How To Be The Luckiest Person In The World

Do you want to be lucky?  Not just win the lottery lucky, but lucky in everything important to you: your relationships,career and finances, and mental and physical health. Now you can be as lucky as you want to be based on recent findings in the psychology of luck.

In his ten-year scientific study on luck, psychologist Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire, examined the characteristics of exceptionally lucky and exceptionally unlucky people.  In his research, Weisman found that unlucky people like Patricia, a twenty-year-old airline worker, always seem to attract accidents, relationships, and unfortunate circumstances. On the other hand, lucky people like Jessica, a forty-two-year-old forensic scientist, always seem to meet the right people–at chance meetings–and end up achieving their lifelong dreams, with seemingly little effort or strain.

How can you become an extraordinary lucky person?  Wiseman points to four personality characteristics or habits you can develop to increase your good luck considerably:

*Create and Notice Chance Opportunities

Lucky people are always open to meeting new people and encountering new opportunities for learning and growth.  For example, they are more likely to go to social events where they don’t knowpeople (even if they are the more reclusive Introvert type) because they’reaware they could meet someone helpful or learn something valuable at the tea-party they attend.

Wiseman did a clever study to test the Opportunities Recognition trait. He asked lucky and unlucky people to read a newspaper and tell him how many photographs were inside.  On average, the people classified as unlucky in the study took two minutes to count the photographs, while those rated as high in luck took just a few seconds. Why?  The second page of the newspaper had the message in large bold print,  “Stop counting—thereare 43 photographs in the newspaper.” The lucky people immediately spotted the message and stopped counting,while the unlucky people were so concerned with looking for the photographs that they missed the obvious message.

*Be Relaxed and Flexible; Use Your Intuition

Unlucky people are often more tense and anxious than lucky people. Unlucky people try to analyze everything and worry about missing something and making a mistake. Lucky people are more relaxed, confident, and listen to theirintuition—their holistic sense of what is right and wrong for them.  Unlucky people miss the right opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.  An unlucky single person, for example, may go to parties obsessed with finding Mr. or Ms. Right, while the lucky person goes to make friends and have a good time. Often, the lucky person ends up meeting a soul mate—someone’s daughter, mother, sister, brother, co-worker, orfriend—through the new acquaintances made at the party.

*Change Things Up:/Do Things Differently

Many of us are creatures of habit.  We take the same route to work every day; talk to the same people about the same things. Lucky people, on the other hand, believe that changing their daily routine—even a little bit—canhelp trigger positive and creative changes in other parts of their lives.  In Wiseman’s study, for example, one highly person would change his route to work before he made an important decision.This small deviation got him out of his thinking rut and opened up some creative alternatives. Another lucky person wanted to change the type of people she met at social events, so she played a game with herself. She would think of a common color before he arrived at the party, and then would only talk to people who had that same color clothing: people in black, or those wearing red, for example.  In this way, she opened himself up to meeting entirely different people, and she ended up meeting her current business partner.

Develop “It Could Have Been Worse”Thinking For Bad Circumstances

According to Wiseman, lucky people tend to use “counterfactual thinking” to soften the blow of bad circumstances which sometimes occur in their lives. Counterfactual thinking refers to thinking about what could have happened (for example, the worst possible outcome) instead of what actually did happen. In one interesting study, Wiseman asked lucky and unlucky people to imagine that they were in a bank when an armed robber entered and fired a shot that injured them in the arm. Weisman asked the participants if this event was lucky or unlucky.  People in the study who were classified as unlucky said it was enormously unlucky that they just happened to be in the bank during the robbery. People classified as lucky viewed the situation as being far luckier:  “At least Iwasn’t shot in the head and killed.” Lucky people in the study also had a more optimistic take on the situation than unlucky people: “Maybe I can sell the story to the newspaper.”  Thus, the lucky people had a more positive, optimistic, and even grateful perception of what happened to them than the unlucky people who were often more negative, pessimistic, regretful.

As you can see from the research findings, luck can be made or created. You don’t have to be born lucky, or rely on some unknown force to be luckier.  You can enhance your luck quotient just by making a few small changes in your everyday habits and approach to life. With greater luck, you will choose the right mate, friends, acquaintances,and business partners. You will make the right investments, and spend time on the best activities, goals, plans, and strategies for you.  You will be happier, healthier, richer,and wiser if you just change a few elements of your personality.  Before long you will create a closer and more intimate relationship with that charming and alluring companion who can grant the dreams of your heart:

Happy-go Lucky Luck.

