Change Your Fortunes

Hello and Happy New Year to you,

My hope is that you are all very well after the Christmas and New Year break.  Wasn’t Christmas nice, so enjoyable and of course wonderful to spend time with family.  However, the New Year, well I can't fib, I found myself going to bed early and waking up in 2017, which I think was the best use of my time to be honest - can't say that I have ever enjoyed watching Big Ben chime away ding a ling and then singing the dreaded Old Lang Syne (again) - I was asked this week if I saw in the New Year, well, the year was coming whether i was there to meet it or not!

Luck

This week's blog is about luck - good old Lady Luck - good fortune – Karma - about being blessed or charmed.  So I suppose that the question is, do I believe in such thing as luck?  Once upon a time in a past life, metaphorically speaking, I would have said yes, absolutely, and that some people are seemingly blessed with buckets full of luck and always do seem to have good things happen all the time; whether they are ready for luck to manifest or not.  Lottery wins, finding that bargain - often the last one on the shelf, getting that promotion at work etc. Sometimes to some people it just seems to come easily and readily for them - we all know someone like this don't we?

Then recently I have been going through thoughts of objectively no, luck can’t exist or just happen, there isn't such a phenomena as merely luck.  Surely, it is when things happen in the right way when things are conveniently aligned.  Maybe someone is simply in the right place at the right time and there to take advantage of an opportunity. In the book Total Competition by Ross Brawn and Adam Parr, Ross talks about luck.  Of course, I could spend all day talking about Ross and his racing background but I don't wish to spoil a damn fine read for you!  Instead, I will tell you that he has been instrumental in winning so many driver and constructor Formula 1 world championships, with Williams, Bennetton, Brawn and of course his Ferrari era and the amazing story of 6 constructor and 5 driver's world titles - a total of over 20 he says worth a matter of fact fashion.  Ross talks about there being no such thing as luck and that when people told him he had been lucky, he suggests that all that preparation and hard work had placed his teams in a favorable position to capitalize on those opportunities that presented themselves. Clearly, an objective engineer who believes in hard work paying off, and he seems to have the right ingredients and magic in formula 1, that's for sure.

Others firmly believe in a much more spiritual way of being blessed, be it from God or maybe the Universe through the Law of Attraction and a few will absolutely suggest that they visibly have lady luck following close by...

Opportunity Knocks

There are stories of people who set off in the morning with an outcome in mind, and hey presto - there it is. Others state that Desire+Action=Luck... could it part of a bigger plan perhaps?

There are stories of extreme luck, for example Andrea Gold... aptly named... she always expects to win every competition she enters and guess what, she seems to. She "believes that [her] confidence in winning helps to manifest the win" and that she listens to her intuition.  Something that we all have but I would suggest few rarely use on a daily basis what would you have done differently if you had, even over the last 24 hours?

When I started my research about self-discovery, I was seeing with my own eyes tha people are being told to learn from experience, and of course while this is an important thing to do, sensible even, (hence in fact that saying once bitten twice shy).  However, then people are expected to make decisions based upon that memory and to ignore their 'gut' feeling.  It transpires that you ignore your intuition at your peril! We are often right when we listen to that inner voice; Socrates called it the inner Daemon, not to be confused with a Demon...

In any case, I digress, there are many daily opportunities which I believe present themselves to you - did you see them yesterday, or have you recognized them today yet?  Have you been too busy to notice?  Have you been so absorbed in the daily journey of repetition that you failed to notice them? Or did you simply dismiss them because of your experiences past?

So what do I think?

I would like to say that you are solely responsible for how you feel - if you wish to be miserable, busy, head deep in the account books, too occupied to notice anything happening or any opportunity that presents itself then I suggest that you NOW work to change the way you feel and change your luck and see those opportunities or at least your outlook (OUTLUCK perhaps). 

Mostly though, I think that hard work and preparation coupled with a positive outlook can bring favorable fortune but, it is odd because I do 'feel' that there is a law of attraction... I feel we can manifest something we desire and that there is a strange energy in the universe running underneath in the background; what this is, I am unsure... but I do believe it's there nevertheless.

So, here we are, the year 2017... What does the year have in store? What opportunity daily will you notice or be failing to notice.

As always,

Best wishes and be back with another blog soon.

Iain