How lucky are you?

Believe it or not, a lot of luck depends on you. Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British psychologist, has studied why some people are lucky and others are not. He advises that there are four main traits that make lucky people “lucky”:

• They create, notice and act on chance opportunities that show up.
• They make good decisions with a combination of intuition and logic.
• They hold positive thoughts about the future.
• They don’t let “bad” luck get them down – they find a way to transform it into good fortune.

Let’s take the case of chance opportunities. It seems that lucky people consistently  notice these kinds of opportunities. Unlucky people don’t.

Wiseman set out to discover what happens with luck. Was it because people had differences in their ability to spot such opportunities – or something else? He gathered a group of people and gave each of them a newspaper, asking the people to page through the paper and report how many photographs they found.

What the participants didn’t know was that the psychologist had placed a large message in the newspaper saying: “Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250″ – a nice prize of about $200 in U.S. currency.

The unlucky people tended to miss the message. The lucky people tended to spot it.

It seems that unlucky people are generally more anxious than lucky people, and their anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.

As a result, they miss opportunities because they are focused on looking for something else.

These are the people who attend parties intent on finding their “perfect” partner and miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs that might be a wonderful fit.

The study continued, with the psychologist asking a group of volunteers to carry out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person.

These exercises helped the volunteers spot opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and gain resilience despite disappointment.

After a month, the volunteers described what had happened, with dramatic results: 80 percent of the volunteers reported feeling happier, more satisfied with their lives and, believe it or not, luckier.

What would happen if you were open to new experiences, rather than stuck in rigid thoughts and a strict routine? When anxious people notice something new – if they notice it at all – they want no part of it. Lucky people are comfortable enough to check out new opportunities and are willing to take risks.

Posted By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP on July 26, 2015

Credit: expandedconsciousness.com