As any field evolves, new discoveries are made, additional applications are found for existing processes, and finer distinctions permit more detailed understandings of how things work. It is particularly interesting when someone outside the field researches a topic that can be understood in more depth using NLP principles.

NLP has long recognized the importance of our beliefs about ourselves, and a number of processes have been developed for changing troublesome beliefs into more enabling ones. Most troubling beliefs include negations, which limit what someone thinks is possible.

For instance, some people think of themselves as unlucky (not lucky). “Everything (bad) happens to me.” Others think of themselves as lucky. “Sure, I’m a lucky guy.” Richard Wiseman’s excellent book, The Luck Factor; Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: the four essential principles. shows that people who think of themselves as lucky actually are luckier than others, in a variety of ways, and it doesn’t have anything to do with divine intervention or winning the lottery. One of the first things Wiseman did was to test people who thought of themselves as very lucky or very unlucky by asking them to choose lottery numbers; the lucky people did no better than the unlucky ones, . . . and both lost money. (On average, most lotteries pay out only about 50 cents per dollar spent.)

When Wiseman interviewed both lucky and unlucky people, he identified four main principles that are true of lucky people:

1. They maximize their chance opportunities by having a wide network of friends. They tell their friends about their goals and outcomes, and these friends often suggest interesting possibilities for them to explore, and/or pass on these goals to other people in their network.

2. They are open to intuition and attend to their hunches, and they are relaxed enough to consider alternative ways of achieving their goals, broadening the range of real-world possibilities that might satisfy them.

3. They expect to be lucky in the future, creating a sense of happy optimism that helps them persevere in the face of repeated disappointment, and that sensitizes them to opportunities.

4. They are able to see the positive side of bad luck, so they are much more resourceful in dealing with it. They often create good luck out of bad—“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade”—and they are able to reframe bad luck as a real opportunity.

In contrast, people who consider themselves unlucky:

1. Have a smaller network of friends, and they tend not to tell them what they want, “because it wouldn’t do any good.”

2. They are blind and deaf to their intuition, and tend to have specific fixed goals, rather than more flexible ones that are easier to satisfy in a variety of ways.

3. They expect to be unlucky in the future, creating a sense of pessimism and doom that makes it difficult to notice opportunities around them.

4. They are unable to see the positive side of bad fortune and have great difficulty dealing with it.

Of course it’s possible that some people actually are lucky (or unlucky) and that causes them to feel lucky (or unlucky). Feeling lucky or unlucky could be just an accurate evaluation of how lucky someone is. Can thinking of yourself as lucky actually make you luckier?

Wiseman didn’t just interview people who considered themselves lucky and unlucky, he also devised several simple experiments to test their responses to events. In one experiment, he scheduled an interview at a coffee house, and just before the appointment, he placed a five-pound banknote on the sidewalk just outside the door. Someone who believed that they were lucky noticed it and picked it up, but someone who believed they were unlucky failed to notice it. This and other simple experiments demonstrated that when people think of themselves as lucky, that actually causes them to be lucky.

Wiseman went on to teach a “luck school” in which he used the principles outlined above to teach “unlucky” people how to think of themselves as lucky—and when he followed them up, found that most of them actually became luckier as a result.

Let’s explore some different aspects of how this works in more detail. Thinking of yourself as lucky results in feeling lucky. Whatever events have happened in your life, either positive or negative, believing that you are lucky feels good, and this is an undeniable immediate benefit of thinking of yourself as lucky. This is a specific example of “seeing the glass half-full rather than half-empty,” or “looking at the bright side of life.” It may not directly change your external reality, but it certainly changes your internal reality, and how you feel in response. Given that certain events happen to you, you may as well enjoy feeling lucky about them. This is not a matter of objective truth, but of your subjective attitude and experience. As an Ashleigh Brilliant postcard says, “I have given up searching for the truth, and am looking for a good fantasy.”

Thinking of yourself as lucky allows you to respond more resourcefully to events, so you are much more able to make good use of whatever happens. You will be aware of events in the world that are real opportunities—like finding money on the sidewalk—that you can take advantage of, and that you wouldn’t notice or respond to if you thought of yourself as unlucky. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” This is one way that thinking of yourself as lucky actually makes you lucky; noticing choices and opportunities to utilize your abilities, whatever they are.

When you feel lucky, you will be more “upbeat” and pleasant to be around, so other people will be more attracted to you, opening up additional opportunities. Only a victimizer—or a “rescuer”—enjoys being around a complainer! You can always decline if you want to, but it’s nice to have additional options. This is one of many ways that feeling lucky can actually increase your lucky opportunities in the real world.

When you feel lucky, everything becomes an opportunity, as if you had an internal voice asking, “How can I enjoy making use of this?” You will find benefits in experiences that others would think of as very unpleasant bad luck. For instance, most people think of a friend’s rejection as a disaster. However, if you think of it in a larger scope of time, you can be really grateful that you found out early, so you didn’t waste a lot of time on a relationship that had no chance of going anywhere. “For every door that closes in your face, a hundred open behind your back.”

