What do we mean when we talk about luck, being lucky, just my luck? There are the glass half-full people, and the people who always expect it to rain tomorrow; there’s the luck of the draw, of the green, of the Irish (I’m fond of that one); there’s endless superstitions (black cats, walking under ladders, spilling salt, breaking mirrors) and lots of lucky rituals – dozens of our recent Olympic and Paralympic winners carried special possessions or wore particular things to ensure their good luck.
What is certain amongst all this hazy stuff about luck is that if you believe you will have good luck then you are much more likely to enjoy the benefit of it, and the opposite is true too – if you believe that ‘it’s just my luck’ means bad luck follows you, then you’re more likely to create or experience poor outcomes. There is a wealth of research online and elsewhere examining both of these ends of the luck spectrum so I won’t detain you with it here, though if keen you might like to have a look at Richard Wiseman’s article ‘Be lucky, it’s an easy skill to learn’.
My view on this is pragmatic: if we believe that our actions and ideas are likely to lead to good results then the positive neurological impact – useful hormones that stimulate brain activity – will help us to create the conditions that produce those good results. And the opposite is also true – feed the brain with scary negative possibilities (‘bad luck’) and the hormones won’t work with you, they’ll work against you.
Which makes it a bit of a no-brainer, really, it seems to me. If you can enlist the power of your own neural circuitry to help you think more clearly and develop ideas and plans that are going to produce good results, why would you not do that deliberately? Of course if you’ve woken up every day so far in your life thinking that the world is going to play tricks on you then that bit of your brain is likely to be inclined to take that path again today – the brain is lazily efficient, and will always take the most travelled, easier route. What can you do about it? Start noticing the messages, be aware of the inner voice telling you that ‘it’s not worth it’, ‘it won’t work’ – and challenge the thought.
We have great power over what we think and what we are telling ourselves. We really don’t have to keep on doing the same things (if they’re not working well for us), we can choose to something different.