So far in the How to Be Lucky series, we’ve covered increasing our awareness, creating and noticing chance opportunities, and how to tap into our intuition.
Today we’re covering positive self-fulfilling prophecies.
A self-fulfilling prophecy happens when we hold a belief or expectation – either positive or negative – and that belief influences actions to bring it into existence.
“Our attention is responsive to the world, but the world is responsive to our attention.” Iain McGilchrist
In order to be lucky, we want to create positive self-fulfilling prophesies. This is where the magic happens!
There are five steps (think of these as rings of a spiral) that we need to go through to create self-fulfilling prophesies:
- Decide what you want
- Increase your belief of what’s possible
- Set your intention
- Seek out knowledge and skills you need
- Take action
A few notes about that list:
First, I want to acknowledge that sometimes we can decide we want something and then do nothing else about it, at least not consciously, and we still end up getting the thing we wanted. In cases like that, it’s as if our subconscious goes to work on the desire, bringing it into our lives.
More often though, we need to put some attention and effort to it. That’s where these steps come in.
We can upwardly spiral through each of these items multiple times, moving ourselves forward with each ring of the spiral.
The order isn’t set in stone and often, we’ll be working in multiple rings at once.
Let’s dive into each of these rings/steps. We could spend a long time digging into these, but for now we’ll keep it short.
Name Your Desire
In order to create a positive self-fulfilling prophecy, we need to know what we want. That sounds easy, but it’s not uncommon for us to have no idea what we want.
After spending a lifetime caring for others or years involved in work or school, sometimes we look up and realize we’ve been following a prescriptive plan and actually don’t know what we want for ourselves.
If that’s you, don’t worry. Just keep asking yourself and refining your ideas as you go.
I could write a lot more on this discovery process another time, if you’re interested.
Increase Your Belief in What’s Possible for You
When I was in Andy Andrews’s entrepreneurship coaching program years ago, he talked a lot about the importance of increasing our belief in what’s possible and in what we’re capable of.
He pointed out that we can only achieve what we believe to be possible. So if we want to achieve at a high level, we need to increase our belief.
Again, I can write more about this topic with some specifics of how to do it.
Set Your Intention
Set your desire as something you intend to actively move toward. Write it down. Try writing it out as a SMART goal, if that’s applicable. Add the reason why you want it.
Seek Out the Knowledge and Skills You Need
Chances are there’s information you need to gather in order to move yourself closer to your desire. You may also need to acquire skills that will help you in this pursuit.
Take Action
For most self-fulfilling prophecies to come about, we need to take consistent action that will move us toward our desire.
Examples
It might be useful to give you some examples of these spiraling rings in action.
Let me tell you about building Eat at Home.
It started by reading and enjoying many blogs. (Building Awareness)
I decided to start my own food blog to share recipes. Soon after that I heard about some bloggers that were able to pay for their groceries with the ads on their sites. I wanted to see if I could do that too. (Name Your Desire, Set an Intention, Take Action)
I quickly realized I needed some skills in writing, creating content, recipe writing, photography and more. I read everything I could find and sought out free resources that would help me build my skills. (Seek Out Knowledge and Skills, Take Action)
Eventually, I did earn enough to pay for our groceries and I began to see that more was possible. I became aware of others who were earning quite a lot more and I decided I wanted that for myself too. (Increasing Belief and Setting a New Intention)
I decided I wanted to create more than content – I wanted a business with a product for sale. (New Desire, New Intention, Increase Belief)
Creating that business required me to learn a lot more skills. (Seek Out Skills, Take Action)
Later on, I wanted to be able to earn enough to pay for my son’s college expenses. That meant leveling up my business. (New Desire, New Intention, Increase Belief, Seek Out Skills, Take Action)
You can see how I upwardly spiraled through the rings over the years of starting and growing Eat at Home.
Here’s another example, this time of something that’s unfulfilled as of yet.
I’ve always wanted to write and publish a novel. (Name Your Desire)
I’ve taken a few fiction writing classes over the years and participated in National Novel Writing Month multiple times. (Seek Out Knowledge and Skills)
I’ve dabbled with fiction writing on and off for twenty years.
So why haven’t I written and published a novel?
I haven’t hit all the rings on the upward spiral. I haven’t set an intention or taken consistent action or increased my belief that I can do this.
Instead, when I hit a difficult part of the process, I stop writing.
I will never be one of the lucky, published fiction writers unless I get serious about setting a positive self-fulfilling prophecy for myself.
You can apply this framework to nearly anything you want in your life. Things like:
- Growing a vegetable or flower garden
- Expanding your friend circle
- Getting fit and healthy
- Improving your relationships
- Buying a new house
- Moving to a new city
- Getting your personal finances in order
- And more…
Tools you can use to support your positive self-fulfilling prophecy spiral
Journals – Journaling can help you discover what you want, set your intentions and track your progress.
Positive Affirmations – A few positive affirmations that your read and/or copy each day can keep your intention top of mind, as well as build positivity and increase your belief in what’s possible.
Vision Boards – This is a fun way to explore what you want, keep track of your intentions and build positivity. Many people have found they put something on their vision board and then forgot all about it until later, when they realized that desire came into being. Our subconscious can go to work on things in the background.
Action
Use your Lucky Artifact notebook or another journal to work through these self-fulfilling prophecy rings. Do some dreaming and thinking about what the steps would look like for a desire that you have.
Then move toward action on that desire.
What do you think?
I’d love to know what you think about this series. How is it going for you? Have you been inspired by anything we’ve covered? Do you have questions or want to dive deeper into any of the topics?
Share in the comments below.