Self Help Book Reviews

Self help books, self improvement books, life coaching books reviewed & introduced

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web www.life-coach-tips.co.uk

GET FREE TIPS - Click Here

SUBMIT YOUR ARTICLE - Click Here

 

 

 

Featured Book:

 

 

The Luck Factor

By Richard Wiseman

 

Book Review of "The Luck Factor"

 

We all know the expression “You Make Your Own Luck”, but is it true? In this book Richard Wiseman, former magician turned Professor of Psychology, claims to have discovered the four principles that form the basis of a lucky life. He derives those principles from research experiments conducted over 8 years with hundreds of people and sets out what he describes as a scientifically proven way of understanding, controlling and increasing your luck. So what are the four key principles?

 

Principle No.1: Maximise Your Opportunities

Professor Wiseman begins his discussion of Principle 1 with some examples of people whose lives are full of opportunities. He cites, for example, a 40 year old housewife Wendy who wins about 3 competition prizes per week and whose winnings have included major prizes such as significant amounts of cash and holidays. Her secret? – She enters a lot of competitions. Wiseman’s initial point here is that if she didn’t enter any competitions then she would have no chance of winning them. This in itself is perhaps obvious, but he then goes on to make some more interesting points about personality traits involved with maximising your opportunities which he argues, based on his research, are features that increase your chances of finding luck. One example: according to Wiseman a personality trait that lucky people tend to have is a relaxed attitude towards life, because of this they are more likely to notice lucky opportunities when these occur. For example, someone who is unhappy and preoccupied is less likely to be aware of a coin that has been dropped on the street than someone who is happy and walking through the streets in a relaxed frame of mind with their senses open to their environment. One of the people who took part in his research project was so lucky in this respect that he now keeps a jug in his kitchen marked “find money” where he keeps all the coins he has found by chance when out walking!

 

Principle No.2: Listen to Your Lucky Hunches

Wiseman indicates that his research results suggest that a large percentage of lucky people trust their intuitions when making decisions in four important areas of their life – careers, personal relationships, business and finance. He gives many examples, including one from his own life where he felt a gut feeling that something was wrong when being asked to hand over his credit card at a particular hotel for a booking despite having done this many times before. He chose instead to pay by cheque and subsequently discovered that credit card fraud had been committed by one of the hotel employees. He had avoided being one of the victims of this fraud through following his intuition, although he had no obvious reason to suspect the fraud might occur.

 

Principle No 2 perhaps highlights a view with which many of us would agree – that human beings can be sensitive to events in very complex ways, some of which we may not be able to articulate consciously, but which can produce reliable intuitions. However the premise is not so helpful for people who have had intuitions about people or events in the past which have proved completely mistaken – for example if you have mistakenly placed your trust in someone whom your instinct tells you is trustworthy, only to find subsequently that that is not the case, would it be wise to trust your intuition next time?

 

Wiseman also suggests that lucky people are more likely than unlucky people to take steps to boost their intuition such as meditating and this feeds into the recommendations he makes later in the book for how you can begin to increase your own chances of being the beneficiary of good luck.

 

Principle No.3: Expect Good Fortune

Good luck and bad luck, it seems, can sometimes become a self fulfilling prophecy. If you expect good luck, the suggestion is, you are more likely to receive good luck and if you expect bad luck you are more likely to receive bad luck. Wiseman also gives some examples of psychological experiments which indicate that people’s perceptions of their abilities can influence their capacities – for instance, in one experiment he alludes to, two groups of people were asked to press a switch the moment a light came on. The second group, but not the first, were told to imagine they were fighter pilots with very fast reactions. Remarkably the second group responded much faster than the first – they expected to do well and therefore performed better.

 

Principle No. 4: Turn Your Bad Luck Into Good

In this section, Wiseman argues forcefully for a positive attitude towards difficulties and bad luck that besets you. He suggests that if you can adopt the belief that any ill fortune that besets you will in the long run work out for the best, then cultivating this positive attitude will help you to move forward and create a luckier future for yourself. In talking about this he seems to be highlighting a kind of resilience, resourcefulness and determination alongside positive belief which can help you. He gives a number of illuminating examples including one from his own life where, in his past career as a musician, his case with all his magic tricks was stolen when he was distracted in a restaurant. Instead of bemoaning his bad luck, he used the opportunity to work through the night to create new magic tricks, with the result that is performance was much better than it would have been and his new tricks later received awards.

 

How to Improve Your Own Luck

The final section of the book includes an explicit programme for how you can go about trying to bring the four principles of luck (and the sub principles that go with them) into your own life, in order to improve your own luck, this includes:

• Committing yourself to the programme with a declaration of your intent to incorporate some of its recommended techniques for a month
• Instructions as to how to create your own “Luck Profile” to assess how you measure up at the moment in respect of the four principles of luck
• A series of recommended exercises in respect of each principle for you to follow – you can choose which principles to focus on according to the results gleaned from your “Luck Profile”.
• Keeping a “Luck Diary” to record on a daily basis the lucky events that happen to you.

Conclusion

The book is engagingly written with interesting and thought providing ideas and makes for a very good read, although some of the research results that Wiseman describes may be open to more complex or alternative interpretations than he provides.  The book gives me the impression of being a combination of positive psychological techniques and magic, as he conjures up principles, conclusions and suggestions. His exercises are easy to follow and provide a good framework for trying out his principles of luck for yourself if you want to try them out. Best of luck!

 

To Find out further details and Purchase "The Luck Factor" through Amazon.co.uk click on the image below:

 

 

 

David Bonham-Carter, the Founder of Life Coach Tips, and writer of this Review is a Life Coach and Stress Consultant with over 15 years of professional experience in the field of personal change management. He founded this directory of life coaching articles in order to bring life coaching ideas and techniques to a wider audience. To find out more about the particular life coaching services David himself offers, please go to: Life Coach David Bonham-Carter.

 

Self Help Book Reviews: 1 2 3