believed in wishes like they had weight, even if we didn’t know what we were wishing for.

When I was a little tacker, one of my sisters decided to cater for her own wedding.
It was a resourceful affair, the kind where everyone pitched in, borrowed what they could, and turned humble things into something worth celebrating.
In the lead-up to the big day, a peculiar request went out to friends and neighbours: save your chicken wishbones.

We cleaned them, dried them, sprayed them silver, and laid them out on a long white table.
After the ceremony, guests paired up, closed their eyes, and pulled apart these little relics of poultry anatomy.
Whoever ended up with the larger piece won the wish.

No one knew the official rules, but that didn’t stop anyone from trying.
It’s my first real memory of a ritual that was part superstition, part celebration.
Something about that forked bone—balanced, fragile, hidden within—suggested fate could be nudged by desire.
That maybe, if you pulled with enough conviction, you could hold a little magic in your fingers.

A wedding. A table full of silver-sprayed bones.
A room full of people quietly hoping.

Maybe we’re all just trying to hold the right end of something fragile and unseen.
And sometimes, it helps to believe.

It turns out the wishbone ritual is older than most people realise.
Ancient Etruscans believed chickens could tell the future—reading the world not through vision, but vibration.
Later cultures turned it into a game of chance: a tug-of-war over potential and suddenly the winner held hope in their hands.

But the magic only works if you hold the right end.

In the workplace, I’ve seen plenty of wishbones dressed up as strategy—two people pulling in opposite directions, each hoping their version of the future wins.
That’s not a plan. It’s wishful thinking.

But I’ve come to believe hope has its place.
It sparks something—a flicker, a reach toward possibility.
But it only becomes useful when it’s aligned, named, and backed by action.

Chickens don’t care for wishbones.
They act—scratching, pecking, moving forward.
No silver talismans. No uncertainty. Just motion.

Still, for humans, sometimes it helps to believe.

Human Insight

We talk a lot about strategy.
But sometimes what we really need to talk about is hope—not the fluffy kind, but the deep kind that fuels action, shapes intention, and requires honesty.

Hope without clarity creates confusion.
Hope without alignment just creates noise.
Hope without action creates frustration.

But hope, when shared and spoken aloud, can be a starting point—a way to surface the real desires underneath our plans.

Naming the wish is how you hold the right end.

“Hope won’t cook the roast. But it might get you to light the fire.” —Chicken Karma

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Back in the 1990s, evolutionary biologist William Muir at Purdue University set out to improve egg production. His logic was simple: if some hens lay more eggs than others, why not breed just the top performers? He created two flocks of chickens: one made up of average hens, the other of high-performing individuals—those that laid the most eggs.

Six generations in, the average flock was thriving.
Healthy. Happy. Productive.

The super flock? A bloodbath.
Only three birds remained.
The rest had been pecked to death by their high-performing peers.

That’s the trap of maximising for individual brilliance rather than collective performance.

It turned out that those superstar hens weren’t just good at laying eggs—they were also suppressing the productivity of those around them through dominance, aggression, or sheer stress.
They succeeded, but at the expense of the flock.
Sound familiar?

Productivity isn’t just about individual output.
It’s about how we behave in the system.
Aggression might win in the short term but it destroys cohesion, trust, and long-term performance.

Margaret Heffernan’s TED Talk Forget the Pecking Order at Work brought this idea to life.
The highest-performing teams weren’t packed with top talent.
They were bound by trust. Empathy. Honest, messy interaction.
The glue between the parts—not the parts themselves.
The problem isn’t talent.
It’s how we think talent should behave.

She was right.
And chickens got there first.

I’ve seen this in projects, teams, even whole organisations.
Everyone chasing spotlight, guarding turf, or undercutting each other for scraps of recognition.
And then we wonder why the workplace feels tense, exhausted, or quietly toxic.

We reward the loudest voice.
The solo hero.
The dazzling individual contribution.

Every football coach knows it by heart:
You don’t win a final with a team full of fullbacks.
You need balance. Glue. Players who pass, cover, anticipate—not just score.

It’s the same in every high-functioning environment.
A champion team will always beat a team of champions.

Human Insight

We glorify the lone genius.
And we build systems to reward that with bonuses, titles, praise.

But when you optimise for the individual, you often break the group.
That’s true in biology, in business, in politics, in schools.

Brilliance without regard for others is not an asset.
It’s a liability—one that often shows up as burnout, bruised culture, or brilliant jerks leaving wreckage behind them.

The most effective systems aren’t filled with superstars.
They’re filled with contributors.
People who lift each other up instead of tearing each other down.
Cultures where people listen, support, balance, and hold each other to account.

This doesn’t mean avoiding excellence.
It means building systems where excellence doesn’t come at the cost of everyone else.

The best outcomes rarely come from the loudest minds.
Turns out chickens and humans both do their best work in environments that feel safe, fair, and shared.

Push too hard, too solo, too competitive, and the whole system fractures.
We can do better.

Be suspicious of any culture built around praise and pressure for star performers.
Look instead for the flocks that thrive without drama.

They might not make the front page, but they’ll still be quietly delivering long after the caped crusaders burn out.

So, if you’re trying to build something that lasts—don’t just look for the brightest birds. Look for the ones who build the nest and make others better.

The ones who don’t need to shine alone to feel like they matter.

