How Lucky Are You?
THE SCIENCE OF SERENDIPITY
For most of my life, I've considered myself to be a pretty lucky person. I have everything that I need and a good deal of what I want.
Lucky duck?
Surprisingly, many of my friends didn’t think so.
One friend in particular was always determined to set me straight.
"You’re not actually very lucky," she’d say to me, "you just think you are." She’d then remind me of all the shitty (and very real) things that happened to me as a way of making her point.
Potato, potäto.
But she did make me think.
Is believing that you’re lucky enough to make you lucky?
What if I think you’re lucky and you don’t - does that make you lucky or unlucky?
Is it possible to be veritably lucky?
For all the years that I pondered these questions, I always land in the same place.
Your life is exactly what you believe it is, regardless of the outcome.
When you think you’re happy – your experience is happy.
When you think you’re lucky – your experience is lucky.
When you think your successful – your experience is successful.
Your mindset matters – and there’s an undeniable abundance of research to support that.
And yet our lives are not that black and white, are they?
We can experience all of those things in relative terms and still struggle through horrible circumstances or yearn for more. We can still aspire to achieve more measurable successes.
In his new book, The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, Christian Burch, Phd suggests that serendipity, or as he calls it, "smart luck" can be created by:
Noticing and remaining open to the unexpected
Finding opportunity by "…seeing links where others see gaps."
Developing the "tenacity and focus to" do something with it
In short, Burch suggests that we learn to "develop a space that we can control in which serendipity can happen – a serendipity field."
Mic drop.
The confluence of belief and action – that place where real magic happens –apparently has a name.
This Week: LUCKY DUCK
ONE – Fuel Up
If action is the motor in your success machine, mindset is the fuel. The wrong one (take it from the girl who put diesel in a gasoline engine before clever nozzles made that impossible) can wreak havoc.
What do you believe about yourself and about your life? Complete the following prompts.
I believe I am….
I believe my life is…
Use as many adjectives as possible. Allow the pen (or keyboard) to take over. Let your answers flow freely and completely unfiltered.
When the flow stops, stop writing and walk away. Don’t read what you’ve written.
For the next two days, repeat the exercise exactly as you did it the first day.
Once you’ve completed the exercise three times, go ahead and read it over. Highlight the pieces that ring most true.
What does this tell you about the way that you’re experiencing your life?
How close or far are you from the way you want our experience to be?
Look that the things you wrote that are most aligned with the best of you…
What can you do to add more of those into your life?
TWO - Get Present
All opportunity exists in the present moment.
Start to notice novelty.
Practice trying on new perspectives.
When obstacles appear, ask yourself the question, what would turn this into a gift?
THREE – Act
Try new things.
Talk to new people.
Give yourself permission to run with a crazy idea.
And if you’re interested in building your own "serendipity field," I highly recommend checking out Christian Burch.