How to be luckier - part 1

I’ve often thought that I was essentially a lucky person who wasn’t very lucky.

What I mean is, I consider myself a lucky person as I now do what I love by coaching people and I have a wonderful family who are all healthy most of the time but I never win raffle prizes or the lottery and always pick the wrong queue when in the supermarket.

I am very happy with my luck on both these fronts.

However, I saw an amazing Ted Talk by a Stanford professor called Tina Seelig who talked about the little risks you can take to increase your luck.

She stated that you could split these into 3 straight forward steps. It was as simple as changing your relationship with yourself, with other people and with ideas.

I believe, and Tina Seelig’s talk highlighted this, that you make your own luck. The question is how do you do this? How do you make yourself a luckier person?

Firstly, challenge yourself to take some small risks, for around every corner of the unknown there is a potential opportunity.

So next time you feel yourself about to say no, I’m not interested, force your brain into saying ok, yes, I’ll give it a go. Talk to that person you’re sat next to on the train, learn a new skill that you’ve been meaning to try. Push yourself forwards to write an email to an old contact, make a phone call to someone you haven’t spoken to for years. It may make you feel uncomfortable but you’ll be so pleased you did and who knows what will come out of those encounters.

Secondly, Seelig suggests challenging your relationship with other people. This is about being appreciative and saying thank you more. How often do we mean to thank someone for doing something for us and not get around to it? It is almost like an external gratitude log. I think this one is definitely worth trying as quite often a small ‘thank you’ to someone could make the difference between a good day and a bad day. An email to say ‘thank you, that was a great meeting’ could change the thoughts of someone towards a different outcome and create more luck.

Thirdly, change your relationship with ideas. Seelig encourages her students to put a positive spin on a bad idea. Sometimes an idea that comes across as crazy with a bit of work and more detail could actually be a completely new avenue to explore.

The reason for writing this blog is that I’m going to make 2024 my lucky year. I am committing to trying out Seelig’s theories and will challenge myself to change my relationships. This means saying yes a bit more and looking at ideas differently.

If you’re interested in joining me, let me know and I will update you with how I got on in a later on

#coaching #growth #mentalfitness