In the end, you don’t need to wear a cape to be a winner.
Just stop pecking your teammates.

“You don’t need to wear a cape to make a contribution.”—Chicken Karma

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On day one, she made a break for it.
Straight over the fence, past two backyards, and into a large mango tree down the street.
She ignored our calls. Refused treats.
And despite a series of decreasingly polite retrieval attempts, that’s where she stayed.

Not for a day or a week, but for eight years!

No coop. No routine. No politics.
Just a tree and a life of her own choosing.

Eight years is a solid innings for a chicken. Most don’t make more than three or four laps around the sun. Especially one living wild-ish in suburbia. The ideal life of an introvert. Alone but not lonely.

But it turns out that freedom, when chosen, can extend your life.

We often talk about people “flying the coop” like it’s a rejection; of responsibility, of structure, of belonging. Of us.

But maybe it’s something else.
Maybe it’s about recognising when the nest no longer fits or feels right.
About knowing, deep in your feathers, that what works for others just isn’t working for you. Not out of rage. Not for drama.
Just for fit.

That chicken didn’t leave to rebel.
She left to realign.

She saw a situation that didn’t suit her and took decisive action to move on.

With little more than the necessary noise of a semi-flightless bird aiming for the stars she took her leave and lived longer for it. Leaving behind the feint whiff of courage and adrenalin and a couple of feathers caught in the top wire of the coop. Proof that she came, she saw, and she left.

I’ve worked in a lot of structured environments.
Big systems. Big rules. Big walls.
And I’ve learned that sometimes, what looks like stability is just containment.

Staying stuck is comfortable… until it isn’t.
Leaving is hard… until you do.

There’s no universal warning signal for leaving.
No flashing exit sign hanging above the coop door.

Sometimes the feeling arrives quietly:

• your energy is spent defending the decision to stay

• small things feel impossibly heavy

• the walls start feeling smaller than they used to

• you stop recognising yourself in the routine

By then, part of you may already have flown.

That’s usually the moment.
The moment to leap. Not because you know where you’ll land, but because you trust that anywhere you land, you’ll be more you than you are here.

We don’t always need a dramatic reason to leave. Sometimes the real reason is simply “I no longer belong here, and I’m willing to live with the consequences of choosing myself and being somewhere else.”

Letting go of the branch you’ve clung to can be terrifying.
But forgetting you have wings? That’s soul destroying.
And sometimes roosting in a new tree is exactly what you were meant to do.

In life, no matter what the “this” is—jobs, relationships, roles, identities—every decision becomes a variation of three broad options. Do I choose to:

willingly accept this situation?
try to change this situation?
or leave this situation?

Because in the end it is a choice only you can make.

Human Insight
Fit matters.

Darwin’s theory wasn’t about survival of the strongest.
It was about survival of the best fit.

Freedom also matters.

And when the two align, longevity often follows.

But freedom isn’t about aimless movement, all flap and no flight.
It’s about finding a perch—a mango tree of your own—where you can thrive on your own terms.

That chicken didn’t just leave.
She opted out with dignity.
She took flight, found her place, and lived a full, feathered life.

And it added one more great yarn to Mum’s growing collection of chicken-related stories.

“Freedom gives you wings. But only if you use them first.”—Chicken Karma

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The dishonest CEO. The absent parent. The politician who built a career on denial and then got eaten by the very story they wrote.

“All their chickens came home to roost.”

It’s usually said with a smirk—like karma dressed up in feathers. But the saying doesn’t come from revenge. It comes from return.

Chickens, when allowed to free-range, don’t go far. They wander. Scratch. Drift down the side path. But as the light shifts, they turn. No matter what they found or where they went, they make their way back.

Back to the perch. The box. The coop. Home.

That’s what the phrase really means. What you send out eventually comes back. Not because the universe is punishing you. But because that’s how cycles work. Energy returns. Stories return. So do systems. So do consequences. Everything finds its way back.

I’ve seen this play out in life more often than I’d care to admit. I’ve learnt to recognise my own shit when it turns up on the sole of my shoe.

The decision you rushed, now showing up as rework. The email you never sent, now costing a relationship. The thing you tolerated, now part of your team’s culture. The shortcut that saved time but quietly frayed trust. The way you were raised. The way you raised someone else. Nothing disappears. It just goes walking. And eventually, it comes back. Like a memory you thought you’d buried.

Legacy isn’t about what you build on purpose. It’s about what you leave behind without noticing. Every system leaves a shadow. Every habit teaches something. Every action creates a ripple you may never see—but someone else will feel. And sometimes, when that ripple returns, it’s sharp enough to leave a mark.

They say integrity is what you do when no one is watching.

I’ve always liked that old line—“my karma ran over your dogma.” It’s funny because it’s true. Dogma clings to belief, but karma reflects behaviour. You can believe in fairness, or integrity, or accountability, but what you actually do is what shapes the system. The coop doesn’t run on intention. It runs on reality. And reality remembers.

Because in the end, if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

The chickens don’t judge it. They just live it. They return because returning is what they do. We don’t get to control what comes home. But we can pay closer attention to what we send out.

So if something in your life feels like it’s circling back—a tension, a decision, a hard truth—maybe it’s not a failure. Maybe it’s a bird you once released, finally coming home.

Give it a place to land. Let it roost. Then decide what you’ll send out next.

“Legacy is not what you say. It’s what returns.”—Chicken Karma