We opened this month by going around the room with a simple question, who here considers themselves lucky. Every hand went up. Then I asked who feels time-free, and who feels financially free, and the show of hands thinned out. That difference is worth sitting with, because the only thing separating the first answer from the other two is a belief.
I can still remember the day I worked out that my lack of time was an illusion. I was walking fast between my office and our Support Services Manager’s office, and something in me woke up. I was rushing everywhere, telling the world in every hurried step that I didn’t have enough time, and in that moment I realised I had been collecting evidence for a shortage I had invented. The same is true of money. The more we believe we need before we can call ourselves free, the less free we tend to feel.
This is more than a nice idea.. I’d been reading into the science of luck, and wanted to bring that research in. A psychologist named Professor Richard Wiseman spent ten years studying more than four hundred people who thought of themselves as either lucky or unlucky. In one experiment he handed them a newspaper and asked how many photographs were inside. The people who called themselves unlucky spent a couple of minutes counting. The lucky ones were done in seconds, because on the second page, in large type, a message told them there were forty-three photographs and they could stop counting. The unlucky were too fixed on the task to notice the opportunity sitting right in front of them.
Across those years, Wiseman found that lucky people tend to do four things. They make the most of chance encounters, they listen to their intuition, they expect good things to come, and they turn a bad break into something useful. When he taught these habits to people through what he called Luck School, most of them reported their luck rising noticeably, and their satisfaction with life climbing with it. Luck, it turns out, is far less a hand we are dealt and much more a skill we can practise.
The way in is easier than people expect. It is the daily pivot from frustration to appreciation, writing down what we are grateful for and why. It can even mean taking the worst thing from yesterday and finding three reasons it served us. Done for long enough, that practice lays down new pathways in the mind and genuinely changes what we notice. Underneath all of it sits one willingness, the willingness to let go of what simply isn’t true.
From luck we moved to perception, which of course is directly related. We watched a short film broken into fifteen scenes, and after each one everyone wrote down the first word that came to mind. The same opening image landed as stress for one of us and as opportunity for another. One person saw a sunset where someone else saw a traffic jam. Fifteen scenes, one room, and a page of completely different words.
That is perception at work. We don’t see the present as it is, we see our version of it, filtered through beliefs formed long ago, which means we are forever recreating the past inside the present moment. And if our beliefs shape what we see, then events carry no meaning of their own. The meaning is something we bring. Every time we decide a thing is less than perfect, we step out of line with what is actually true, and that misalignment is what hurts. Make it all the same, and a liberating freedom opens up. Not a flat, boring sameness, but the relief of no longer being pulled up and down by the verdicts we hand out all day long.
That thread carried into the updates Members brought. One of us, in the middle of record growth, named the opportunity to grow his team as currently they have too few people holding too much. Rather than shoulder it alone, he has realised the next stage is to share leadership and ownership more widely, and he has brought someone in to take charge of a division. He’s been leaning on a principle he picked up recently, that people commit far more willingly when we give them the reason why behind a task, not just the task itself.
Another Member shared that his scan results had come back clear, close to a year on from breaking his back. He is recovering well, grateful, and content to give it the time it still needs. One of us spoke about watching his partner loosen a long-held tightness around money, choosing increased generosity, without any nudging, which delighted him. And a good stretch of the session went to the practical side of all this, the tools and systems we are each weaving through our businesses to buy back time and attention, which sits neatly alongside everything we’d been saying about freedom being a choice more than a circumstance.
What connects the luck, the perception, the leadership, and the recovery is the same small word. Willingness. We don’t have to force the shift or arrive at it fully formed. We only have to be willing to set down a belief or perspective that was never true, and to let the next moment be exactly what it is. That is where the luck, and the freedom, quietly begin.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” — William Shakespeare
