402 how to get lucky

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402 how to get lucky

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We love to tell ourselves that some people are just lucky, born under the right star, in the right place, with the right opportunities. But luck is not magic, and it is not as random as we think. In this episode, Betsy explores the science and psychology of luck, and why what we call “good fortune” often comes down to patterns of thinking, awareness, and action.

You will learn:

The research behind why some people consistently experience “lucky breaks.”
How attention, openness, and mindset actually create opportunities.
Why unlucky people often miss signals and possibilities right in front of them.
Practical shifts you can make to increase your own luck, so you are not waiting for chance but setting the stage for serendipity.

This is not about superstition. It is about training your brain to see and step into opportunities. If you have ever wondered why certain doors keep opening for some people, and how you can make that happen in your own life, this episode will change how you think about luck forever.

Transcript:

Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Art of Living Big. Welcome to the show. Happy Thursday. I have been thinking about luck. I’ve been thinking about luck, and I wanna say I’ve been thinking, well, I’ve been thinking about this for like 54 years. I have always thought of myself as really lucky. You know, things always work out for me.

I always know that in the end, things are gonna go the way that I want. I am lucky enough to have. Really cool experiences and synchronicities [00:01:00] happen and many times I win things that are unexpected. When I was in high school, I won a gift card to $500 worth of shoes at a shoe store that I didn’t even remember putting my name in the fishbowl.

You know, which $500 of shoes back in 1988 was a pretty significant amount of shoes. I had shoes for years. I have won iPads at events and iPods at events. I have won everything under the sun from cakes and cookies to chicken sandwiches. I have always found a way to get the good stuff. I feel like I’m really lucky and not to mention, I think that it’s kind of luck how I grew up.

Who my parents were that they had money to send me to college. Like there was a lot of things that I think you could lean on and say those things were really [00:02:00] lucky. Privileged in many ways, right? And not to confuse those two things, I wanna stick with luck, but I just wanna point out that a lot of things weren’t necessarily something that I did Now.

If you’re already feeling like kind of some pressure here, I wanna tell you another quick story and then I wanna really talk about this because who doesn’t want more luck? Right? Why not? Why not have luck on our side? So years ago, probably five years ago, I took a class and in the class it was a business class, like a coaching class.

And in the class somebody mentions it might have been me, mentioned something about luck. And there was another woman in the class that got really upset and she said, I am not lucky. I work really hard for everything that I have. And I thought it was so interesting because she was so adamant about it. I just never thought that [00:03:00] my luck took away from my hard work.

’cause I work hard too. But honestly, if I could work in ease, like I. I don’t know that my goal is to like work really hard. I would like things to just kind of happen and have it be fun and flowy, right? Who doesn’t. But I remember how much this woman who was great, I really liked her, but I remember how much she fought to hang on to the idea that she wasn’t lucky that everything that she got was simply.

A matter of her hard work and determination, and I think both things can be true. But what I wanted to talk to you today about is really the idea that we could think about life as a little mystical, a little bit out of our control, and a little bit lucky and.

You know, sometimes you’ll hear [00:04:00] people say like, Ugh, she’s just so lucky, or, I never get those lucky breaks. Well, I wanna flip that story around because I don’t think that luck is nearly as random as we have been taught. And so I wanna talk about the science behind luck, why some people always seem to land on their feet, and more importantly, how you can make yourself luckier.

So this isn’t about like superstition or. You know, carrying a rabbit’s foot around in your purse. This is about mindset and about awareness and about action. Okay, so let’s get into it here. When we hear this word, luck, I think what a lot of us default to is that we think that it’s chance, right? Like winning the lottery or.

Stumbling upon the right job or meeting the right person in line at Starbucks. I mean, we watch romantic comedies that create these magical run-ins that seem [00:05:00] totally like Chance, and I believe those moments do feel that way. I think they do feel random, but the truth is that there’s a lot more patterns behind them.

And so I want you to think about the last time something really, really good happened to you. So did it just fall from the sky or did you put yourself in a position where it could happen? So most of the time, luck isn’t something that just randomly strikes you down in the driveway. It’s really about being in the right place with the right mindset, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about and actually recognizing something as an opportunity when it shows up.

Sometimes inside the Navigate method, somebody will talk about something that’s a problem, and I always like to call it something different. Is it a problem? Is it an opportunity? It’s an opportunity to [00:06:00] learn something new. Learn something about you. Learn something about somebody else. Learn a new way of doing things, and you might think it doesn’t matter what I call it, like you could call it not a problem, but it’s still a problem.

And I would say that you can call it whatever you want. But which one feels better in your body? If you say out loud right now, maybe you’re in your car driving ho, hopefully not like in an elevator with a whole group of people, but I want you to just say, I have a problem and I want you to feel how your body feels.

