Do you tell yourself you have lousy luck? Do you want to know how to change (at least some of) your “lousy luck”?
It’s time to “fess up”. I will if you will! Have you convinced yourself that nothing goes your way? Do you think it is really bad luck that plagues you, or is it at least partly your own attitude?
Maybe it’s time to take a long, honest look at yourself in the mirror, to examine what you see and what the dynamics are in your life. Is it possible that this notion of bad luck has colored how you perceive the world? Do you preserve some of those old family recipes (ideas) that really need to be discarded?
You may delight in making your grandmother’s delicious snickerdoodles when the holiday season rolls around, but nobody needs a recipe full of ingredients that disagree with us, or that cause us to be less healthy or happy. I know my grandparents used to enjoy a variety of peasant food that turn my stomach thinking about them. They loved hard rolls smeared with rendered chicken fat, with fried chicken skins (gribenes or cracklings). This is the Jewish equivalent of fried pork rinds and you couldn’t pay me enough money to eat that kind of stuff. That’s one piece of my family and cultural heritage that I am happy to be rid of.
When I think of the family I was born into, I can think of many fine attitudes, qualities and gifts that were passed on to me. I always had an abundance of love, even if I sometimes felt a bit smothered. Learning for the sake of enjoyment and personal enrichment was encouraged. Writers and good literature were greatly valued. I learned that people, as well as causes to which you were committed, were more important than money and material things. This belief has prevailed throughout my life and has been both a positive and negative force, but perhaps that’s the subject of another blog post.
I learned that family is ultra-important, as well as loyalty to good friends. From my parents’ marriage and obvious love for each other, I was taught that nurturing the marriage or primary relationship is crucial. I learned from my mother how to be frugal when needed, and how to plan and budget. From my father, I learned how to be generous. I learned how to be welcoming and hospitable to those who visited our home, whether the insurance agent, the plumber, the Egg Man who sold farm fresh eggs to the neighbors, or the doctor (who made house calls).
I was taught to buy only what I can afford, and that it’s a virtue to be as debt-free as possible, but when money is tight at times, it is important to feed your family well before taking care of some other things. Having enough food, even in lean times, was key to my parents’ ability to feel secure. Naturally this stemmed from their childhoods and I am sure had some negative carry-over, but it was mostly a good thing. If family or close friends were short of cash, you tightened your already tight belt just a tad, and helped them out of a jam.
Unfortunately, along with these mostly good notions and values, I got a pretty strong lesson in L.D.S. principles. That may sound odd to you, since we were Jewish, so I need to explain. My family did not convert to the Mormon faith (though I have always liked their concept of the Family Home Evening). L.D.S. in my lingo, stands for Lousy Destructive Shit (pardon me, if you prefer to just substitute the word ‘stuff’).
Now it’s time for my confession. I grew up in a home where blame was put on bad luck more than I care to remember. After a while, I began to internalize my parents’ mindset. They sincerely believed that they did not have good luck in life, in general. They felt that trouble had some sort of radar with which to locate them.
That is not to say they weren’t thankful for what they had, but they just expected things to go wrong. When they purchased appliances, cars or furniture, they assumed it would not go smoothly and they went on the defensive from the start of most transactions. They perceived of it as protective or smart consumerism. It never occurred to them to think that one might catch more flies with honey than with suspicion. Therefore, I also grew up thinking that bad luck was my fate in life and that sales people, contractors, craftsmen, etc. were out to either cheat me, to bestow inferior goods, or to provide me with less than adequate service. I considered it my mission (not always totally consciously) to research to the point of ridiculousness and to be in the highest DefCon Alert mode.
When people took ill, my parents hoped for the best, but usually assumed the worst would happen. While I still have some residual effects from this, hopefully ameliorated by education, time, therapy at different life phases, and my life coach training, I have done my best to be aware when I slip back into that mode and to work on ways to talk myself out of it.
I certainly don’t believe that people bring misfortune on themselves when they are stricken with illness, as I have often written. I don’t like blaming those who are victims of terrible occurrences. I do believe, though, that when you go through life with distrust and expecting the worst, you project that out into the world and you get a lot of it back. You don’t directly cause the ball bearings in your brand new fancy clothes dryer to break off after a few months, (Increasingly shoddy workmanship in manufacturing takes care of that) but I think you do have some influence on the frequency and way in which things occur. I think we have all read about and seen for ourselves, the effects of embracing negativity as a way of life.
Will Edwards, in his blog, “Inspiration-Personal Views by Will Edwards”, says, “There really is no such thing as “luck” and that is because life is what you make it, and by maintaining a positive mental attitude, you attract positive events into your life. This is no accident.”
I don’t believe that bad luck is totally non-existent, but I do feel we can attract some of it to ourselves. Will Edwards says something else that really strikes me.
“Having a positive mental attitude is also about having faith in your ability to succeed in any area of your life and doing whatever it takes to get there.”
After years of working to get out of expecting things to go badly for me in life, I realized that somewhere within themselves, my parents felt that they didn’t deserve to have good luck or success. They needed to believe that bad luck clung to them like dirt to the Charles M. Shultz character, Pig-pen. For whatever reasons, they did not have the faith or confidence in their own ability to succeed at whatever they set their minds to. They believed that life was a series of obstacles put in their way to make their days more difficult and less pleasant.
Therefore, this was my legacy for a long while. Instead of seeing obstacles as unpleasant, but surmountable with persistence, strength, faith, support and creativity, I saw life as one big “downer” and sometimes felt it was futile to try to accomplish my own goals. I had not yet trained myself to view obstacles, even serious and painful ones like losing loved ones, as lessons from which I could learn to be a happier, better and more compassionate person. I had not conditioned myself to search for what might be just be small specks of positive value within a dark and difficult experience. Slowly I worked on changing the way in which I viewed such experiences, which helped me through them and permitted me to try to salvage or construct something good from them.
Think about the messages you received when you were a child. Are they still influencing how you behave and how you perceive the world? What do you tell yourself about the existence of luck, whether good or bad luck?
“It is your Attitude,
Not your Aptitude,
That determines your Altitude.” ~ Zig Ziglar
Iris J. Arenson-Fuller, PCC, CPC is a Grief and Loss Transformation /Life Reinvention Coach who helps people through and beyond tough life challenges and changes. She helps people reinvent their lives no matter what they have been through and helps them find new purpose and joy.
https://visionpoweredcoaching.com/
ir**@vi*******************.com
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