Increase Your Luck For Better Business Success

Four ways to create your own luck

Certain people, like lawyer John Woods, can be identified as lucky. He left his office in one of the Twin Towers seconds before it was hit by a hijacked plane on September 11, 2001. This wasn’t the only time he had been lucky, he also was on the 39th floor of the World Trade Center in 1993 when it was bombed by terrorists and escaped without injury. And five years before that incident, he was scheduled on the Pam Am flight that exploded above Lockerbie, Scotland-but cancelled at the last minute.

There is no question that some people seem to attract good fortune, while others are a magnet for bad luck. New research into this phenomenon has revealed that luck is not always purely a matter of chance, however.

At the University of Hertsfordshire in England, Richard Wiseman, Ph.D., has studied hundreds of men and women ranging from housewives to factory workers to sales people, doctors and nurses. He has conducted lengthy interviews, completed detailed psychological questionnaires, and had volunteers participate in experiments. What Dr. Wiseman found was that there are different ways in which lucky and unlucky people think and behave. He eventually identified four major psychological differences that seem to be the foundation of luck.

• Lucky people constantly encounter chance opportunities. Lucky people tend to be more extroverted than their unlucky counterparts, according to Wiseman. They enjoy visiting friends, going to parties and tend to meet and maintain contact with large numbers of people. Lucky people have body language and facial expressions that draw others to them. They engage in more eye contact, are twice as likely to smile and make “open” gestures to others such as uncrossing their arms or turning to the people who are talking. These encounters increase the likelihood that they may find a new opportunity for future business or success.
• Lucky people make good decisions without knowing why. When it comes to business and financial decisions, lucky people trust their gut. They often have a keen sense of when a business decision is prudent or a person should not be trusted. According to surveys completed, lucky people take active steps to boost their intuition through the use of meditation and daily rituals. These types of activities tend to clear the mind so that one can “listen” to what intuition is saying. Many lucky people say they trust their intuition more the older they become.
• Lucky people’s dreams, ambitions and goals tend to come true and be met. The research found that lucky people’s expectations were far higher than the unlucky ones. They believe in themselves and their futures. Unlucky people are the exact opposite; they often see their dreams as unreachable fantasies. Lucky people believe that there is an 84% chance of achieving one of their lifetime ambitions; while the group identified as unlucky identified only a 60% chance. It appears that we create our own life fulfilling prophecies.
• Lucky people have an ability to turn bad experiences into good fortune. They tend to “find the silver lining” to what happens to them and use situations as learning experiences. They tend to ponder how lucky they are as things can always be worse, often comparing themselves to others with bad fortune. Unlucky people see their bad breaks in almost a superstitious manner or view their destiny to be in the hands of “fate.” This thinking leads them to rely on ineffective ways to alter the poor fortune of what is happening to them. They often have difficulty analyzing mistakes and so are more likely to repeat them.

Enhance your luck quotient by building your own foundations of luck. And remember, hard work makes good luck.

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