How to improve your luck: These tips will help you increase your chances of getting lucky
According to a professor of psychology, your approach to life really can maximize your chances of good fortune.
As the saying goes: “You make your own luck.” According to a renowned psychologist, this really can be the case: Enjoying favorable fortunes in life can, in part, come down to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., says people who operate with an optimistic mindset give themselves a greater chance of being someone who appears to attract good luck.
The degree of flexibility with which an individual approaches life can also be an influential factor, he adds.
“To do with optimism”
“Lucky people often know where they’re heading in life, but they’re not certain how they’re going to get there,” Wiseman told an interview with PBS NewsHour. “They’re very open to new ways of doing things.
“The unlucky people are kind of stuck in a rut. They had one way forward, and if that didn’t really work out, they hadn’t really got a ‘plan B’.”
Wiseman continued: “It’s also to do with optimism: the unlucky people were convinced they’re going to fail; the lucky people knew how to bounce back. The unlucky ones tended to get dragged down by that failure.”
The keys to positive fortunes
Wiseman has outlined his approach to generating your own luck in his book The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles. As he also explains in his blog, the four key building blocks behind the generation of positive fortunes are:
- “Maximize chance opportunities”
“Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities.” You can help yourself to do this, Wiseman explains, by “adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new experiences”.
- “Listen to lucky hunches”
“Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings.”
- “Expect good fortune”
By anticipating positive outcomes, you can contribute to making them a reality. People who adopt such an attitude tend to “persist in the face of failure, and shape their interactions with others in a positive way”, Wiseman says.
- “Turn bad luck good”
In the face of an adverse turn of events, the way you react is key. “Spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on the ill fortune, and take control of the situation,” Wiseman says.
“A stunning example of how you create your own life”
Speaking to Psychology Today, Wiseman offered up an example of how a person’s mindset can influence their chances of noticing, and benefiting from, the positive opportunities that may arise in their life.
He described an experiment in which participants were given a newspaper and asked to count the number of pictures in it.
Inside the paper, however, was a message telling the reader: “Stop counting, there are 43 photographs in here.” What’s more, there was a second message telling the participant they had won a cash prize.
“What happened? Well, the unlucky people came in and were so focused on just seeing the pictures, they went straight past the opportunities,” Wiseman recalled.
“The lucky people, more relaxed, tended to spot the opportunities […]. It was a stunning example of how you create your own life in terms of opportunities.
“If you are very anxious about a situation or yourself, your attentional spotlight becomes very small. You don’t see the bigger picture. If you’re more playful, you’re more relaxed, you’re in a better mood, that attentional spotlight becomes larger and you suddenly see these opportunities.”
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