Does it kind of constrict a little bit? Maybe you feel that in your chest, but if you say, I have a challenge. How does that feel? A little bit better, right? Like it’s something I’ve gotta work through, but it’s a challenge. But what if you say, I have an opportunity. I know for me, I feel like my chest really [00:07:00] opens.

I almost feel like I’m sitting up a little bit taller. Like that feels different. And you might think that the way that you feel doesn’t matter. It absolutely matters because your brain and your body are talking, and when you notice that you feel something, that’s how you can recognize what your brain is actually talking about.

Sometimes people are like, how do I know what my unconscious mind is thinking if it’s unconscious? And I say, how do you feel? How do you feel? That is gonna be the gauge that’s telling you what’s going on upstairs, and I wanna be. In an expansive, open place in order for me to be able to see the most opportunity, the most synchronicities, the most ways I can solve this problem.

Look, there are infinite ways to solve every problem, but the more constricted you are, [00:08:00] the more narrow your focus becomes and the harder it is for you to be able to see. Other options that may be right under your nose. When we start to see all these options, what do we do? We go, God, I got lucky. I got lucky.

I just happened to walk in when there was a sale. Right? Maybe there was a sign a week ago that there was gonna be a sale, and you didn’t notice it consciously, but your unconscious mind did. These little things happen all the time. There’s a guy on the internet, there’s a guy on YouTube. Darren Brown, Darren, D-E-R-R-E-N, I think is how you spell it.

Darren Brown, and he is an illusionist, but he does some incredible things with putting out, he does these elaborate, I’m gonna call it a hoax, right? Elaborate. Experiments where he puts out little tiny signs all along somebody’s [00:09:00] path, you know, their drive to an event, , in the parking lot. Little things you’d never notice, and then he can get them to.

Say a certain song based on all of the different signs that they saw. They don’t remember seeing any of those things yet when they show up and he has them come up with any song they want, they say the exact thing that he has been dripping out to them throughout the day. So our brain is constantly picking up information.

Check him out on YouTube. His videos are fascinating. He’s fascinating. But I want you to be thinking like if my brain is always scanning for information and it’s gonna be scanning, like opening or closing, depending on what I’m telling it, then wouldn’t it make sense that if I told it that things were magically happening all the time?

And that there was constantly opportunity and that things always worked out for me. Doesn’t it make sense [00:10:00] then that they would, I’ve seen this trend on TikTok, it was probably a year ago, called Lucky Girl Syndrome, and basically it was the idea that the more luck you think you’ll have, the more you have it’s science.

It makes sense. So there is a science of luck and there’s this researcher named Richard Wiseman. He studied people who call themselves lucky versus unlucky, and what he found is that lucky people aren’t magically blessed, but they do think and act differently. So here’s what really stood out in his research, he found that lucky people.

They’re really open to new experiences. So if things don’t go the way they think they’re gonna go, they go, uh, well, what could be, what could be, what could happen for me here? Right? They don’t shut down before things begin, right? We have things that go sideways every single day. That’s just life. But if you close down [00:11:00] or you go, oh gosh, darn, uh, here we go again.

That is telling , your brain, and the universe that you’ve gotta constrict and get really narrow. But what we really wanna do is we wanna open up to new experiences. He also noticed that lucky people tend to notice opportunities that other people missed, and that’s because they’re relaxed and they’re paying attention.

Again, if you think about it, when you get really stressed or we get hyper-focused, everything narrows, right. We get really honed in. I mean, if you think about it from a biological perspective, this makes sense. If I am walking down a dark alley and. I see something that is a danger to me. I’m gonna get really high, like I’m going all of my attention, my peripheral vision’s gonna come in.

Everything’s gonna come in so I can really like focus in and fight or whatever it is I need to do. Right? Lucky people. They’re more relaxed. They [00:12:00] have a calmer nervous system. This is why we teach this inside the n, the Navigate method. They, know how to operate their nervous system, and so they notice things that other people would just let pass right by.

Again, when I say other people would just let pass by, it’s not that they’re trying to ignore things or they’re just letting things go, they literally don’t see it. You could be. In the same exact spot as somebody else. One person thinks they’re lucky, the other person doesn’t, and they will see and notice different things, different opportunities in the same experience.

The other thing about lucky people is they trust their gut. More importantly than that. ’cause I hear, I talk to people all the time. They’re like, I have an incredible intuition. And then when we are talking and then they’re like, Ooh, but I knew I should have done that, but I didn’t. So the trick is they trust their gut, but they actually follow it.

Gosh, this sense that we have [00:13:00] is so important, and I think we miss all the time. We think it’s not as important as our hearing or our seeing or our smelling or our tasting, but that gut feeling, that thing can be honed, that thing is important. It tells you so much. And the other thing he found is that.

