Were you born under a lucky star? Or have you always felt like you just can’t catch a break?
Even if you weren’t born with the luck of the Irish, I’m here to tell you there’s hope!
Start improving your luck right now with these four SCIENTIFICALLY-PROVEN principles to create lucky opportunities for yourself.
Let’s go!
Can self care increase your luck? YUP!
FIrst: Relax and open your mind
Really? Relax?
Yes! According to Dr. Richard Wiseman, “unlucky people are generally much more tense and anxious than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people’s ability to notice the unexpected.” So if you are super tense or preoccupied with money worries or other anxieties, you might not notice opportunities that present themselves.
Another way to think about this is being in the moment and letting go of the need to control the outcome in any scenario.
Imagine you go to a friend’s house party, and, being single, you are solely focused on finding a partner. You’re less likely to talk to your friend’s married college friend who just happens to be hiring for a job you’d be perfect for, meet their new work colleague who just relocated and is looking to meet new friends (and has a ton in common with you), or chat up the older woman whose son just happens to be your exact type.
By approaching the situation with a closed (or at least singularly-focused) mind, you are seeing only the opportunities you are specifically looking for, rather than being open to the many opportunities that are available.
In voiceover, this might work in another way. You might be pursuing one niche, but other opportunities might be presenting themselves that you aren’t noticing. Perhaps you skip right past the audition notice for the radio drama posted on Facebook, and miss out on the opportunity to work with a great client who just happens to be doing this as a fun side project. Maybe you’re so focused on your day job that you forget to check your spam folder for weeks…and miss an email from a potential client looking for a quote.
Wonderful opportunities can come from all different directions, so keep your eyes and your mind open!
Second: Increase your chances
It’s almost impossible to be lucky if you stay home all the time and don’t interact with the world. If luck is being presented with opportunities that one then notices and acts on, then in mathematical terms, the more permutations you have, the higher your chances.
In gambling terms: You gotta play to win. And the more you play, the more likely you’ll get the winning hand.
I’m not telling you to get down to your local casino for some blackjack—I’m telling you to shake up your routine! If you always talk to the same five people, go to the same coffeeshop, take the same route to work everyday, etc, the chances of something novel and interesting happening are pretty low.
When I first moved to Atlanta in October of 2019, I knew it would be up to me to start making connections in order to get things moving. I immediately signed up for a class at Atlanta Voiceover Studio. Heidi Rew told me about a voiceover happy hour happening that Friday, and I went. Soon after, Heidi sent me an audition for an audio drama podcast, and two years later, the producers of that podcast introduced me to the producer of another audio drama back home in Minnesota, and he wrote a character for me! And then he introduced me to his daughter, who’s in town working on a feature film…point is, it’s a SMALL WORLD. Never underestimate the power of creating more points of connection in order to make it even smaller and more incredible.
Want to increase the odds of something truly amazing occurring in your life? Make it a point to get out of your rut and be more outgoing on a regular basis…and watch your luck increase exponentially.
Third: Listen to your intuition
Sometimes your logical brain is telling you one thing…but your gut is screaming at you to head in a different direction. At those times, it is best to trust your gut.
Our brains are amazing computational machines that hold a lot more data than we can ever be consciously aware of. So when those alarm bells are ringing, it’s best to trust that some piece of data that you just aren’t seeing has tripped that wire.
Some of the best decisions I have ever made have been spurred by pure intuitive energy. The year that I first decided to go VO Atlanta, I had booked a TV spot, and used a friend’s studio to record. While there, I had a sudden overwhelming urgency come over me, and I asked him if he planned to go to the conference. Until that point, I always thought I’d go “someday,” but suddenly that “someday” needed to be “now.”
I immediately bought a ticket, got a hotel room, and went about a month later. It was on that trip where I reconnected with my now boyfriend, and on another intuitive urge, made him pinky swear that he’d go to Iceland with me if I found cheap tickets.
Four years and one trip to Iceland later, I’m living in Atlanta and doing voiceover full time. I’m not sure if that all would have happened had I suppressed that impulse to go to VO Atlanta as impractical or illogical.
Fourth: Expect good luck and reframe bad luck
Dr. Wiseman’s studies found that lucky people tend to be optimists who expect good luck.
Their positive mindset results in self-fulfilling prophesies, as people who expect things to turn out don’t often give up when the going gets tough, but stick with it and find solutions to obstacles.
And when they do encounter bad luck, lucky people are often able to reframe the event positively, either believing themselves as lucky that it wasn’t worse, or seeing how a particular piece of bad luck might have directly caused created a lucky opportunity.
The (TL;DR) point of this tale is that there is no real way to know the consequences of “good” luck or “bad” luck. Something terrible can lead to positive consequences and vice versa.
One examples of how this has played out in my own life is that the pandemic caused me to get laid off from my serving job. I hadn’t lived in Georgia very long before lockdown, and it was a scary month and a half waiting to see if I would be approved for unemployment benefits.
However, waiting tables had been draining me. Working 55 hours a week, I was barely clearing $600 a week in my paycheck, and I was BURNED OUT. Being laid off actually gave me more time and money to pursue voiceover full time, and was a blessing in disguise.
So…let’s review!
For better luck in your life:
Stay relaxed, be present in the moment, and keep your mind open.
Increase chance encounters and opportunities by getting out of your routines.
Trust your gut, and follow your instincts about what steps to take going forward.
When bad luck happens, ask yourself: Where is the opportunity in this circumstance?
Want to read more about Dr. Wiseman’s work? Click here to read a short article!
Until next week…may the odds be ever in your favor!