When you feel lucky, you are much more likely to take the initiative in situations where the cost is very small, and the potential payoff is great—another way in which your behavior can invite a lucky response. I spent a whole summer canoeing as a result of daring to ask a complete stranger a simple question, “Could I use your canoe?” Can you think of times in your life when luck would have passed you by if you hadn’t taken the small step of asking for something, striking up a conversation with a stranger, or inviting someone for dinner? (That’s how I got to know my wife, Connirae.) Sometimes lucky events just happen to us, but at other times it requires some initiative on our part, and that is something that is under your control. The more you take the initiative, the more likely you are to encounter lucky opportunities.

There is an old joke about a man who prays to God every day to let him win the lottery. Finally, after thirty years of this, he complains to God bitterly, saying, “All these years I have prayed to you to let me win the lottery, but it hasn’t happened!” The sky opens and a booming voice from the heavens answers, “Joe, do me a favor; buy a ticket.”

Thinking of yourself as lucky makes it natural to persevere despite repeated failure, and to try unlikely possibilities, to see what might come of them. I got my undergraduate degree in chemistry at Caltech, so I had only two one-semester courses in psychology. When I applied to graduate school in psychology at Brandeis University so that I could study with Abe Maslow, most people thought me completely crazy. (I got only 66% on the grad record exam in psychology, which says something interesting either about the quality of the typical undergraduate psychology program at that time, or about the exam!) However, that year Maslow had decided that psychology needed more input from outside the field, so that year the only students admitted were those who did not have an undergraduate degree in psychology. My classmates included a mathematician, a social worker, a chemical engineer, and a minister. As hockey player Wayne Gretzky said, “Statistically, 100% of the shots you don’t take never go in.”

People who are seriously injured in an accident, or find that they have a terminal illness, often feel very unlucky. But some actually come to see it as a wonderful stroke of luck. “If that hadn’t happened to me, I would have gone to my grave living an empty, meaningless life. Now I realize what is really important to me, and I’m living my life in a way I didn’t previously realize was possible.” For many of these people, this is not just brave or empty words, but a congruent, heart-felt truth.

Even if someone is very poor, the benefits of others’ labors are available to all of us in a huge multitude of ways—the clothes we wear, the highways that we travel on, hospitals, police, books, movies, computers, electricity, and all the other things that others have produced, and that we usually take for granted. This cornucopia of benefits would suddenly become very very apparent if one of us were dropped naked and alone into a steaming jungle or onto a desert island. As Joni Mitchell’s song The Big Yellow Taxi goes, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” While that may be true for most people, it doesn’t have to be true for us. We can appreciate it all now, and all it takes is a little time to acknowledge it all and feel grateful for it. Many people collect experiences of unpleasantness—anger, resentment, disappointment, and betrayal—a great basis for grumbling about “bad luck.”

Others collect happy experiences so that they can feel the richness of gratitude—thankfulness for the life that has been given to us. We have an incredible number and variety of experiences stored in our memories, and we can use this as the raw material for creating a useful new category, called “luck” or “gratitude.” Whenever you create any category of experience, you spontaneously tend to notice other events that fit into that category, so the category continues to grow. When you think of yourself as lucky, many very ordinary everyday events will be drawn into the category and be seen as additional examples of luck, increasing your subjective pleasure in being lucky. Like small children, you can find great pleasure in small things that most ignore or take for granted.

For instance, what do you do when you are waiting for something to load on your computer, or some other short delay? Sometimes I enjoy looking out the window, or at one of the paintings on the wall behind my computer, but my favorite is feeling my breath coming in and out—something that is always available to me.

Then you can go on to enjoy imagining more lucky things happening to you in the future. This will add yet more examples to your luck category, further increasing your pleasure in being lucky, and at the same time sensitizing you to all the other lucky things you experience. If thinking of yourself as lucky is something that interests you at all, try the following exercise, which is a little more specific and detailed than the brief description above.

Becoming Lucky

1. Pick a prototype. Think of a particularly strong and unquestionable example of good luck that you have experienced. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it makes you feel incredibly lucky….

2. Select additional examples. Search through your memory for other examples of being lucky, no matter how small or commonplace. For instance, the enjoyment of music from long-dead composers, who often struggled to create in very difficult circumstances. Having a car to take you from one place to another whenever you want may have much more impact on your life than a “once-in-a-lifetime” stroke of good luck. Be sure to include examples when you took some action to invite the possibility of luck, as well as times when something lucky “just happened” to you without any apparent effort on your part….

3. Assemble examples. Literally gather all those experiences together into a category in whatever way is natural for you. Most people collect images of being lucky in some location in their personal space. These could be in a simultaneous display of images, like a collage, or they could appear to you as a sequential display, like a rapid slide show. Or you could collect internal voices that describe or are in response to lucky times in your life. These could be sequential, so you can hear them one at a time, or they could be simultaneous, like a choir singing together joyfully about your good fortune. Take whatever time you need to select and collect many examples of being lucky, and collect them somewhere in your personal space….

4. Test. When you think of this group of examples that you have assembled, do you feel lucky? If so, great; realize that you can always add more examples to make it stronger. If not, what could you do to make it more impactful? Perhaps you need to find and add additional convincing examples; someone who knows you might suggest events that you tend to ignore or “take for granted.” Or perhaps you need to make the images brighter, closer, or more colorful, the voices louder, or change their location so that it has more impact. You can experiment with making these kinds of changes, keeping only those that make this group of experiences more powerful.

For even more information, examples, and instruction in how to understand and change your beliefs about yourself, read Transforming Your Self: becoming who you want to be, by Steve Andreas.