Conscious Luck: Eight Secrets to Intentionally Change Your Fortune
OMTimes Radio Show host of Sexy Mom Abundant Life, Kathy Williams, recently sat down with New York Times Best-Selling Authors Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline to have a chat about their most recent book, Conscious Luck: Eight Secrets to Intentionally Change Your Fortune.
Conscious Luck – An Interview with Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline
To listen to the full interview, visit Carol Kline and Gay Hendricks – 8 Secrets to Creating Conscious Luck on OMTimes Radio
Kathy: Gay and Carol, I think most people believe that luck is a random occurrence. Your new book demonstrates that it can be a deliberate choice. Can you talk a bit about that?
Carol Kline: Grasping the understanding that luck wasn’t random took some time for me. Like most people, I’ve had great things happen to me and unfortunate, even tragic, things happen to me. But the bottom line is that luck never seemed to be something I could control. So when Gay sent the original Conscious Luck manuscript for my professional opinion in 2011, and I saw those two words, “conscious” and “luck” together, it was mind-blowing for me. Wait, how can luck be conscious? I was intrigued.
When I eventually started working on the book with Gay, I didn’t have his long-time, personal experience with luck as a conscious choice, so I struggled a bit to internalize the idea. The shift came when I read this quote by Stanford professor and luck expert Tina Seelig: “Luck is rarely a lightning strike—isolated and dramatic—but a wind that blows constantly. You need to build a sail, made up of tiny behaviors, to catch the winds of luck.” I thought, wow, it’s not something outside my control. There are things I can do to harness the winds of luck.
Kathy: In the book, you outline eight Secrets and actions people can do to catch the winds of luck. What’s the first thing that you recommend?
Gay: The first thing I recommend, which only takes 10 or 15 seconds, but immediately gets you started on the right path is this: make a commitment to being luckier today than you were yesterday. And then, make a commitment to being luckier tomorrow than you are today.
Let’s do that! Whatever you’re doing right now—whether you’re sitting, standing or lying down —take a minute and make a commitment to increasing the luck in your life.
In my five decades of working with people to transform their lives, I’ve learned that every important self-change program starts with a willingness to change. But what really makes the transformation happen is when you make a commitment to it.
So if you can make a sincere commitment this moment to being luckier every day of your life, that’s a great place to start.
Kathy: Ok, that’s the first of your eight Secrets: Commit to be a VLP—a Very Lucky Person. You mention that the first four Secrets are like building a foundation: 1. Committing to luck, 2. releasing your personal barriers to good fortune, and 3. transforming shame into a magnet for luck. I love that you use the word magnet—we’re attracting luck. Can you share a story about transforming shame into a magnet for luck?
Gay: Yes. That particular Conscious Luck Secret came out of a personal experience, which happened about 30 years ago when my brother and I were in Florida. My mother had recently passed away, and we were cleaning out her house and preparing it to be sold. As I was packing away a picture frame, an envelope fell out of the back. It had obviously been stuck in there many years ago because the postmark on it was 1945, the year I was born. I pulled out the letter inside, which was from a woman in my mother’s church group. In it, she begged my mother to come out of the house and not to stay locked inside, away from her friends. She wrote: Norma, we know you feel ashamed about the birth and the way it happened, but we love you and accept you. We’d do anything to have you come back to church and be with us.
As I read, a strange feeling washed over me—it was my birth that she was talking about! Then I realized that meant I’d spent the first nine months of my life, literally soaked in shame, absorbing into my body the chemicals of shame that surrounded me in the womb. And, I realized the shame was still there. Suddenly I could feel its heavy energy throughout my body, living in areas that I’d never paid attention to.
Having worked as a psychologist for decades, I knew that to change something, you must first accept it as it is and not try to hide from it. So I just stood there, feeling it for a while. Then I had another realization: this area of my body that I hadn’t been aware of was like a field inside me that had been planted with shame. But, I told myself, there’s no law that says I can’t replant it with something beautiful. I could turn that field of shame into a field of positive possibility. So that’s what I did. I decided to open to the energy of shame and feel it—and then transform it into an attractor field for love and luck. We describe that process in the book for anyone to try for themselves.
After I replanted that field, my life started moving in an even more positive direction. Things started kind of falling into my lap. I had made myself a magnet for luck and love. I always put love and luck together because in my view, one without the other doesn’t really work as well.
Kathy: That brings us to the fourth Conscious Luck Secret: Have Luck-worthy Goals. What is a luck-worthy goal?