Lucky people carry an expectation that things are gonna work out, which weirdly makes them more likely to act, and those actions create more luck. So I actually asked on Instagram, I put a poll and I said, how are you lucky? That’s what I asked. Are you lucky? Are you not lucky? Or do you think that luck doesn’t even exist?

14% of the people that filled out my poll that chose to interact said that there’s no such thing as luck, which I also wonder how are you defining it, right? 22% said they’re [00:14:00] not lucky, and 64% of people said they were lucky. Now the people that see themselves as unlucky. Are more likely, according to this research, to be stressed out or anxious or focused on what could go wrong.

So they get this tunnel vision. That means that they don’t even really see some of the good stuff that might be right in front of them. So here’s the thing. A lot of what luck is is really tied in to how your brain is wired to pay attention. So we have this thing called the reticular activating system.

You’ve probably heard of this, right? It filters what we notice. I think of it as like a little guy in a mail room and the male is coming down the chute, right? And the little male guy is looking at it and saying, is this important? And it tosses it to your conscious mind. If it is, if it’s not important, it throws it behind him and goes, eh, that’s not [00:15:00] important.

But this. Reticular activating system that’s constantly filtering is determining and deciding what you consciously notice. You’re unconsciously noticing everything. So, you know, I noticed this like when I bought a new car and I’ve noticed it. Every time I buy a new car, I’m like, nobody has this car.

I’m so unique. And then I drive down the street and I’m like, why is every car in the parking lot the same exact car that I got? Right? So your brain is gonna be showing you what matters to you, and it determines what matters to you based on what you spend the most time thinking about. Repetition or what has the most emotion.

So pause for a moment and imagine if you are worrying. Highly emotional, super repetition. Now what? Now your brain’s like, show her more of that or him more of that. [00:16:00] So lucky people are essentially programming their brain to look for opportunity. They just expect good things. And so their brain says that little filter, the little male guy says, Hey, look at this one.

Look at this one. Here’s another one. And the filter of the unlucky. People just expect the opposite, and then they get more of that. So it’s not just what you notice, either luck actually really favors action or motions, right? So if you’re taking little small risks, you’re saying yes, or starting conversations, you’re, you’re doing things different.

I know one of the things I’ve really been focused on, hyper-focused on is, um, I’m gonna say it like this, but Neville Goddard, if you are familiar with Neville Goddard, I should do a whole. A whole podcast on him, uh, inside one of my programs, um, Voyager, which is for people who have already made the decision or [00:17:00] decided to stay or leave in their marriage.

We, every other week we dive into some concept and Neville Goddard is one that we’ve been working on, and really, Neville Goddard talks about being in the feeling, again, remember what our feelings are doing, right? So being in the feeling of it is done. Whatever it is you want, that’s the outcome that you have.

It’s done. You just have to linger in that feeling, right? So luck really loves this. Because as you linger into the feeling of it is done, you’re, first of all, you’re not worried anymore, you’re totally relaxed and your brain is looking for like, how did this happen? And suddenly you’re gonna be feeling like doing things.

So I have been hyper-focused on Neville Goddard, and I have been living in the future in terms of how I’m feeling. The goals that I have, they are done. And I have [00:18:00] noticed that I am way more apt to do things that I would have put off or been shying away from because I’m already living in as that other version of me and that other version of me had to do those things to get there.

And so. You dramatically increase the odds of bumping into something good when you’re taking different actions, right? You’re seeing totally new things ’cause you’re taking different actions and when you believe that those things are gonna work out, you’re more likely to follow through. Right? I’m doing those things because I believe it works out.

’cause I know what it feels like to be at the end result. Essentially, you’re turning possibility into reality. Okay. So if you’re with me on all that, let’s just talk about how you can actually become luckier. So here’s some practical shifts that you can make. One of the things that I think is super important is to [00:19:00] pay attention to the people that you surround yourself with.

So when we surround ourselves with people who are lucky, right, who see opportunity, who think differently, we begin to become like them. So they say, you know, we are the top. We are the average of the top five people that we spend the most time with. This is why I think groups like I’m in a, I am a coachee.

I’m being coached in a group that I have been in for a long time. The people that are in there are really big thinkers. They create their opportunities. They don’t wait. They are excited about life. They want to have new experiences and. That’s important for me because I will become the average of the top five people I spend the most time with.

So I wanna curate who I’m spending time with. I don’t want it to just default. Now, you may [00:20:00] be working at a job where you don’t like it, or the people you work with are just. Terrible or makes you unhappy, like all of that stuff is fair. You might be in a relationship that doesn’t feel like it’s feeding your soul.

You might feel, you know, just really unhappy and unsettled in that. And so in those experiences, if you’re like, I can’t do anything about that. Like I can’t just pick and choose everybody I spend time with, sometimes the people are picked to by my boss and who I have to do projects with or all those things.

