Delusional or Delightful? What Do You Think of Luck?
If you believe in luck, are you delusional?
Is the concept of luck too…foo-foo for you?
In a previous post we discussed the concept of “counterfactual thinking.” And some of you probably went, “Say…what?”
Granted, there is a school of thought which believes that you can greatly increase your luck (or odds of success) with respect to anything by engaging in counterfactual thinking. The degree to which you believe an occurrence to be fortunate or not has been linked to the degree to which one generates alternatives that are either better or worse.
So it’s been argued that those who constantly engage in “stinking thinking” will end up brewing up more and more bad luck because they just don’t prime their brains for anything to be on tap in their lives other than more crappy consequences to be on tap.
Which starts to sound eerily close to The Law of Attraction (“what you think you will attract”) which was so the rage from 2006 to 2009 or so. And while some people love at least the theory behind it, there are scores of folks that find such stuff to be very delusional. As Lord Business said in The Lego Movie: “What a bunch of hippy, dippy baloney.”
Like, you know, you could sit around hugging a vision board of a million dollars and at some point in the not too distant future, boom! You win a million dollars in the lotto…or as a judgment in your favor via a lawsuit…or you received major payola via someone’s will.
Please.
Nope, I’d never expect everyone to buy that. But what I would like everyone to consider is this:
Counterfactual thinking could be a great mode of thinking that is both unconscious and automatic, where instead of focusing on the garbage of a certain event, you’d acknowledge it, sure, but then sift about to find the gift contained within said garbage.
For example: You’re in a car accident. Major downer, right? Of course!
But instead of marinating in the misery of that fact, you can acknowledge it, be present with it and then progress past it to a more positive way of thinking where it serves as an automatic chaser to the stiff drink of the experience, where you focus on on the fact that at least you made it out alive.
And then from there you should automatically move on to find even more gifts in the garbage. For example: Is the cop who arrived at the accident scene cute? Hello! You probably would never have met him/her without this chance occurrence coming down. Get their phone number!
And so on.
There’s nothing delusional at all about pivoting away from the negative (as soon as it’s practical) to focus and fixate on the positive. If it keeps you going in the face of adversity and softens the impact of life’s blows, what’s wrong with that?
The more you focus on the positive, the more you’ll open your mind to picking up on the opportunities that surround you in life. The more you do that, the more the winds of useful change could blow your way. And the more you’re focused on harnessing those winds and have your WHY to guide you in terms of adjusting your sails, there’s no reason why you can’t reach your desired destination in life sooner or later through the achievement of your S.M.A.A.R.T. goals.
How lucky is that?
So use counterfactual thinking to keep you from taking what should be a short-lived fling with negativity and despair and use it to set you up with a long-term commitment with positive progress. It’s a match made in heaven. Nothing delusional about that!
Grab our 43-page eBook, “The Woman-101 31-Day Life Reboot Guide” FREE, by joining the Woman-101 Hoot-Whoot! Club. Go to: www.woman-101.com and join us!
To upgrade your thoughts to a better place, try the book, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, available on Amazon.