Carol: When your goals are luck-worthy, you give luck a reason to visit. Luck-worthy goals have three qualities. The first is that your goal is meaningful to you, it aligns with your sense of purpose. The second is that your goal lights you up and allows you to do what you most love to do. If your goals fulfill just these two requirements, you will definitely have more luck in achieving them.
But if you want to turbocharge your goals, so that luck is chasing you, make sure your goal not only helps you but helps other people as well. This harnesses the “good karma” effect. When you support others, then the universe supports you—often in unexpected ways.
We heard all kinds of stories about this. I especially loved this anecdote from our friend, Jack Canfield. He told us about a time when he was conducting a workshop and using muscle-testing to determine if people’s goals were a “good fit” for them. A woman came up to the front of the room to demonstrate. While pressing down on her outstretched arm, Jack asked her to think of the ways that achieving her goal would benefit her, and her arm remained fairly strong, not going down much with his pressure. But when he asked her to think of how achieving that goal would benefit other people as well, her arm became super-strong. It was as if her nervous system coalesced around that goal. This is why we say it’s really important to make sure your goals will benefit other people.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to be completely selfless. You want what you want—but to “luckify” your goals, just be sure to get in touch with what’s important to you about them, how they light you up, and how they help others.
Kathy: That makes sense. Luck is often defined as being in the right place at the right time. How can readers do that consistently?
Gay: Part of the art of Conscious Luck is to learn how to move through life at a pace that puts you at the right place at the right time, in the sense of having things line up to support you. We call that your “essence pace.” Here’s an example: Back when I was first putting all these Secrets to work in my own life, I was walking toward the door of my building, where my office was, with a big box of books in my arms. As I came closer to the door, I realized, “Oh my goodness, it’s Sunday. The building isn’t going to be open.” I had the key to my office, but I didn’t have the key to the building, because usually when I went there, it was open. My heart sank a little, but I kept walking towards the door, staying present and taking it easy. Then right as I got to it, the door opened from the other side, as somebody came out and held the door for me. Without missing a beat, I walked right through. Probably the only other person in the building that afternoon just happened to be right there when I needed them. That’s what I mean by moving through life so that you have those kinds of experiences—the ones that let you know that you’ve chosen luck and you’re open to the winds blowing you in a lucky direction all the time.
Carol: That’s a great example! Finding your essence pace is just one of the settings on your inner GPS. You can’t possibly calculate how to get to the right place at the right time on the level of your brain. You have to rely on your internal guidance system, which means moving at a pace that allows you to remain centered, like Gay described, plus listening to your intuition, and making decisions guided by your values. If you do those three things, you’ll end up in a lucky spot.
Kathy: Can you please talk about the Secret that suggests finding your lucky tribe or community?
Carol: Absolutely! What most people don’t understand is that our luck is the combined result of our actions, our attitudes, and our associations. The people you’re around can lift you up and help you be lucky or they can bring you down. Think about it, are there people you seek out to complain and commiserate with, and awfulize about whatever’s going on? We all have friends and family like that. Unfortunately, they keep us from being as lucky as we could be.
The good news is that you don’t have to cut these people out of your life, just be aware of their effect on you and try to limit the time you spend with them until you’re strong enough to not be affected.
In the meantime, spend as much time as you can with authentically positive, supportive people. You can even find a virtual lucky community, which is what we invite our readers to do so that they can make their conscious luck journey in the company of other like-minded people—no matter where they are in the world.
Gay: We have a Facebook Conscious Luck Global Community group page where people can find their lucky community online. Carol and I post tips and answer questions, plus people post great stories of the lucky things that have happened since they’ve started reading the book. I love reading those posts, because there’s nothing that warms my heart more than seeing somebody else make a big change that works for them in their lives.
Kathy: I love that that’s available. I also found it quite profound to do something you suggested: I went through the contacts on my phone, sensing the energy and connection of each person to determine who’s in my lucky community.
The final secret to Conscious Luck is practicing gratitude and appreciation, which we all know is so important in life. In fact, you say that this is actually the number one thing you should master to be lucky.
Gay: We could’ve easily put this Secret at the beginning because I think gratitude opens up space for good things to happen in your life. That’s why, in my mind, gratitude is one of the great gifts of human life and is central to being a lucky person.
Carol: And we’re so grateful we could be on your show with you, Kathy!
Find Carol and Gay at www.consciousluck.com
Connect with Kathy at www.meetkathywilliams.com and Thursdays at 5 Eastern on Omtimes Radio
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