I can still curate my group, and I do that sometimes by checking on podcasts, who do, whose voice do I wanna be hearing? I do it by reading books. I do it by attending different groups or events, saying yes to invitations. So every new connection that I make is [00:21:00] essentially a doorway to a different possibility.

Almost like I could open the door, look through and be like, do I like this one? Mm, that one’s probably not for me. Find another one. So expanding your circle can actually make you luckier because you’re gonna be exposed to different people. The next one is shifting your state. So stress, like I was saying, makes you really blind to opportunity, but when you start to regulate your nervous system, this is, this is I, I swear this changed my life.

Really knowing how to regulate my nervous system and doing it every day, you can actually start to see opportunity that’s in front of you because you’re not constricted and laser focused. So this is why we teach this to women inside the program because. You need to be able to see opportunity if you’re unhappy in your marriage.

Our program does. It doesn’t mean you, you stay and it doesn’t mean you go. It means you get to really see, and you get a totally different vantage point so that you can make a really clear [00:22:00] decision. So, shifting your state, noticing when you’re dysregulated and knowing how to shift it into a regulated state life, changing it, it’ll, that’ll shift everything.

The next thing is to really practice optimism. You know, if you follow me on Instagram, you know, almost every day I post my outfit, nobody sees my outfit, but you guys, because I sit in front of the computer all day, I joke that I do it for that one picture every day, but it, it makes me feel good, right?

That I’m dressed. It is a creative outlet. It helps me feel motivated and like I’m ready for the day. But if you notice when I post that picture. Because nobody really, ’cause, well, some people care about my outfit, but nobody really cares. So on the side I put all these things that I’m thinking about that are good things.

So every day I have a list of good things and I try and think about stuff that I never would think of, you know? ’cause I can say [00:23:00] like, well, it’s a good thing to have a paycheck. It’s a good thing to, like, there’s things that are obviously good things, but what about the things that we forget about? So the things that I tend to post are like, uh, I go into my kitchen and I just flip a switch and clean water.

Clean water just comes pours into a basin in my kitchen. Do you know how many people would kill for that? Like that is insanity. I can go into a grocery store, like it’s a giant warehouse full of food. Like every kind of food I could think of. Do you know how many people. Would be in. Complete awe of that.

Like there are magical, , lucky things happening all the time. So train your brain to practice optimism and gratitude and noticing those three things. You don’t have to write ’em down, but you could just have a rampage of appreciation. You know, sometimes I’ll take my coffee and I’ll be like, [00:24:00] I love this coffee.

I love that it’s the perfect color. I love that it’s warm. I love that I get to drink it, and it feels good. I love that it wakes me up. I love my mugs. I usually will pick a mug based on my mood, right? So I get to pick my mug and how cool is that? And I have different mugs, like, do you see how it’s simple?

Simple. But this is what lucky people tend to do just automatically. They also, they micro risks, so they try something, right? They have a, a competence enough to make little, small, bold moves. Then they end up stumbling into like a lucky break, right? Like that was lucky. Well, I mean, she did 19 other things before that thing happened.

So taking micro risks to reach for something, to go for a goal, and when it doesn’t work, those other 18 times that it didn’t work and it goes wrong, ask yourself, what was I [00:25:00] learning here? What, door might this have opened? How. Did this actually work for me? That’s a question I love to ask. How is this working for me?

What are all the ways that I’m learning new things from this? How is this gonna move me forward even faster? I always think this with my setbacks. Not always. Often I think this with my setbacks, like, this is actually working for me. How are all the ways this is working for me? When I ask a question like that, then my brain.

Has to answer the question, how is all the ways this is working for me? Instead of, wow, why does this always happen to me? Do you feel the difference again, feel it in your body. Expansive or constrictive. So here’s the thing, with luck, you can just choose. You can choose right now, you can be like, I’m the luckiest person ever.

’cause it’s not about fate, it’s about focus. [00:26:00] So you don’t sit back and wait for luck, you create it. And I think about that lady that said I worked really hard for everything I did. Absolutely. And that’s why you’re so lucky. So I wanna leave you with the challenge. So I want you to notice one opportunity today that you might have overlooked.

I want you to say yes to some really small thing that normally would’ve dismissed, and I want you to just see what happens and pay attention to your body and how it feels. So when you can do that and you can start to create and be the creator of your life, I think that is how you live a big life.

Alright, it was so good to see you. Thanks for being here with me today. I love you guys so much. And again, if you want some help, you wanna join the Navigate Method or even Voyager, just reach out to us. You can message me on Instagram or just go to my website. You can book a call with us right there and I’d love to talk with you.

See you guys next [00:27:00] week. Bye-bye. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today.

You can find me over on Instagram at betsy pake and on my YouTube channel. Remember. The world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring and keep living big.

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