Some people are unlucky, others seem to have been born lucky. Coincidence? A higher force? Or maybe it has something to do with how the person concerned goes through life? The latter – says psychologist Christian Busch.
Departure delayed. A good 300 passengers wait at the gate for two hours before things finally get going. For 100 of them, the delay is particularly bitter: they miss a connecting flight, and the last one that day that would take them to their destination. You have to spend one night in the hotel and will arrive home a whole day later than planned.
Bad luck. However, only for 98 of those affected. Because two of the passengers spend a fun evening together in the hotel restaurant at the expense of the airline and form a friendship for life. What luck. The two are certainly Sunday children. Or chosen ones. In any case, they obviously belong to those typical lucky people, for whom almost every problem sooner or later resolves itself and who are always in the right place at the right time. The world is just unfair and luck and bad luck are distributed unequally.
Or maybe these two passengers and all the other Gustav’s gooses of our universe contribute something to their happiness? The psychologist Christian Busch at least assumes it very strongly.
“Many think of serendipity as passive happiness that just happens to us or others,” the psychologist writes in a blog post in Psychology Today, “but it’s actually an active process of registering and connecting dots. With smart luck It’s about seeing bridges where others see chasms, and then taking the initiative and acting.” According to Christian Busch, our approach, thought and perception patterns play a role in how receptive we are to happy coincidences. In his opinion, the following three habits in particular are a reason why people who have them appear to be exceptionally lucky.
3 Habits Of People Who Appear Outrageously Lucky
1. You expect the (gratifying) unexpected.
We can plan a lot in life, but unexpected incidents happen. Nothing new for most people, so many take unplanned events into account and prepare as best they can – albeit mostly negative ones. For example, some of the lecturers always have an alternative plan or sayings to bridge the time ready in case the technology doesn’t work. Others would rather take a bus that would get them to their destination two hours earlier without traffic jams and delays than the one that would fit perfectly if everything went smoothly. Such measures arm us for the improbabilities of life – at least for the negative ones. Lucky people, on the other hand, prepare themselves for the occurrence of positive incidents as well as for the occurrence of complications. And as a result, they seem to be actually more receptive to improbable happiness. At least that is what the following experiment suggests.
Researchers observed two people in an identical, posed situation. One saw himself as lucky, the other thought of himself as unlucky. The experimenters asked both people in turn to go to a café to have a coffee. They placed a five-euro note in front of the café, and inside, a businessman was sitting right next to the cash register.
The lucky guy saw the bill entering the cafe and pocketed it, also sat down next to the businessman and chatted with him. The unlucky fellow didn’t notice the money, nor did he seem to notice the other café customer. At the end of the day, the lucky man reported that he had a great day: first he found money on the street, then he had an interesting conversation with a businessman. The unlucky person said her day had been uneventful.
Of course, this is only an example and not a representative study with evidential value. But just as we are better able to deal with negative incidents when we are aware of the possibility that they will occur, it seems entirely plausible that the same should be true of positive incidents. In fact, the positive improbable is just as probable as the negative improbable. And if we don’t think so, maybe it’s because we often overlook the positively improbable.
2. They accept the limits of their control and the importance of coincidences.
Especially when we look back, we tend to perceive everything that has happened to us as a consistent sequence of our actions. Step A led to X, whereupon we responded with Step B, which in turn led to Y, and so on. In fact, we often ignore a whole series of coincidences that have influenced the sequence of our actions to a large extent. Understandable, because our brain loves clarity, control and causality. Not being able to completely control your own life and destiny is a frightening idea for many people. However, this notion is a fact. And denying them can obscure the opportunities that chance throws at our feet.
Lucky people typically recognize that chance and luck play a very large part in their life path and this makes them open and receptive to unforeseen possibilities.
3. They engage in open-ended experimentation.
Most people feel most comfortable when they can use known methods and strategies to overcome challenges and tasks. Rightly so. After all, what has worked well in the past cannot be wrong. But how do we know if a strategy is the best if we haven’t tried another? Maybe the strawberries will taste even better if we sprinkle a little pepper over them. Or swimming is just as fun or even more fun than circuit training. The likelihood of being lucky typically increases with the willingness to try new things, even if this sometimes involves risks. Lucky people usually have this willingness. However, not by a higher coincidence, but because they decided to do so.
Source used: psychologytoday.com