We’re in the midst of the How to Be Lucky Challenge. This week we’re diving into ways to maximize our chance opportunities and to make more of them.

But first, if you haven’t read last week’s post about increasing our awareness and the Lucky Artifact notebook, click here to read it. 

If you’ve been using the Lucky Artifact notebook to remember the things you did, saw, and heard each day, I’d love to know how it’s going. Are you finding lots of things to mark as lucky? These don’t need to be big things. Little things that seem positive and that you’re grateful for can count as lucky.

What I’ve Experienced So Far

I’ve been keeping up with my Lucky Artifact notebook and marking things as lucky. This practice has increased my positivity, as I’ve seen there are so many things in my life to be grateful for.

There are still days that I sit down to make the lists of things I did, saw, and heard and I can’t seem to remember the day before in as much detail as I want. That’s getting better, but it’s a work in progress.

One surprising thing that happened so far – I lead tours at a local historic house and on one of my tours I reconnected with someone I went to church with in the early 90s. We’d lost touch with each other and probably wouldn’t have recognized each other, except I had a name tag on. It was so good to see her again!

Creating and Noticing Chance Opportunities

There are four qualities that lucky people have, according to Richard Wisemen in his book The Luck Factor.

Lucky people…

1. Are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities.
2. Make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition.
3. Create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations.
4. Adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

This week we’re talking about the first quality of maximizing and increasing our chance opportunities.

There are two ways to increase our chance opportunities – socializing and embracing new experiences.

Socializing and Meeting People

According to Wiseman, people who are lucky have more social connections. It makes sense that the more we interact with others and the more connections we build, the more opportunities will present themselves.

New Experiences

New experiences open our minds and lives to new things. That’s pretty obvious, but as we’ve seen, when we allow new things into our lives and we pay attention to those things, we experience more luck.

Last week we talked about right-brain attention and how it sees the whole picture. It’s broad and flexible. By actively seeking out new experiences and interacting with new people, we can increase this type of attention even more.

This Week’s Challenge

Talk to someone new this week or get to know someone a little better.

Also seek out at least one new experience during the week. It’s possible that these opportunities will flow to us naturally this week and because we’re paying attention, we’ll be able to say yes to them.

Write these interactions and experiences in your Lucky Artifact notebook to keep track of them.  We want to pay attention to these connections and experiences. Capturing them in the Lucky Artifact notebook helps us do that.

Here are a few ideas to get your mind rolling for this week’s challenge:

• Join a new group or class
• Take a new way home from work or to another place you go frequently
• Shop in a different store than usual
• Try a new food or recipe
• Go to a new restaurant
• Visit a new city
• Try a new game like mahjong or bridge or chess
• Check meetup.com for groups you might be interested in. If you’re very introverted, this could feel way out of your comfort zone, but could be so rewarding.
• Be a tourist in your hometown – Do something that others do that you haven’t tried yet.
• Go out of your way to talk to someone you don’t know well or to introduce yourself to someone.
• Get there early – If you’re in a class or church or have a meeting etc, get there early so you have an opportunity to chat with people before the event starts.
• Give a compliment to someone to start off a conversation or deepen the interaction.

To Recap the Challenge for this Week:

1. Meet at least one new person or talk to someone you don’t know well.
2. Seek out a new experience.
3. Record both of those in your Lucky Artifact notebook.
4. Keep up with recording what you did, saw, heard and marking things as lucky in the notebook.

Share Your Experience

I’d love to know how this is going for you! Share in the comments below or send me an email. Also, feel free to share this post with anyone you think might be interested.