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 themsel