Sometimes things just work out well even when you didn’t expect them to – seemingly against the odds. We put this down to luck. “Boy that was lucky!” But maybe most so-called luck isn’t just luck. Or, to put it another way, luck isn’t something that happens to us, but something we make happen. Something we can attract. What if luck was a muscle that you can develop and encourage?
Famous golfer Gary Player once got heckled by someone in the crowd shouting out, “Hey Gary, that was a lucky shot!” Player turned to him and said, “I guess you’re right. But you know, it’s a funny thing. The more I practice the better I become. And the better I become, the luckier I get.”
I’m sure you know the saying ‘Fortune favors the brave’. Think what it means. Luck is often a product of our behaviors and attitudes, and what appears on the surface to be ‘just chance’ is actually the visible manifestation and result of hard work, positive expectation, a calm mind and a powerfully developed intuition. The results that follow from these attributes can often seem to others like luck.
Luck is something we can encourage into our lives and it’s lucky that some valuable research has been carried out on luck. Richard Wiseman looked at the secret behind the success of exceptionally lucky people. He found it to be a blend of attitude and behaviors. He found that lucky people share certain traits:
Being skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities
Firstly, they chase opportunity. If you don’t expose yourself to luck you are unlikely to find it. So lucky people increase their chances of luck by exposing themselves to opportunity. If you make a sales call you are more likely to make some sales than if you don’t make any at all.
Making lucky decisions by listening to intuition
Secondly, Wiseman found that lucky people trust their intuitions and act on them. We pick up many more signals from the environment than we consciously realize. When you pick up something but it doesn’t make it to consciousness, then you will get a feeling that something is a good idea or not. The feeling is intuition. By learning to act on those feelings you will promote what seems to be luck in your life. To develop intuition, your mind needs to be calm more of the time.
Creating self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations
Thirdly, Wiseman found that lucky people expect to be lucky. If you expect positive things, then you are looking out for them and therefore more likely to find them. What we expect in life has huge implications regarding what we actually get. This is why placebo medications work.
Adopting a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good
And lastly, he found that lucky people can feel lucky even when others can’t see that there is any luck. They know how to positively reframe what seems like bad luck into good luck. They see opportunities when things have gone wrong. They see so-called ‘failure’ as constructive feedback and, of course, this gives them a more positive expectancy about the future.
We can call these four characteristics ‘luck magnets’. Each of them can be maximized, and this is where hypnosis comes in. Hypnotherapy is the art of communicating with the subconscious mind, which is where your attitudes and instincts are housed. Hypnotherapy helps create and develop these habits of mind so that they become part of who you are, without you having to think about 'doing them' consciously.