Bad luck, odd luck, good luck was evolved by me over many years. This is my perceived story. A story that I told myself every single day. Day in and day out and it was back fed from others around me that seemed to just keep stoking the fire as I scrambled to pick up the pieces. This topic was covered in a previous blog post, but I felt it deserved its own.
Luck has many faces. For me, bad luck was a nasty face that kept me down for many years. This of course is the starting point on this journey. Since I could remember weird things seemed to happen to me that I couldn’t get a grasp on. I thought it was just life. I believed it was my path of chaos. When I was down bad luck just seemed to football kick me right in the ribs. I then would get up and try to dust myself off.
Knock, Knock
Bad luck was there to clock me right in the jaw. I didn’t understand why crazy things would happen to me. Did I do something wrong in life? I didn’t think so. I thought I always tried to do the right thing. As each situation arose I would just say, “I have bad luck!” The service writer at the dealership said, “Man, sorry for the luck, we’ve never seen this happen. Just bad luck I guess.”
Then as time progressed people around me seemed to observe the weird occurrences and promptly chimed in, “Damn, you sure have bad luck. You’re like a black cat.” I started adopting that saying. My mind truly believed that I was a black cat and that I was surely doomed. There was never an understanding that I was telling myself a story that played on repeat. You have to get to know yourself. I needed to learn who I was and how I responded to the outside world.
I didn’t want bad luck anymore. “Go away!” To break the cycle something big had to happen. Something so big that I would have no other choice but to look at myself, take a look at my life, and take a good hard look at where the heck I wanted to go. We don’t get user manuals in life and if we aren’t surrounded by others that have awareness we may never figure it out. We may never know that something is a miss. I had no one to mentor me and help me get my head on straight.
Wake-up call, it’s for you
I was down for the count. My back was on the ground and I was looking up. When you look up, you can get up. I finally had a wake-up call of the stupid story I was DJ’ing in my head about how everything in life went bad for me and I had bad luck. Boo. Stop your whining and do something to change it. The realization was there. I did a full rewind of events that went bad that I could remember.
I decided to introduce new dialog into my life. I called it, “Odd luck.” Why would anyone do this? To my understanding, people only had good luck or bad luck not freakin in between nonsense. I don’t care what those people said, this is my own story. Marc is the narrator!
I coined odd luck as a safety net so that I could get my mind right. Odd luck could be good or bad right?! As if to say it was a neutral term. This term would be the perfect pivot for me to start seeing clearly. To start figuring out what were the things I told myself. We always have a narrative that just keeps circling around us and I desperately wanted to get past it.
Every time something crazy would happen I would do a brief complaining session about the matter and then I realized my brain was heading on that negative train, so I paused. Then I would say to myself, “this is odd luck.” Let’s try to move on past this quickly. Don’t stress. If I could fix it and it was in my control I would immediately. But if it wasn’t in my control, my job was to let it go. It was considered odd luck. Don’t worry about it.
Let it go, Let it go
When I stopped worrying about things so much I realized that those perceived problems seem to have a way of working themselves out naturally. Many times without my input at all. I thought that was freakin great! I was now in a transitional phase of my life and I needed to pay close attention to the things that followed and how I would respond to them.
This is where I started introducing the term, good luck into my life. Magically my odd luck phase lasted just less than a year I believe. I was finally able to move forward with my head held high. In this transition, I started saying that I had good luck when those “weird things” would arise. Just as if it was straight out of a movie things just got way better. Problems lasted a short period of time and I was on cloud nine.
Conclusion
When you pay attention to the things your mind has on repeat you can start rewriting your own script. Change your perception of things even if things look horrible. Just imagine the good things and find something that you can latch onto. Remember, new life starts from land that has been on fire. The grass that comes through is greener. You can always find something good out of any situation. I promise!
Question
Where are you at on this scale? Do you tell yourself you have a certain type of luck and what do you do about it?
