Fear and Loathing and Your Luck (Or Lack of It)
Is there a connection between luck and fear?
If you’re afraid, what can you do to improve your luck…if anything?
You can view luck and fear as merely acronyms: luck is said to be Labor Under Correct Knowledge and fear is said to be False Evidence Appearing Real.
We often freak ourselves out with scary thoughts that aren’t even in direct alignment with what’s going on, either up front or behind the scenes of our own lives. We waste so much time, effort and energy sweating things we think might happen, only to find out that they actually don’t happen at all, or things turn out galaxies and universes better than we’d ever have believed. There’s an old saying: “A coward dies a thousand deaths; a hero[ine]–only once.”
It takes hard work and effort–and perhaps more than a little patience–to gather all of the facts and make the right decisions instead of jumping to conclusions. We can’t labor under correct knowledge if we’re always feeding ourselves false evidence.
Your luck improves as you take more well-informed action and it will certainly increase the more you open your mind to all of the possibilities surrounding you, even the hidden or unorthodox ones. Of course, you have to take action to bring about results…which of course makes you even “luckier” still when everything comes together in the end.
You just have to be on the lookout for all of the facts, data and input that life serves up to you which are in direct alignment with your WHY or reason for living.
The only way to get beyond a fear in particular is to march straight through it. Your WHY and your S.M.A.A.R.T. goals will give you the drive and direction to take that march most successfully. Wrap your hands…or arms…or head…around fear and DEAL with it. You must.
Otherwise, whatever’s freaking you out will sit there in front of you like some big, ugly old monolith. You have three choices at that point when it comes to fear:
(1) stay stalled out, staring it it, and doing nothing;
(2) take a terribly long, circuitous path around it, wasting time and opportunities along the way; or
(3) feel the fear and do it, anyway.
Lucky people don’t hide from opportunities; they run to them. You can’t convince them to do otherwise; nothing and no one could. The rest of us overthink everything, and while risk for the sake of risk is foolish, taking calculated risks isn’t. When you look at luck as Labor Under Correct Knowledge, you learn, sooner or later, that the harder you labor, the luckier you are. Calculated risks call for intelligent action…not over-cautious inaction.
You won’t be lucky when you sit there, stalled out, and do nothing. You won’t be lucky when you overthink things or otherwise give in to analysis paralysis. And as Master Oogway said in the movie Kung Fu Panda, “One often often meets [her] destiny on the road [she] takes to avoid it.”
So what does this mean? While luck might find you, no matter what fate definitely will.
If you master your fear and take the direct route to it and through it, with your WHY guiding you along the way, you’ll be more likely to have a positive/lucky outcome. When you don’t take action, you have a guaranteed result: nothing or nothing new. You must embrace change and (calculated) risk.
The less fear you have, the luckier you’ll be!
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For more help, try the book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway: Dynamic Techniques for Turning Fear, Indecision and Anger Into Power, Action and Love, by Susan Jeffers, Ph.D., available on Amazon.
