The Luck Factor - How To Increase Your Good Luck

Professor Richard Wiseman in his book The Luck Factor said, you can become luckier through changing your thoughts and behaviour. Are you a lucky person? Or are you someone to whom catastrophe often happens? In his Luck Factor book, Professor Wiseman explored why some people seemed to lead charmed lives full of lucky breaks, while others experience one disaster after another.

He found that lucky people generate their own good fortune. He used the principles he found as the basis for a Luck School. 80% of those who participated increased their level of luck, happiness and success.

Dr. Wisemen lists the four essential principles of luck as:

1. Principle One: Maximize Chance Opportunities

Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking, adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new experiences. Being an extrovert, which means you are more sociable and have more social "magnetism", is correlated to being more lucky. Lucky people smile twice as much as unlucky people and have more open body language. And perhaps the biggest role in their success is that lucky people are effective in building long-term, secure relationships with other people. And they keep in touch with these friends and colleagues and this network of people bring opportunities.

2. Principle Two: Listen to Lucky Hunches

Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. In addition, they take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities by doing such things as meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts. "Almost 90 percent of lucky people said that they trusted their intuition when it came to their personal relationships, and almost 80 percent said that it played a vital role in their career choices. Far more lucky than unlucky people were relying in their intuition when it came to making important decisions in their lives. It was a simple message - when it came to luck, intuition mattered."

3. Principle Three: Expect Good Fortune

Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune. These expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping lucky people persist in the face of failure, and by shaping their interactions with others in a positive way. "Lucky and unlucky people have amazingly different expectations about the future....Lucky and unlucky people seem to be living in different worlds. No matter how hard they try, unlucky people seem unable to obtain their goals while lucky people effortlessly achieve their lifelong dreams and ambitions."

4. Principle Four: Turn Bad Luck to Good

Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and often even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on the ill fortune and take control of situations. "Lucky people are convinced that any ill fortune in their lives will, in the long run, work out for the best...Unlucky people tend to dwell on the bad luck in their lives"....and..."Lucky people take constructive steps to prevent more bad luck in the future...they treat their failures as opportunities to grow." Unlucky people, however, are reluctant to learn from their mistakes and more likely to repeat them in the future.

Below are more observations on increasing your good luck:

1. RESILIENT ATTITUDE

Lucky people adopt a resilient attitude that transforms "bad" luck into good. They find the good in a bad situation, realizing how a circumstance could be much worse. More than that, they see opportunity coming out of a negative experience. These attitudes help them to keep their expectations about the future high, and increase the likelihood of continuing to live a lucky life.

2. INTENTION

Consider what you really want for yourself. Positive expectations lead to self-fulfilling prophesies.

Cultivate the language of positive expectation. Get away from talking about how bad everything is, and anticipating the next disaster in life's soap opera. Assume that good will come from the most difficult of events. It will. In time.

Visualize: imagine the best outcomes you wish to take place. Expect the best.

3. INTUITION

Make lucky decisions, based on your intuitive guidance. Listen to, and evaluate what you hear inwardly with an open mind. With practice, you may discover that spontaneous decisions are well rewarded. It is possible to fulfill a very good life based on the inner resource of your intuition.

4. OPENNESS

Be available for chance opportunities; a new business venture, your life partner, the journey of a lifetime. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities because they are open to them. Anxiety and tension decrease your vision, in every sense.

Learn to relax, notice and enjoy the world around you. Be amazed.

Let go of attachments to life having to be exactly the way you want. Allow the space for what you envisage to evolve into something much better than you could ever have imagined. This saying opens the way to the best outcomes:

Tell the people you love that you love them. Making these important connections can lift you into a new world of possibility and freedom. Share the best of yourself. Experience joy in the giving.

Celebrate the beauty of the present moment. Breathe deeply, drop your shoulders, smile. Right now, you could be blessed with an idea that transforms the quality of your life, and the lives of others.

5. ACTION

Good luck does not necessarily just happen. You may not know that a person who is "lucky" has been applying themselves to an objective for some time.

Many of Professor Wiseman's lucky participants went to considerable lengths to introduce variety and change into their lives. Doing so increased the number of chance opportunities they encountered.

Before making an important decision, try constantly altering your route to work. Disrupt a routine and have fun doing things differently: get out of bed on the other side; reverse your car into the garage, instead of driving it in forwards; spend an evening with the tv switched off. Go to a new place on vacation. Meet unusual people. Read a different newspaper. Random experiences introduce the potential for new opportunities.


Have you been blessed with good fortune? Do you know lucky people? What does "good luck" mean for you?


Good luck quotes

"Being deeply learned and skilled, being well trained and using well spoken words; This is good luck" -- Buddha

"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." -- Garrison Keillor

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." -- Seneca

"Luck affects everything; let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it, there will be a fish" -- Ovid

"Luck is when opportunity knocks and you answer." -- Unknown

"Be lucky, mate." -- Cockney greeting

"A person does not seek luck; luck seeks the person" -- Turkish Proverb

"Dance under the stars of life and feel infinity flow through you." -- Davide de Angelis

"Nature creates ability; luck provides it with opportunity." -- François de la Rochefoucauld