Characteristics of a High-Performer

Time and time again history has shown us the lives of remarkable human beings that attained monumental achievements and made their mark in the world. What may not be looked at all the time is that they too were human beings with character flaws, human beings that made mistakes, human beings that failed time and time again… but that ultimately left a legacy we can all admire.

So if they were just human beings like you and me; what eventually led them to much success, at least in some areas of their life?  There are so many variables to that answer that I will have to include the complete answer in my book but for now let’s look at some of the characteristics of high-performers so we can become aware of what we can do on a day-to-day basis to improve our performance.

In my definition, a high performer is someone who is fulfilled, maintains balance and health and consistently practices effectiveness and efficiency in the realization of a worthy goal.  I would not consider someone who is neglecting his/her family, health or some other aspect of his/her life for the attainment of a career goal to be a high performer.  In essence, a high performer boils down to someone who exercises awareness and discipline consistently in a focused direction.

High performers are aware of their mission, values and their purpose which gives them their why, what and how of life.  High achievers set goals that help them live their values, attain their mission and live on purpose; those are worthy goals.  There are many ways of embarking on a journey of self-discovery that will aid us in understanding those areas of our soul.  Yes, it could take us a whole life time to find ourselves but high achievers know that experiences will mold them so they don’t wait a lifetime to define themselves. They become aware of their values, define their mission and decide on their purpose.  Once you have those clearly defined on paper, making decisions on what direction to go in life becomes much easier.

High achievers also practice daily disciplines. Now many people hear the word discipline and cringe because it may remind them of discomfort, pain, and/or hard-work and, who likes that? Research has proven that we first tend to consciously or unconsciously choose our habits but ultimately our habits will create the quality of our life.  So if we think about it, to avoid a greater amount of pain and discomfort in our lives it is best to discipline ourselves to practice effective habits.  In doing so, those habits will soon become automatic and we will begin to have better results in our lives with less effort.

Here are a few simple habits that if practiced daily can make all the difference in your life:

Consistently focus your energy/thoughts on what you want. Not on what you don’t want or on fears or doubts. Spend time every day to learn something new, something that will further your career or make you better. Always be optimistic; always be solution oriented. Just do it; have action orientation.  Just get it done. Maintain and build positive associations. Who you spend your time with makes a BIG difference. Remind yourself of what you are grateful often. Gratitude opens your heart to happiness. Stay resilient. Keep on keeping on in the midst of struggle or failure.

So remember, if you embark on your own journey of self-discovery life will be more fulfilling; if you define your mission, values and purpose decisions will be much easier to make, especially in those forks of life. Practice the habits I mentioned – daily, they will create in you the characteristics of high-achievers and succeeding will come more naturally from there. Until next time, God bless.

The Power of Focus

Today I wanted to share a little on the power of focus. Now I am sure we have all heard time and time again to focus, that if we focus we will get more done but how many of us actually practice that day in and day out.

We tend to bring into our lives what we consistently focus on and what we focus on expands just by the nature of it. Wouldn’t it make sense to become aware of where our focus is going so that we can be more proactive as to what we are creating in our lives?

Understanding how high-achievers focus and applying that in our lives can make a huge positive impact in our career and in our level of fulfillment and satisfaction.

For a long time now, it has been obvious to all of us that there has been an ever growing accessibility of available knowledge and the advances in technology have made that possible. Also, in an effort to cut cost companies are now demanding higher productivity from its employees where they asking you to do more with less and less time and/or resources; I am sure we can all relate.

We also know that our world is experiencing an accelerated rate of change; if one thing is constant is change. We might even feel like there are never enough hours in the day.  But the answer to achieve more – faster, control the rate of change in our lives and still be able to spend quality time with our loved ones is to utilize the power of focus.

Just as the sun’s rays when focused through a magnifying glass can create intense heat – when you focus your knowledge and skills on a few key activities you are able to accomplish much more than the average person can in far less time leaving you with more time to spend time with your loved ones.

The key to utilizing the power of focus is first to be crystal clear as to the outcome we are looking for and then to identify and put our attention on accomplish just that. We can maximize that power by finding the few activities that if we do consistently will generate us the biggest results, instead of just keeping busy like most people and having little to show for at the end of the day.

One thing we can be sure of, there are never enough hours in the day to do everything but there will always be enough time in the day to accomplish the most important tasks.

So spend a few minutes and clarify exactly what you want to accomplish. Then find the most important activities that you have to do to accomplish what you set out to do. Finally, block out the time and commit to doing them. I would recommend doing nothing else but the most important activities first thing in the morning. By doing so, you will begin to accomplish more and more in less time. You will be producing higher value results and ultimately will reach your goals faster.

Until next time,

Love much, learn often and leave a legacy!