How to cultivate your own luck
I’ve always held the belief that I’m a lucky person. I had a wonderful start to life, with parents who were invested in my personal growth and development. I was lucky enough to attend a school where I was given countless opportunities to bloom in a myriad of different arenas. I was lucky to find a profession that I am truly passionate about. More than that, I am lucky to have a family that I love and adore. But, is that really luck? Yes, there is some luck involved in terms of what family you are born into and what school you might have attended, but in regards to my career, my successes and achievements, those were born from cultivating my own luck and I have my Dad to thank for alerting me to this phenomena years ago.
Think of it this way, what, other than being tech geniuses, is the common factor between Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? What do you think it is that enables entrepreneurs like these men to make their OWN luck?
Research proves that entrepreneurs who report feeling lucky also report higher levels of motivation and wellbeing, which are essential ingredients to being able to sustain performance during challenging times. More than that, research from the University College London found that lucky people have two things in common: “first, they realized an opportunity was presented to them. Then they seized the opportunity and took action.”
Sounds simple right? Find an opportunity and then seize it. However many of us have a long list of missed opportunities, so perhaps it’s not quite as straight forward as it sounds. The great news is, if you are a self-subscribed ‘unlucky person’ you can learn to act more like lucky people do — the result, 80% of people who changed their thinking and behaviours around luck, reported that their luck increased! And what’s more, they were happier!
Here are 4 ways to help you maximize your shot at being one of life’s lucky ones:
1 | Trust your gut
At the heart of it, luck is about cognitive flexibility, a willingness to experiment and trusting your gut instinct. Steve Jobs himself emphasized the importance of gut instinct (fun fact: we have more neurotransmitters in our gut than we do in our brain!!) when he spoke at Stanford University:
“If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later … so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, and karma., whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life”.
Research demonstrates that 90 percent of lucky people state that their gut instinct plays a vital role in their career choices. This is something that I can attest to using regularly in my clinical practice and personal life. So, why does it help? Well what intuition seems to be, the majority of the time, is when you’ve got expertise in the area and somehow the body and the brain have detected a pattern that you haven’t consciously seen. Have you ever had a feeling that something didn’t feel right? And then in hindsight wished you had paid attention? I definitely have! Lucky people do this really well, if they get a gut feeling about something they stop and consider it. Unlucky people don’t follow those instincts because they aren’t aware of where they are coming from.
So, if you want to increase luck in your life, start trusting your gut more often!
2 | Be an opportunity magnet
Why do you think it is that some people appear to attract more opportunities than others? It is because they are open to them and they make sure that everyone around them is aware of it. For example, you want a new job. What do you think is the best way to achieve that? Tell everyone you know that you’re looking for a new job. Word of mouth is powerful and as that moves through your network constellation, chances are, you might be presented with a host of different opportunities.
The thing to remember here is that lucky people try their hand at lots of different things. Unlucky people tend to suffer from, as Professor Richard Wiseman calls it, “paralysis by analysis”. They struggle to try something without walking through every dimension of it and from that they don’t gain the advantage of learning through doing. So, start small, try something new, see what works and what doesn’t and base your choices on feedback from that.
3 | Be flexible
One of the pitfalls that people face is cognitive rigidity. We all make plans in our life and that’s wonderful, but luck doesn’t necessarily care what your plans are. It isn’t going to present itself when you have planned for it! So, part of this is seeing that when a new opportunity presents itself, you have to be flexible, agile and ready to modify, change or throw out altogether any plans that you may have made. The more you can harness this flexibility, the more luck you will bring into your life.
4 | Change your mindset
Luck is as much about your expectations as it is your behaviour. Do you wait for success to happen to you or do you go out there and make it happen? Professor Richard Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor, describes what traits lucky people have in common.
“My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good”.
In its simplest form, its optimism. You are far more likely to try new things, follow through on opportunities and have success with them if you believe that they will work out well. Professor Wiseman reports that “on average, lucky people thought that there was about a 90 percent chance of having a great time on their next holiday (and) an 84% percent chance of achieving at least one of their lifetime ambitions.”
And what does that boil down to? Well, grit. When you think things will work out, you are more likely to persevere. Think of any project you have tackled, when you believed it could work did you then push through those harder days? Or when obstacles arose? I know I have - and when you’re more resilient, you give possibilities more time to work out in your favour.
This also plays into how you respond to disappointment. Lucky people are very resilient. The approach they take is very much looking for that silver lining behind the cloud. They don’t dwell on their ill fortune and instead, they see that in the long run it will work out for the best. Essentially, they keep their focus on the big picture.
Now, some of you might be thinking, ‘we all know people who aren’t just optimistic, they are utterly deluded — are you suggesting that we lie to ourselves?’. Well, sort of!!! The research tells us that while pessimists do see the world more accurately, optimists are more likely to be lucky because those delusions push them towards opportunities!!!
Professor Wiseman stated that “lucky people are buying into positive superstitions. In studies we’ve seen that good luck charms do improve performance, whether it’s physical skills like playing golf or mental skills like memory tasks … lucky thinking positively affected people’s ability to solve puzzles and to remember the pictures depicted on thirty-six different cards, and it improved their putting performance in golf”. These work - because they bolster self-confidence. So perhaps it’s time to find yourself that lucky charm after all!
