Hey Friends!
Have you ever played the game yellow car? If not, it’s this childish game where whenever you’d see a yellow car, you’d scream, “YELLOW CAR!!!” and hit the closest participating person. While playing this game, not in New York City, but on Guam, where taxis aren’t typically yellow - I swear I’d never seen so many yellow cars in my life.
As stupid as this game is, by participating in it I primed my brain to both anticipate and easily spot yellow cars, even in my subconscious. Boop bop bam 👊🏾💥 yellow cars galore 🚕🚖🚕 By now you probably know where this email is going… 👉🏾 Yes, you can absolutely prime your brain to be more lucky. But how??
Here’s how I do it:
If you walk around thinking about all the bad things that can happen, your brain will start to anticipate and spot bad things for you to experience. Thus the phrase, “this would happen to me...” starts becoming a part of your identity. This goes back to the previous email that talks about the importance of replacing limiting beliefs and negative self talk. So!
Lesson☝🏾You have to believe, deeeep down inside that you DESERVE good things and to feel good at the same time.
And I don’t mean things like, “I had a hard day at work today I deserve to sit around and binge watch The Office.” I mean things like, “I’ve done my best at everything within my control for this project at work, I deserve taking some time off to go to watch my favorite show, the Office.”
Ok so notice that those two things are actually the same thing, but the feelings surrounding them are incredibly different.
Whether you believe in the law of attraction or not, believing that things are happening FOR you rather than TO you can have a massive impact on how you feel - which translates into feeling lucky.
I once applied to be an officer in the United States Air Force 🇺🇸 I met with a recruiter, studied for and took the super boring, tedious, hard test, collected promising letters from high ranking officials in the field, submitted my packet, and got denied 😀
Lucky for me, this is what catapulted my application to Physical Therapy School and now I’m soaking in a bathtub writing an email about cool lifestyle science stuff. Thanks Uncle Sam 👍🏾
If I had sulked about my denial and waited for something good to fall into my lap, it would’ve been exponentially harder if my brain was all like, ”Damn you suck. If you can’t even get into the Air Force with the help of all those people, how are you gonna get into PT school?”
Which leads to 🥁🥁🥁
Lesson✌🏾 The sooner you roll with the punches and work on spotting the next teensy tiny good thing that pops up in life to latch onto, the faster you can reframe a negative event into something that happened FOR you. Think training your brain to automatically go into “YELLOW CAR” mode 🚕👊🏾💥 but for good things.
The more you practice this, the easier it gets to start spotting opportunities that can easily sprout into lucky events. You’ll catch yourself saying, “What are the odds?!?” but for good things happening.
One of the easiest ways to train your brain on this is to practice gratitude. As you get into the habit of doing it regularly, challenge yourself to look for things that are a bit harder to think of. For example, I try to never repeat things on my gratitude list to encourage my brain to find the good in the most mundane things. Once you master this, you’ll get much quicker and better at reframing even the most unfortunate events in life.
Phew 😮💨
I’m gonna leave it at just two lessons for now, because I think they’re among the most important things to work on to start turning your luck around, and they’re admittedly not easy. I mean, we’re talking about creating new neural pathways in the brain. It’s possible but requires so effort.
🍀🍀🍀So here’s the journaling prompt to take your luck to the next level 🍀🍀🍀
Visualize something good that you want to happen in your life. Think as detailed as you can. Who you’re with, what you’re wearing, where you’re at, how you feel, the environment, the smell, go on and on - the more detailed, the better. Then put it on paper. Either write it out in a paragraph, bullet points, draw it, whatever will get you to vividly picture exactly what you want AND deserve. Picture this image over and over in your brain and come up with more details, add on to them.
I’ve always done this exercise in my mind for as long as I can remember. Like imagining scoring goals to win championship soccer games, getting into PT school, and getting a raise. But once I started putting it on paper and I reviewed them, it made it so much easier for my brain to subconsciously spot and come across crazy coincidences. Then I noticed I started to naturally change my behavior to increase the odds of being in the right place at the right time.
Most recently, I drew out the layout of my next dream home in my journal. It’s not pretty, not to scale, the lines are crooked, but it makes perfect sense to me and it’s super easy for me to picture being there. But something about drawing it out vs writing about it caused something to click in my brain that opened up more doors. I noticed in the floor plan that my home office was perfect for content creation at home, but not if I wanted to work with clients in person… and I didn’t want to bring clients into my home anyway.
A few days later a really old group chat I’m in rekindled a random conversation and someone in the group said this in response to me mentioning home hunting.
(I’m the eyeballs responding, that’s me 👀)
A sign from the Universe? Digest it however you want. The point is, this wouldn’t have grabbed my attention the way it did if I didn’t do the mentioned exercise. I can tell you now from experience, this is how big changes happen. But remember, this will only work if you BELIEVE deeeep down that you DESERVE this and if you have the resilience to reframe things to happen FOR you. If you wanna watch an oldie but a goodie about a time where I was doing this without knowing, check it out here.