I’ve had some really rotten luck recently. Some of you may be familiar with a book called ‘The Luck Factor’ by Dr Richard Wiseman; it’s a book that I’ve listened several times over, and every time I listen to it I get something new from the book. There are just four basic points that are talked about in the book, which is designed to help you be luckier.
Now, luck is some kind of weird, evasive, magical thing, which it seems that some of us have and some of us don’t – but that’s simply not the way that luck works! Luck is just about your psychology. So I’m going to be sharing with you the many different ways in which you can become a luckier person through the four principles of good luck which are stated in the book I mentioned above.
‘Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles – they are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, they make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, they create self-fulfilling prophecies for our positive expectations and they adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good’.
Let’s look at creating chance opportunities first. About a year or so ago I was travelling back from Bulgaria and I had been listening to ‘The Luck Factor’ whilst I was away on that trip, and I’d made a conscious decision that I was going to interact with the outside world a bit more – specifically people. What I wasn’t doing was really making the most of interacting with people as much as I could have been doing. Now, on this flight back from Bulgaria I got sat next to a couple who also had an apartment in Bulgaria, and it would have been very easy for me to have put my headphones in and just got to work on my computer. In fact, I had the computer up there in front of me, and if I’m honest that was probably my intention! However, I had to squeeze past them to nip to the loo, and as a result of that ended up striking up a conversation with them about my apartment in Bulgaria and their villa in Bulgaria. Since then I’ve stayed in contact with them – I’ve been over to their villa about three times for barbecues and even stay in contact with them when I’m back here in the UK. Being open to having a chat with some strangers on a plane created some friends for life simply because I was open to the opportunities that were available to me.
This is one of the key ways in which you can increase your feeling of luck – because the more that you interact with the outside world (and specifically with people) the greater the chances are that new opportunities will come your way that you can capitalise upon. Opportunities that wouldn’t have been there for you if you hadn’t have made that effort to push yourself forward.
Another key thing that we can do in order to increase the level of luck that we experience is to get really good at tuning in to our intuition. For me intuition isn’t something that we channel in from on high; for me intuition is really about being able to bring your five senses together and have them all working simultaneously. When you get a funny feeling inside, when you have that gut feeling that normally comes from something that you’ve noticed and felt all those senses coming together and that information working in a way in which they’re also bonded and blending together. That is what really gives you that deep down feeling that this is a good move or that something’s not quite right. Intuition is not an exact science, isn’t always going to be spot-on – especially if there’s hope involved!
For me, one of the ways in which I find that my intuition can get led astray is if I’m really hopeful for something. Then it may be that I’m relying on the hope rather than my intuition. But there’s definitely been times when my intuition has completely saved the day!
When I was growing up my Mum had a habit of saying that ‘bad things came in threes’. If anything went wrong in life my mum would be looking out for the next two bad things to happen so that it would fulfil the quota of the three bad pieces of news. I grew up around this and eventually reached a point where I thought ‘I don’t really want to think like that anymore’. I noticed that if something bad happened I’d be tuned in looking out for the other things that could go wrong, and this wasn’t a good way to be. I decided to change my thinking and that, instead, all good things would come in threes. This is worked really well for me! If something bad happens I tend to treat that as a one-off event, whereas if goo things are happening I’m looking out for the other two good things to happen which will support the rule of three. This is just one way in which you can start to change your thinking about what happens to you in life – actually starting to tune in and focus on how life may be able to present you with more opportunities than you’d expected there to be.
And the fourth principle of the luck factor is developing a resilient attitude. Resilience is really about making sensible, well-thought-through choices and sticking with them because you know in yourself that the outcomes of doing so will far outweigh the pain or discomfort that comes with going through that period where you have to be resilient. Sticking out a negative situation to enable to you to experience a positive end result is the key to feeling more lucky in life. There are some positives to be drawn even from the darkest of situations.
By Gemma Bailey
https://peoplebuilding.co.uk/
