Do you believe in luck?

I was reminded of luck this week as I went shopping at a thrift store with one of my daughters. Sifting through other’s no longer loved items has always been an enormous source of fun for my girls and me. Have you done this too?

One of my daughters adores brands (she was at work at the time) and the others are not overly fussed. So, you can imagine our surprise and delight when we stumbled across a seemingly new designer handbag.

Now there’s no better reward from such a bounty than sharing the triumph with your sisters and you can imagine the fashionista’s envy at her sister’s lucky find.

Which got me thinking…
Is there such a thing as luck?

“Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered,” William Shakespeare said.

There’s been times in my life when my luck was surely tested. It felt that one thing after another kept going wrong and I remember wondering if I was jinxed. Then there are times when things just seem to fall into place. However, I’ve learned a secret to “cultivating luck,” or at least stacking the odds in your favour.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted a famous experiment on luck. People were recruited on the basis of whether they defined themselves as lucky or unlucky and were told to read the paper and count the number of photographs. Their results were timed. The unlucky people took about 2 minutes to count the photos, whereas the lucky ones, took just seconds. Why? Because embedded in the text were the words, “stop counting, there are 43 photos in this newspaper.”

You see, personality tests reveal unlucky people are typically more tense and anxious than lucky people. Research shows that anxiety disrupts people’s abilities to notice the unexpected.

The moral of this story is that luck is partly dependent on peripheral vision, your ability to notice cues that others miss. And it follows that the more relaxed you are, the more you see.

So regardless of the challenges before you, my invitation for you this weekend is to relax.

Check out. Walk. Dance and breathe.

You might be surprised at the treasure you’ll find right in front of you.