you make your own luck

When you believe that people are only happy and/or have found love/success out of sheer luck, it’s a roundabout way of telling yourself that not only are you an unlucky person, but that it’s out of your hands whether you will be happy, successful, or in a loving relationship.

Luck regards fortune, fate, destiny, randomness, unpredictability, chance, and your ‘lot’. If you’re ‘lucky’, it’s believing that you are very likely to bring good fortune upon yourself. It may mean that you seem to feel like you tend to be in the right place at the right time, that competitions favour you, you manage to avoid what could have been a worse situation by some sort of guardian angel, or that you’ve lived a charmed life.

  • While you might be in the right place at the right time, it may also be that you recognise and seize opportunities.
  • While you may win things, it may be that you enter enough that odds are that you’re bound to win something, or you enter competitions for things that are quirky enough not to be deluged with people or have a certain ‘knack’ or ‘skill’ that enables you to back a good horse for example.
  • Maybe you do have a guardian angel or maybe you really know how to pay attention to your gut at the very last moment – I know my bacon has been saved a few times by this.
  • And yes, you may have lived a charmed life but it’s difficult to say if this is down to luck or the circumstances you’re raised in which may have afforded you different opportunities. That said, I know some pretty messed up people who have had charmed lives, which suggests that it’s not really about luck.

Basing your life and view of yourself on ‘luck’ is like sitting back, letting life happen to you and hoping to hell that it turns out to be good and then obviously feeling crap when it doesn’t and you actually have work at it, use your brain, eyes, and ears, and not rely on your hormone/chemistry/vagina/penis/common interests navigation system .

When you designate anything that you truly want and that you should in fact have input in, over to ‘luck’ and then it doesn’t happen, or it proves to be harder to rely on chance because it seeks your input, the net result, which will be things not happening as you would like, will communicate to you that you’re unfortunate, and yes, rather unlucky, which in turn ends up equating to, yep, you guessed it…not good enough.

Are you unlucky though if you don’t ‘end up’ in the career you say that you’d like to be in but aren’t actually consistently doing anything to make it happen?

How could you be ‘unlucky’ if you haven’t for example, gained the qualification, enrolled on a course, started the business part time on the side, or garnered some experience? How are you unlucky if you’re working at one particular job when you want to be doing something entirely different?

It’s time to make different choices.

You could argue that circumstances and responsibilities have governed your choices – everyone has them. The filthy rich can change their lives with a click of their fingers but aside from the fact that they represent the minority, many of these people are still miserable and I’m sure some of them feel ‘unlucky’. You only have to take one look at Hollywood to see that money, fame, opportunities and even lackeys, don’t buy happiness… when you’re internally unhappy.

I understand people who feel “unlucky in love” – I believed that I was having an extended run of bad luck before I changed my ways.

In the past I’ve felt ‘unlucky’ about aspects of my childhood but that was to suggest that something about me wasn’t good enough at the outset that started the bad luck chain reaction. I had no control over my childhood, but as an adult, by shedding this idea that I’m unlucky and not good enough, it’s allowed me to grab the reins of my life and not feel helpless to a predetermined ‘fate that doesn’t have to be – a self-fulfilling prophecy centred around this idea that everything will go tits up because of me.

My old dating life could be regarded as ‘unlucky’ – I once went speed-dating and met a Jude Law lookalike who was interested but then he got back with his ex before we could arrange a date. I was set up with a guy who showed up high as a kite, talking dirty. A guy I used to ‘make eye contact with’ for a few months, finally asked for my number…and then his girlfriend called me. On a solo holiday to Antigua, I agreed to hang out with the entertainment manager who was “protecting” me from guys hitting on me (snort), only for his child’s mother to show up and pull a Jerry Springer. While she went ballistic in the street, I had to find my way back to the port to get a taxi, using stray dogs to guide me. I could regale you with tales for hours but you get the gist…

I could look at all of these experiences as “unlucky” but the truth is, I had a recurrent theme of being a tad naive, gravitating to unavailable men and not asking questions/doing my homework. “I can handle it!” was my motto. All of these tales involve ambiguous, super-persistent, or showy, charming men.

Trust me, if I’d managed to hold down a decent relationship without changing me THAT would have been lucky.

Now that’s not to say that there isn’t an element of ‘luck’ but we still have to make our own. We still have to seize opportunities, put ourselves out there, and address the things we can control and evolve – us.  

It’s not really ‘unlucky in love’ if you hardly ever go out, or hardly talk to new people, or have a rigid routine of work, home and gym (or whatever), spend 99% of your dating time online, claim ‘never’ to meet anyone that’s your ‘type’ or that will be your type and available, think it’s everyone else that needs to change, or you keep trying to be with lesser shades of unavailable instead of calling a spade a spade.

The boyf and I floated around in the same circle for a few years – he wasn’t on my radar. I don’t think it’s luck that we noticed each other nor is it luck that we remained together, although it is lucky that we both showed up at the same event after being forced by our best mates.

But that’s about where luck starts and ends with relationships because someone could be fabulous and fall out of the sky, land in your lap, and even have fireworks shooting out of their arse displaying ‘Pick Me!’, but if you’re not available, aware and genuinely open to different possibilities, you’ll keep walking, or fail to appreciate them.

If you have made dodgy relationship choices in the past especially those based on unhealthy beliefs, you will have to put in some extra work to see the fruits – it’s getting out of your comfort zone.

You’ve also got to be out there living to experience ‘luck’ because it doesn’t happen when you’re too busy being afraid, on your laptop, or invested in someone else, even if it’s an ex, as it makes you unavailable for an available relationship.

Luck will put some opportunities in front of you, but invariably you have to make your own luck or at least be very good at seizing. Opt out of shady relationships and treat you with love, care, trust, and respect and your ‘odds’ of experiencing good fortune and creating it will increase. You have your own power – own it and use it.

Your thoughts?

Check out my book and ebook Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl in my bookshop.

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